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A Look At the "Information Superhighway," As It Looked In 1985
jfruh writes "AT&T's video library is a treasure trove of future-looking films from the past, and this one is no exception. Combining what might be the first on-film use of the phrase 'information superhighway' with predictions of Siri-like services and sweet '80s computer graphics, this offers a valuable look at how close we came to our past's future."
Damn, in 1985?
We really didn't even get this until about 1995!
The next wave didn't latch on until the rise of Windows XP (patched a few times) circa 2002.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
http://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-Hyperland
For a video made in the 80s, there is a dearth of embarrassing haircuts and/or clothes.... Come on 1980s!
They (AT&T, Xerox, IBM, and multinational companies of similar stature at the time) thought that the global information infrastructure would be centralized, monolithic and closed. Businesses and consumers would have to choose a provider that would provide the whole enchilada.
This was the backdrop for Japan's Fifth Generation project (referenced by the AT&T video around 13:30) and was met with a certain amount of panic in the US at the time.
I've always found it interesting, how projections get the basic concepts right, but they completely miss on the piratical implementation of things. In TNG everyone caries around a small computing pad, but they seem to keep several of them from different reports and do not have any internal communication systems unless they download from a master main frame
Early on one of the interviews talks about full volumetric holographic displays by the end of the centuries, but ignores the middle ground of real time video transmission on existing displays. And the artistic renderings through out the video's keep displays as simple monochrome 13inch displays, because no one seems to imagine a high resolution color display, but they can predict the need for a network based communication network to transmit idea's.
The basics of the video are valid and a good projection to modern times, but all of the interpretations of how it will be implemented show a limitation based on 1985's existing tech. You see this same limitation in the early 1950/1960's articles on the world of tomorrow.
Momento Mori
Not mentioned was the first test run of the flux capacitor.
Unfortunately, it was strapped to a DeLorean so it did not have a lot of credibility at the time.
One thing stood out for me was that of all the nations discussed as possible competitors to the US, China wasn't even mentioned once. This was made less than 30 years ago. Just goes to show you how quickly the unexpected can happen.
They (AT&T, Xerox, IBM, and multinational companies of similar stature at the time) thought that the global information infrastructure would be centralized, monolithic and closed. Businesses and consumers would have to choose a provider that would provide the whole enchilada.
Not surprising. They figured "the internet" would be run like cable TV... hell Cable TV providers are still trying to make that happen.
The intro actually used the word telecommute when talking about how computers were in the home. Was that a word in common usage at the time? I was only 12 at the time banging out BASIC programs copied from magazines so I wouldn't recall lol.
Wait, is this the same AT&T that didn't officially admit until somewhere in the 'aughts that packet switching was actually a viable technology?
The same AT&T that couldn't possibly understand why telephones would replace the telegraph?
The same AT&T that tells Congress that competition among telcos hurts consumers?
Something doesn't seem quite right, here.
enefesdi bhootparamdi
if a thing is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. -- H.S. Thompson
The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.
Spinning in the wrong direction...
Can films be used as prior art to invalidate patents?
When I think of ATT and its company-produced advertising (of which there are tens of hours: there's a short for that), think forward-looking, but not exactly what the material predicted. How long afterwards were we consumers able to get 45Mbps?
While we are at it, peeking through the channel, almost the same ATT a quarter-century back had a combined live-action+animation short which predicted that 86ing those old telephone EXchange NAmes (telephone exchanges carrying 10000 lines were large and expensive, plus, ATT thought remembering seven numbers was difficult; ergo, according to Ma Bell, they felt they had to be named: e.g. REpublic 7, NAtional 8, DI. 7, EX. 3, [...]) meant that our keypads would lack letters beside the numbers (Commercials screaming phonewords every other minute? Texting-on-the-flip-phone-from-2002 addictions? Mr Digit could've cured 'em all!) and would even yield Outer Space Dialling!1!
(At the same time, I'm so astounded at Bell Labs, which while they were a zealot for IP actually employed talented people. Remember, if you are using C/C++...)
Captcha: stupidly: as in my tendency to look like I almost strayed off the topic.
Al Gore didn't go into the Senate until 1985. so inventing the Information Super Highway (née, Internet) must have been the very first thing he did when he got in office!
In 1990 IBM was baking RAS technologies into its POWER processors, INTEL would not start building reliable processor unitil late 2010.
1983, at my university, was my first exposure. I'd say the original internet lasted from its inception until about 1992 or 3, where the Eternal September utterly destroyed the original internet culture.
True, the resources available online now are drastically beyond anything at the time - I mean, graphics, over the internet! - but despite that, the loss of the original culture is not a good thing. Now that everyone and his dog is aware of it, we have politicians trying to censor and control it, hundreds of millions of idiots supporting centralization of everything onto a few services like Facebook, the Closing of the Net where people move away from open and free protocols to proprietary and undocumented ones (a thing the original culture would never have stood for), and more.
Yes, there's far more here now. No, it is NOT a better internet now.
...in the introduction that the earth was rotating backwards?
Too bad the American values he extols have been completely crushed under the weight of an enormous, all-consuming centralized government that has the hubris to pick industries (Solyndra, and others), reject capitalism even though that's what made the country great (killing the goose the laid the golden egg), and stomps all over individual rights - all of which it had been increasingly doing so since this video, long before Obama, though Obama has doubled down.
As such, individuals have now bought into it, gladly sucking on the government feet and unwilling to relinquish grabbing entitlements even though self-reliance would yield better individual results in the end, as it has for the prior 200 years.
This country needs a huge dose of tough love.
don't feel that anybody's gue5s member. GNAA (GAY
Not one mention of lolcats? Wow, they were way off, as lolcats have taken over the entire internet.
He talks as if every other country resides on a different enemy planet. If people talked like that now they would be considered terrorists...
That map projection that morphed into a globe was horrible - since when is the center of USA also on the equator?
The key question is whether Japan has as flaky a job base as the US? Yeah, it's tough for new entrants to get jobs, but once in, they don't fear losing it, except for performance related reasons. That, more than anything else, keeps their society stable.
quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.
1985 was only 1 year after the Ma Bell breakup and while the Macintosh was out IBM still dominated the PC business. So when you look at this in the context of the times it makes sense that they would think the network and infrastructure would be closed because that was the way things were during the time period. I am glad they aren't like that though I think with AT&T reformed and Apple controlling the whole experiance things might go back to the "Ma Bell" days :(
One thing they definitely got wrong in this production was the direction the earth rotates on its axis.
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they had ihnp4 as an example. what other conclusion could they have come up with?
(the guy at 1:29 looks like Jim Fleming who signed of on it's replacement, ihnpss)
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In the early 80's, Intel was working on the IAPX432 object oriented processor. This was a secure, mainframe class architecture that was quite revolutionary.
Unfortunately, It was also slower then anything else available and was killed. due to industry disinterest, Mostly Intel's
Too bad Intel didn't later revisit that path when the technology allowed this kind of architecture to be implemented to it's full potential.
We would probably be programming in Lisp or Smalltalk now and the web would be a totally different place.
We will probably see ISA extensions that support those ideas in the future.
Alright, so let's say the example in the video took place today:
Company 1 in Europe has an idea for a part and contacts Company 2 in America to produce it:
1) Company 1 googles and finds the name of a company in America to produce the part. They call the American company and it takes two hours to wade through the phone system menus and leave several voice mails and wait for a reply.
2) Company 1 can't give any details without a signed NDA, and because of requirements from the company's lawyers, the NDA has to be faxed over, signed, and faxed back.
3) Once they agree to work together, company 1 wants to send company 2 a copy of the design.
3a) The email bounces because it was typed wrong due to international spelling differences
3b) Once the email stops bouncing, it is picked up by a spam filter and nobody ever sees it
3c) Since the email had a large attachment, microsoft exchange choked and the server admin had to come in on the weekend and rebuild the databases
3d) After that, Company 1 decides to just put the file on an internal FTP server.
3e) Company 2 isn't able to use FTP in windows without downloading a program from the internet, which involves getting permission from the IT department, registering the program with the developer, convincing the anti-virus software to allow the ftp program to run, etc etc
3f) The server at Company 1, an older machine not frequently used, isn't firewalled correctly by an unintelligent cisco firewall product, and fails to correctly open the reverse datastream. The files never arrive, as the connections hang.
3g) Company 1 gives up and uses Dropbox.
3h) The files arrive at Company 2, but they are also intercepted by some Russian and Chinese hackers that easily evesdropped into their dropbox using a script inserted several months ago to look for interesting keywords.
4) Many months pass, and finally the prototypes are shipped over to Europe, where it is discovered, the Americans did not convert metric units to English units correctly for each portion of the project, and nothing screws together.
5) The hacked data is leaked to the highest paying competitor.
The other futuristic situation, about the doctor, is equally obnoxious these days if you factor in HIPPA, incompatible data formats, and even lower IT standards.
Let's face it, this started off as a great idea and became something quite different.
Replace the guy in the video with Mitt Romney. Damned funny.
Of course, as computer scientists we can say with utter certainty that the scare tactics at the end of the film were utterly unnecessary: the claim that countries other than France had Minitel ('video terminals in the home') fell apart rapidly, and expert systems and knowledge inference, the messiahs of 80s AI research, utterly failed to amount to anything. Even the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer System flopped due to a lack of market. In retrospect it's obvious that the end of the video was corporate propaganda meant for government consumption; perhaps even amusingly so. (And a little sad that TFA calls it 'preaching'.)
The US was so far ahead in educated population at that point in time that the risk was always close to nil, no matter what national posturing was made, and the proof is in the import/export business: of the manufacturers who sold and supported machines in the US, the only non-American company was Bull—and they inherited their product line from Honeywell, who had bought it from GE, who had co-developed some of their most important offerings with MIT. So much for 18% of the US computing market, Japan. (Unless they meant Nintendo? Or the razor-thin manufacturing margins? Or components?)
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
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The music, it burns in my ears.
Well, for a while in the early 90's it was looking like it would go that way. There were about half a dozen closed services like Compuserve, AOL or Genie with a relatively large number of subscribers each. Thankfully they were quickly overtaken by the open Internet.
Mada mada dane.
Ah, the good ol' days when American companies actually cared about their own country. Too bad the video couldn't foresee the
present anarchy.
Excellent point. They didn't just think that monolithic and centralized garbage was how it should be back then, they think it RIGHT NOW.
And today we still have closed social networks providers like Facebook. The game is still afoot, except at a higher level than the network protocols.
Any time you hear someone lying about "Al Gore said he invented the Internet", tell them they're lying:
Gore saw the 1980s "Information Superhighway" and saw the future. His leadership got the Internet protected and funded as one of the great Federal programmes of all time, along with the Apollo programme. Without Gore the Internet today would probably be either long dead, or still some obscure government system only Feds and giant corporate cronies use (eg. solely to spy on you). The Reagan/Bush recession wouldn't have ended under Clinton/Gore with the greatest wealth creation of all time. You wouldn't be reading this on Slashdot.
The Internet is one of the things that fulfills America's promise. Thank Al Gore for being among the few who recognized its value back among the blips and bleeps, and among the fewer who actually did anything about it.
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make install -not war
The whole appeal put across in the video is very nationalistic. They used words like "we" to refer to both the US and AT&T. I don't think this would happen any more. Today companies are global, so they are rivals with government, shopping the globe for the most business-friendly laws and taxes. The idea of the "The Japanese" taking the lead in artificial intelligence doesn't make a lot of sense anymore.
Yes, the whole idea in that film was that central control (hmm, like Ma Bell?) was crucial. But even then DEC was showing that IBM's fanatically controlled One Big Data Center idea was crazy. The failure of Japan's 5th Generation, France's central system, AOL, etc. followed. To date myself, I remember working at HEW in 1973, and bringing my punched cards to the computer center, where I was at the mercy of the arbitrary manager. I hated it! The control freaks ruled (but soon after, we got a timeshare system and were liberated). So AT&T wanted a centralized government subsidized telecommunications system run by guess who. Not surprising. I guess I should throw in Ada, too: centralized, government sponsored language. What is surprising is how effective decentralized open source projects have been.
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
The video makes a oblique reference to the Canadian Alextel which was technically like its French minitel counterpart, but never really got off the ground and deemed destroyed by the internet by the '90's.
However, for a while Canadian RIM was quite a competitor with US companies with their proprietary email network. Now, not so much... Ironically, this company was probably also destroyed by the internet...
Only in comparison with undeveloped portions of the world. If you look at the rise of Intel and just about everything else in Silicon Valley at the time it was investment that encouraged the best and brightest to come from everywhere, which had nothing to do with US education one way or another. Japan, the UK, France and certainly nothing on mainland Asia was ready or willing to do anything like that, especially any of the government programs.
If anything I'd say the scaremongering was amazingly effective - not prophetic, but causal. AT&T pitches to the US government to invest in a global information "highway." Here we are 25 years later, boom, that's exactly what happened. The US goverment did invest in the Internet, through companies like AT&T and Mitre, and now it exists, and US-based Internet companies such as Amazon, google, and Facebook are well ahead of the International competition and making billions of dollars, due in part to home-field advantage. (In fact there is great caterwauling about the prospect more global management of the Internet under the auspices of the UN).
I'm not sure those ideas can be grafted onto present processors. What I found interesting is just how early Intel was working on such an advanced chip. The web wouldn't be the only thing changed if they had succeeded.
I remember before there were hierarchical name servers, we kept the list-of-the-internet on each of our computers and updated it weekly. Above about 10K names its got cumbersome.
Well, for a while in the early 90's it was looking like it would go that way. There were about half a dozen closed services like Compuserve, AOL or Genie with a relatively large number of subscribers each. Thankfully they were quickly overtaken by the open Internet.
As someone who was using uucp networking, those names meant nothing to me. If you couldn't send email to their users, they were just play-pretend networks for toy computer users.
Sure, they had impact, but the fears were unfounded. All of the videotex networks except France's fell apart, Japan never gained the market dominance they sought in the US, and the fifth-generation computer was as unpopular as its American and European contemporaries.
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True, the competition failed to live up to its hype. So did the proposed timeframe for the Internet. The predictions I noticed in the video mentioned a time horizon around 5 years (1990), whereas it seems things materialized rather more slowly than that. It's funny, because I wouldn't feel comfortable proposing anything for even 5 years out. And anything that might take 10 years hardly even seems worth talking about, since nobody can imagine what the company will even be doing by then. It seems like it would be so great to work uninterrupted towards a 5 year goal.
Want a PhD? :)
I think the surest way to get something done is to swear it'll happen in 5 years and not be disappointed when it takes 15.
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