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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."
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.
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.
Can films be used as prior art to invalidate patents?
We really didn't even get this until about 1995!
Sure we did. I was here in the early 80's, and know people who were here in the late 70's.
The AOL crowd showed up in the mid 90's and essentially destroyed the original internet culture. This was not an improvement.
3K which was almost enough to pay for 4 years of university at the time.
It's simple, this was the distant future brought to you by AT&T Internet where all communications are approved by AT&T and their corporate buddies who pay big bux for the right to have a server. And not to worry, it'll all be done with short haul Frame Relay feeding into long haul SONET. All paid for in your monthly bill from AT&T. All safely in the hands of corporate America.
And absolutely none of that crazy Communist Egalitarian peer2peer packet switching nonsense in sight!
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 :(
He was a congressman for 9 years prior to being elected to the Senate. He was boring the pants off everyone about the Internet since the 70s! The actual quote containing his infamous claim was:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
One thing they definitely got wrong in this production was the direction the earth rotates on its axis.
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Actually AoL was/is a self contained network, so it wasnt really on the internet.
It did provide a gateway to it, and when I was on it in 1993, I found out after a year that it wasnt the internet like I thought. Instead AoL was nothing but a controlled network with a filtered and censored gateway to the real internet.
Then i got a real ISP and enjoyed freedom ever since.
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.
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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It's truly amazing how much tech grew up around end-running the inability of the telecoms companies to do anything even slightly innovative or sensible. Because they couldn't pull their collective heads out of their asses and just implement ISDN in an affordable way, the modem developed from simple frequency shift keying to rather complex signal processing to trick the AtoD converters into encoding 56Kbps digital data onto a 64Kbps digital line passing through analog audio.
To add insult to injury, the telcos are so incredibly bad at appropriate tech that it's cheaper to nail up digital connections over voice lines to form a digital network and THEN carry voice traffic over the digital layer than it is to use the voice lines directly for their intended purpose.
The truly bizarre part is they had labs where actual innovative and clever things were done all the time but the business side had no ability to actually do anything useful with the tech.
No, it was more like "let there be money".
It is just like how Steve Jobs didn't work in a Foxconn sweatshop building iPhones, and yet he still got the kudos for the product.
It depends who the OP means by "we". I'm in Australia, and we didn't even get a connection into US ARPAnet until the early 1990s, and it was a satellite connection that served as the only outbound link for the entire country.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hallo, me again.
So it looks like I misfired the tone a little on my post. I was trying to capsule summary a couple of the big intersections in Microsoft's role in consumer computing on the net. Isn't that why MS had a Borg Gates icon for some 12 years? Instead I got a chain of insulting AC's. Oh well.
All I meant was that in 1985 people my age were still playing games on their Commodore 64's, and we weren't aware of any way to get online for years later. 1995 was the iconic year of a new Win95 computer running Netscape.
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