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This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions
harrymcc (1641347) writes "If you remember the golden age of BYTE magazine, you remember Robert Tinney's wonderful cover paintings. BYTE's April 1981 cover featured an amazing Tinney image of a smartwatch with a tiny text-oriented interface, QWERTY keyboard, and floppy drive. It's hilarious — but 33 years later, it's also a smart visual explanation of why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions. I wrote about this over at TIME.com. 'Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction.'"
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?
"Is it PC compatible?"
(Source unknown...)
No sig today...
...isn't too far removed from a micro-SD card.
C'mon, it's entirely obvious that that "PC on a watch" painting is a rather clever piece of irony or even satire, not a meaningful prediction of an actual future piece of technology.
That doesn't mean I disagree with the point of the discussion, namely that we're not that great at predicting the directions of future tech, but using this magazine cover as a direct illustration of that is, IMHO, rather disingenuous.
Looking at the image it's totally clear to me that it's just visual metaphor. Clearly the artist was not suggesting that this was a workable idea, simply that watches would soon be like computers. This rather makes the rest of your analysis seems fragile.
FTFA:
No, it's not an explanation at all. It was intended as a metaphor for miniaturization of electronics. Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
If you're tempted to assume that the image was actually a serious depiction of what a future wrist computer might look like-well, no. Inside the magazine, which only had a brief editiorial about future computers, the editors pointed out that it wasn't a coincidence that it happened to be the April issue of Byte.
Anyone with half a brain could realize that watches would never have keyboards so tiny that the only button you could press using your fingers (more-so your nails) would be the space-bar. The rest of the image is plausible and not far removed from what we have now.
I'm not sure what the killer argument for smart watches is. That's not to say that there won't be a market for smaller devices that smart phones. But the real issues are display size and input method. Current smartphone sized displays can't be strapped to your wrist, and its not clear that a smaller display is useful in a general purpose device. If glass-type devices take off then it's possible then you solve the display problem, but then why would you want a watch too?
"is a rather clever piece of irony or even satire"
Yes it was, it was a joke back then, now with smart phones we have even more functionality in a small package that they even dreamed of and made jokes about back in 1981
It's pretty obvious that it was a visual joke rather than a serious representation of a computer on a wrist. Anyway no smart watch has managed to sell well so it's not like what we call a smart watch today is what people want either.
Ugh. Every once in a while I'm reminded of just how much we've lost (and continue to lose) with the death of print media. Byte was shut down before its time, but there used to be so many good zines like it.
I guess 2600 is still around, maybe I should get a subscription before I forget. Are there any other decent zines still in print? I should do an Ask Slashdot instead of just posting a comment...
The prediction fail with that watch is the idea that you need any form of input. These days, phones, tablets, and smartwatches are purely consumption devices, designed to pump content into your brain, force you to watch ads, and take money from your pocket. At least, that's what the big corporations want. How many futurists saw that coming?
How many of us remember using those as a kid to get info about stuff...
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic. Here's my effort at a perhaps better future prediction: We'll have much better AI than we do today and it will know everything about everyone. Yet it will not be google, or anything like google, but a service catering to intelligence agencies. Poverty and destruction of the ecosystem will continue at a worse pace than it is going now. We will have the capability to cheaply explore other planets, but we won't actually have a colony on any planets. We'll have the capability to feed everyone in the world yet global hunger will still exist and maybe even be worse than it is today. Rich nations will be richer and poor nations will be poorer. Strong AI will eventually come about then promptly proceed to kill everyone. Not because it hates us, just for liebensraum. Have a nice day.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
Do you mean these guys?
Casio released the C-80 calculator watch in 1980 which is almost identical to this but a better design. The floppy was (and still is in word processing) a universal symbol for portable storage so it would be a micro SD card today but other than that I don't think he was far off.
Casio did. Well, it was an alphabetic order rather than QWERTY, but they did put it in their organiser line of watches.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
instant access to computers around the world
Actually, in 1981 the internet existed, you could FTP and use email, as long as you knew the bang path routing.
It wasn't for 2 more years after 1981 that I learned of it, but I knew people that were using it in the late 70's even. Contrary to what seems to be the popular public belief, the internet didn't start in the 1990's. That's just when the masses became aware of it, largely due to the influx of AOLers.
Granted it was much smaller then as far as number of connected machines.
If we imagine society as noise of randomly colored dots, for example, blue dots can represents people currently connected to Facebook. There are so many blue dots in current society, that highly intelligent person could easily predict this even 20 years ago, right? Well, problem is, this color first appeared couple of years ago, there was no blue color among dots we see *at all*. Breakthrough events that forms society like this comes like explosion, and brings new colors that was never seen before. We can predict and imagine only in colors we know, not in colors we've never seen.
839*929
I find this statement very ironic:
"I wrote about this over at TIME.com. 'Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction.'"
Especially when you consider, science has a hard time predicting future trends and technologies, yet Science Fiction seems to have been fairly accurate in predicting, if not outright influencing, future technological trends.
For example: the waterbed, the waldo (as in glove, not Where's Waldo), cell phones, data pads (also called tablets). Even Kubrik's protrayal of space flight was more accurate than any other sci-fi of it's age, and certainly more realistic than what little was being released by the professional scientists.
If you want to see what is going to be trending in ten or twenty years, check out today's science fiction.
The cover art was delivering the message of the "wrist-worn/hand-held computer". It was neither joke nor prediction; it was symbolism.
right?
TFA barely talks about actual technology or issues of "futurism"...
so much of what everyday people see in the media about tech is utter bullshit...IMHO it measurably costs us $$$
Thank you Dave Raggett
Well, if we generalize that floppy to "secondary storage" we can observe it's pretty much in line with the physical size of a Micro-SD card (or a nano-SIM, if we wanted to use cloud storage) and while small keyboards have gone from physical buttons to touchscreens, we're still using QWERTY. Even though smartwatches of today might support graphical interfaces, their "killer apps" are mainly text-centric things like "show notifications", "pedometer" and "send template-based SMS".
So, while certainly meant as a pun back in 1981, I can't help but think of how unnervingly spot on it seems to be.
Casio did. Well, it was an alphabetic order rather than QWERTY, but they did put it in their organiser line of watches.
Damn I had one of those watches. Super cool, although I prefer the ones that had games.
If anyone wants to predict what technology we will be using, would have been using and have been using, then all you need to do is watch the original Captain Kirk series. All of the gadgets and tech used are more or less what we have adopted and are adopting. From the cell phone to the 3d laser printer. Listen to Gene Roddenberry, not Gartner
Does anybody else want a mini-sd card form factored to look like a mini-floppy disk? I sure do. And now since I've mentioned it, you do too.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
"This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions"
No it doesn't. Even if the image was a depiction of a serious prediction (which it was/is not); it "explains" nothing. There is no "why" inherent in the image.
Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
Obviously. I mean, there are much better input methods for such things, namely Dvorak.
I always thought the most unlikely technological development in my lifetime was the handheld GPS device. It would be "most unlikely" because it required tremendous, simultaneous, and largely unforeseen advances in several different technologies, each of which was hard to predict in 1981. The list is at least:
1. Low power, low voltage, low noise L-band receivers, sensitive enough to be compatible with the weak signal coming from the internal antenna of a handheld device;
2. Stupendous amounts of digital signal processing, also at low power and low voltage;
3. Digital map databases of (substantially) every road in the world, accurate to a few meters;
4. A substantially world-wide, wideband wireless data link to get the digital map into the handheld device in the first place;
5. Low power, low voltage, high resolution, multicolor flat panel displays;
6. Gigabytes of low power, low voltage data storage memory; and
7. High energy density, high power density batteries capable of supplying the whole thing.
And, perhaps most impressive of all, the manufacturing technology to make all of the above small enough to fit in a handheld device, at a price low enough to sell by the zillions.
Of the list above, probably only #2 could have been predicted, and then only if one were willing to extrapolate the then-relatively-new Moore's Law by a very large amount. (Recall that Mead and Conway had only written their Introduction to VLSI systems the previous year; until then it was not clear that such complex chips could even be designed on human time scales, let alone built for a profit.)
The fact that a handheld GPS device is now an anachronism, since the technology is now small enough and low-power enough to be integrated into other handheld devices, like smart phones, pleases me no end.
From the article:
We tend to think that new products will be a lot like the ones we know. We shoehorn existing concepts where they don’t belong. Oftentimes, we don’t dream big enough.
I have found this to be a serious problem for system designers. When gathering requirements we often ask users what they want, or what they need. They then give us narrow response like "a button that does X" or "a screen that shows me Y". This can be valuable input, however these requests are based on their knowledge of what can be designed with "yesterday's" technology. A better question to ask is "what do you do?". I have found that responses to this question (purposefully open ended) give the system designers the freedom to streamline the users job, and tools that will actually make them more productive.
Paging through that magazine reminded me of why I got into computer engineering to begin with... I remember looking forward to each magazine, for the various programming quickies... I remember waiting for my first PCB etching kit so that I could design my own circuit boards...
Sigh.
When men were real men and computer engineers were real engineers.
Take a look at a 747 in 1981, and look at one now. Heck, look at a 747 from 1969. Some things just can't change all that much.
Here we are still running a Unix derivative and processors dereived from the instruction set on the first IBM PC. A lot of linear extensions still exist, but the commercialization of things link LCD screens and cellular radio make more possible.
For me, watching the development of the microprocessor has been the most interesting - the amout of processing power I can through at a problem is boggling.
One thing that sticks in my mind from when I was a child was artists' impressions of "The Car of the Future". They had shapes like half-sucked wine-gums - fug-ugly I thought.
That has come true.
1. Introduction of the Osborne I portable.
2. Introduction of the Sony 3.5" floppy disk (875K!).
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I remember reading one of Robert Heinlein's novels in which a character (Slipstick Libby, perhaps) was on a rocket ship and dealing with a computer. Via punch cards.
"First, it reminds us that the smartwatch is not a new idea. Even in 1981, tech companies had been trying to build them for awhile:"
`Consider the wrist radio introduced in Tracy on January 13, 1946. No other single aspect of Dick Tracy has received more press and coverage in newspaper and magazine articles than the wrist radio' - "Dick Tracy and American Culture: Morality and Mythology, Text and Context" by Garyn G. Roberts
But things like moving mass? There's nowhere to go. We're there already.
No one's colonizing Mars because we got better at making smaller bits.
I wonder what would happen if we looked at space predictions from 1981? Oh all of a sudden they're not "bad", they're rigorous engineering proposals that must be followed to the letter for the benefit of the species. Hilarious.
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
Oh no, suddenly we're no longer bad at making predictions! Uuuhh, it's the evil gubment, it's the species, it's because of this or that! It's never that it simply makes no sense. Weird.
I always thought the most unlikely technological development in my lifetime was the handheld GPS device. It would be "most unlikely" because it required tremendous, simultaneous, and largely unforeseen advances in several different technologies, each of which was hard to predict in 1981.
All of these are not necessary for GPS. Most people use GPS in their cars and low voltage, low power stuff doesn't matter there. Also, gigabytes of data also doesn't matter because you could have city-wide maps only that you could swap in and out. There have always been maps of every road and digitizing it isn't that big a deal.
That's kind of how I feel about the "keyboard" on the iPhone.
Looks like they already had Powerpoint in '81, judging from the schema-art in the advertisements :-)
The cover is not an explanation. It's an example of poor prediction. Fuck, people, these words matter. How the hell can you communicate if the words you use don't mean what you want to say?
It looks like that watch might be running MS/TRES
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
If you take into account the sd and micro sd cards we use in our devices, the fact that keyboards are there (just on the screen) then this actually isn't that far off the mark.
I, for one, am impressed that they were able to predicte so closely 30 years into the future.
Handheld GPS didn't have Gigabytes of memory or digital maps of the whole world accurate to a few meters when they came out. Or color screens or wireless networking. The first Garmin handheld I saw had 8MB of NVRAM, a monochrome screen, and retailed for over $1000.
I remember thinking the future of handhelds would only get better back when PocketPC and Palm were competing and they both took CF cards with all manner of expansion devices, including GPS and cameras. Well, CPUs and screens got better, OS not as much, and the expandability and rich peripheral set evaporated in favor of fashionable but functionally irrelevant thinness.
Today the IC technology exists to make smartphones and tablets with RADAR, LIDAR, SDR, audio interfaces, and all manner of other awesome addons, but smartphones did away with the expandability that PDAs had. They could make tablets slightly thicker and equip them with Express-card slots, but competition has been virtually eliminated from consumer electronics, not from lack of companies, but from lack of intellectual competitiveness. Every company does the same exact thing, where I can only speculate on whether it is collusion or just a lack of confidence to put something different out on the market. Laptop screens and keyboards are another example, everyone on the market ships 16:9 screens* and chicklet keyboards. There is market competition, but no intellectual competition.
Hmm, market competition, intellectual collusion. And whenever someone does put something new out there, some jerkoff patent troll shuts it down so fast, it never sees the light of day.
* I don't know if they still have them in America, but imagine if every paper notebook company decided that exactly one size of notebook was needed, or you couldn't buy Letter, Legal, A4, B4, etc paper, but had just one size to "choose" from.
We are bad at predicting the future because it cannot be predicted.
The gadgets that we think about as "the future" (actually: only the future of technology - the broad-brush future of the planet is vert easy to predict. We know how high the population will grow, when the max. will be reached and where all those people will live and when they will die. Omitting disasters (natural or man-made), wars and pestilence our future is easy to map) are totally subject to random decisions: which standard will be adopted, which advertisements will be used (and therefore the success or otherwise of an appliance), which bugs will be fixed and which ignored - mking the difference between choosing product "A" or product "B" as the next big thing.
Since the next generation of gadgets is built on the one before, think video games: an easily described lineage - right back to "pong" or PCs, the random decisions made every couple of years compound those made before.
While those paths are easy to see in hindsight, guessing (and it IS only guesses, no talent required) which decisions will lead to the next generation of successful gadgets and form-factors is not possible.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Those of us who love science fiction are used to this. It's fun to go back and read what some of the authors in the 1950's thought the future would look like. My personal favorite is that no thought it given to miniaturization; everything still uses tubes. Exotic tubes with magical abilities (like the power tubes in the Venus Equilateral series), but still vacuum tubes with filaments.
When it comes to computers, it's just as hit and miss. The way some authors handle artificial intelligence is by insisting that it won't happen. (David Weber, to name one -- in his books, the idea is that any true AI would quickly go insane.)
(But then, poor David has other concerns: in the Honor Harrington series, one key to Manticore's military superiority is the fact that they've harnessed "gravity waves" for faster-than-light communications ... and the physicists have long since determined that gravity propagates no faster than the speed of light.) :)
Likewise when I see anyone in a story "pressing a button" (even if it's a virtual button). We're already on the brink of direct neural interfaces. You think it, things happen. That's the future. But to be fair to these authors, it's hard to see what's coming in 10 years.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
It's seldom that Slashdot takes me on a Wikipedia-like adventure. But once I was there and realized that archive.org is more than a Wayback Machine, I started looking up issues of RUN magazine (C=64 and C=128 centric magazine of the time). I was determined not to stop until I found the two "Magic" articles that they published for me. Issue 65 and Issue 69, long lost in the real world, and now added to my digital trophy case.
I can't believe I was programming 8502 assembly language back then and haven't so much as learned a damned thing about Java these days.
--Jim (me)
In the 1976 film of the book, Thomas Newton invents an instant camera that allows you to see the pictures you've just shot immediately... by opening the back of the camera and pulling out the 36-image film strip. I guess the true future of instant cameras was hard to predict, even though the necessary technology was already in existence.
it would also have been hard to represent an RF data connection replacing physical data transfers
A telescoping antenna analogous to those on portable radios would have sufficed for that. For a keyboard, I would have probably used the 4x4 matrix of my Casio calculator watch.
Actually, to me, most impressive of all was the fact that something *in my lifetime* actually has to account for both special and general relativity. I remember studying them in my college sophomore physics class and having the standard student complaint, "When am I ever going to need to use THIS?" (By the way Mrs Morton, I still have not diagrammed a sentence in real life).
It was intended as a joke. The "In This Issue" section on page 4 reminds the reader of the issue's proximity to April 1.
Ah, I see the problem, you missed that he was talking about handheld GPS. Easy to do since he only mentioned it in the title and the first sentence you quoted. It is true that you only need either 4 (world-wide wireless network) or 6 (gigabytes of storage).
Yes... and no. In 1981, the pieces and precursors of pretty much everything on your list was already in place. Very little of it was available down at Radio Shack, granted, but much of it was already in use (at a minimum) by the military.
" why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions"
It seems to me that most predictions were dead on accurate. I have a freaking Star Trek tablet that the captain used for data and logging, Giant display screen with the world on it in every home, communicate around the globe over light or via magical robots in the sky( satellites) , freaking dick tracy watches have existed for 3 years now (search ebay for "gsm watch") etc... Cars are about to drive themselves, Airplanes have flown themselves for decades. etc....
I'm thinking the author has zero clue as to what he is talking about in tech let alone predictions that were made in the past and how dead on accurate they were.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My Nintendo DS came with a typing needle. So did my Newton MessagePad 2000.
Some people might think "firstpost.com" is a troll site like "hotgrits.org" or anything in the .cx top-level domain. So let me explain this input method in my own words. It works in much the same way that activating tiny hyperlinks in the Chrome browser for Android works. Tap once in the vicinity of the key you want to press, and it'll zoom in on an area of the keyboard centered on where you pressed. Tap again to actually enter a letter.
This picture is in my opinion pretty darn CLOSE to what we really ended up having.
Oh, the styling is bad - the keyboard is unusable. But it looks reasonable, not stupid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It gets clearer if you flip a couple pages of the magazine and read the "In this issue" box:
Before you write to comment on our cover's "unusual" design approach (created by artist Robert Tinney), keep in mind the proximity of April 1st.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
Either buy a house, or a BYTE magazine, I guess.
This entire article is a "whoosh". A drawing designed to make people think about a computer on your wrist (which this one does very well) is about conveying an idea and not a blueprint for a real object.
Watch the show "Connections" some time. If you're not familiar with it (and you call yourself a Geek?) it takes a historical view of how we got from there (the invention of stirrups) to here (telecommunications). Take that kind of historical perspective and then try to extrapolate forward from it. Don't forget to figure in the technological growth curve, socio-economic factors, human psychology, a hundred other things that I don't feel like compiling a list of right now...oh yeah...and a big, healthy dose of random chance (think The Mule in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy). If you get better than 5% accuracy on a 25 year prediction I'll be very surprised.
M$ is still around, so I failed on that prediction *rueful sigh*
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
The keyboard might be a little off, but the floppy disk could easily be a micro SD card.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
much of it was already in use (at a minimum) by the military.
I think you're missing the point. Sure the army may have had the precursors to Handheld GPS since the first satellites were launched in the 70's. But in 1981, the thought of billions of people having access to it in their pocket on a device that gets thrown away every 2 years was probably about as unfathomable as people commuting by SR-71 blackbird (built a decade before "The" GPS was conceived).
Thank you, Captain Caveman.
Heinlein's 1966 classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is wonderful and visionary on many levels but still tripped over some contemporary assumptions. Like one big computer ran everything, including the phone system. It could synthesize audio but it had to jump through fancy hoops to do video. I guess we all are stuck in our own time.
FTFA:
No, it's not an explanation at all. It was intended as a metaphor for miniaturization of electronics. Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
Except for the pinheads!
That's the OP's point - you're missing my point, which is that it's not really so unfathomable at all. By 1981, we'd already in less than a decade gone from pocket calculators being expensive rarities to being practically given away in breakfast cereal. LORAN was already widely available in a compact box. Etc... etc... By 1981, the accelerating pace of technology was already clearly visible to anyone who was looking. (Which I was at the time.)
What I missed/didn't grasp the full import of is that between 1981 (the year of my high school graduation) and 1991 (the year of Desert Shield/Storm) GPS went from being a highly classified piece of military hardware to a handheld commercial unit. There were actually more units in the civilian world than in the Army. (Folks were actually buying handheld GPS units at sporting goods stores and sending them to soldiers in the field because there was a shortage of officially available and issued GPS units!) But given the rapid advance of IC's into the civilian/commercial world, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. (OTOH, the full story of the DOD's role in developing IC's wasn't fully known/grasped at the time.)
We never have. We probably never will.
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
They had numeric keypads which allowed you to enter text by pressing the buttons repeatedly or in a specific input mode, similar to dumbphones. They had organisers with full-blown keyboards, but those weren't watches.
From page 212:
Everyone who shopped at Target last fall saw how well that was implemented here in the U.S.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Tinney's image was a logical evolution from this.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
USB OTG not good enough? Bluetooth not good enough?
The problem with expansion, especially using ExpressCard, is that there's a horrendous chicken/egg problem. very few express card peripherals exist, thus few express card slots are being included in modern machines.
It has nothing to do with intellectual competition. It's just that, most people's wants are served on board. Expansion's existed but as time has gone on, the need for PC Card and ExpressCard has gone away thanks to USB.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Samsung Gear.
I was old as you are now back then!
Kinda brings you back in time.
The ads of companies so young, many of which didn't survive... a Microsoft ad of a good product (softcard), who knew what they would become? To someone who talked about the IBM PC, it's interesting to notice there are no ads about PC clones or add-ons or whatever. It simply wasn't yet relevant...
Lots of Pascal ads -- didn't see a Turbo Pascal one, though -- and a dBase II one.
Simpler times with better magazines (300+ pages!).
I didn't even dream about the internet back then... look how wondrous things we have today...
The Science Fiction stories I wrote back then are fairly correct in terms of what 2020 would look like.
I had the planet suffering from technological disasters that had people working as serfs to heartless corporations, and never-ending war machines, with a planet that was heating up so much that plans to colonize Antarctica were underway.
My only incorrect guess was that fusion power would exist for slow multi-generation interplanetary spaceships sent to the moons of Jupiter.
Fusion is always 20 years in the future. Has been since I was born. Still is today.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"But most of all, the Tinney watch is a wonderful visual explanation of why human beings–most of us, anyhow–aren’t very good at predicting the future of technology. We tend to think that new products will be a lot like the ones we know. We shoehorn existing concepts where they don’t belong. Oftentimes, we don’t dream big enough."
I realize the Tinney watch was more of a joke than a prediction but even it is a good example of why the author of the article is completely wrong with the above statement. Take the tiny floppy disk. At the time, in 1981, everyone reading byte knew what a floppy disk was...it was a storage medium. What if Tinney had drawn something more akin to today's SD cards? No one would have know what it was supposed to be and no one would have understood it unless Tinney explained it to them. Tinney, through the tiney floppy disk, was showing a prediction of storage getting smaller (really small compared to what was available at the time) without confusing the issue by trying to portray that smaller storage medium as something no one would understand. The author is taking the predictions too literally. Rather than trying to see what is being predicted (smaller storage medium) he is calling the prediction wrong because it didn't produce exactly what was portrayed.
Just 4 months later this issue came out. Smalltalk, originally created at Xerox' PARC facility, made its way into Objective-C and NextStep and now Objective-C is used in mac and iOS apps. Seems they were pretty much spot on with this one.
It was not supposed to be a real watch. It was a joke. A spoof. A representation. It's funny anyone would think that cover was representing a real prediction. Crimminy.
"Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction. "
Sure, but those technologies which do not involve glowing pixels have progressed much slower, if at all.
An Intertec Superbrain, more or less.
2(!) Z80 processors at 4MHz, 64Kb RAM, 2 8" floppies, ran CP/M.
I had a ZX80 back then, A Superbrain (or something very similar) WAS the future, as far as I was concerned!
The BYTE cover wasn't intended as literal prophecy, just eyecatching comment on the possibilities of future increases in computing power.
>Not because it hates us, just for liebensraum.
Strong AI will kill everyone because it wants a Love room ?
The future certainlz is weird!
I had a watch with a full scientific calculator on it when I was a kid. My fingers were small enough to press the buttons, but an adult likely would have needed a pencil lead to push the buttons. :(
It died when we were having squirtgun fights and I dunked my arm in a bucket and forgot I was wearing the watch
I loved that watch.
When I was a boy...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Add to that list an item 0:
That a satellite cluster deigned, paid for, and deployed for military use would be freely available for civilian use. (President Regan's decision to allow that, in the wake of the Korean Air flight 007 wasn't made until 1983 and the satellites weren't launched until 1989).
Without the military necessity and funding behind it there's basically no chance that the GPS satellites would have been deployed, and without Regan's decision there's no reason they would necessarily have supported unencrypted civilian use.
But yeah, I like your unlikely technology prediction. Although certainly much less capable handheld GPS units existed long before the map based raod navigation one's you were primarily referring to.
Yeah, thats right, everything about how we predict anything boils down to one shitty cover from 33 years ago. Guess it is time to give up.
That's the new iWatch we've been hearing about!
People are much better at thinking of what we already have and making it better in quantifiable directions. That is what that Byte cover is showing, what we already had, just smaller. So called "disruptive" changes, where we go off in a new direction, is much harder to predict, but when it's done, we get the "why didn't someone think of this already" sort of talk. So many companies are focused on optimizing what we already have instead of playing with ideas without a ROI that is obvious to the people controlling the money. That's why I think technology companies should be managed by engineers and people who read a lot of sci fi.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Apple's win with the iPhone wasn't the concept of "smartphone", but the concept of "humanist UI design".
The idea of scrolling, zooming, pointing and manipulating objects as if they were paper on a roll, or physical buttons eschewed the previous generation of phones which used a stylus and scroll bars down the side of the window.
It's this humanist user element that represents the revolution if the iPhone, rather than the anything of the "smart" features, which people rightly point out were rather underwhelming when it was released.
That might be overstating one thing, however. The one other innovation was the integration of a full Safari rendering engine, as it was far better than comparable phones at the time. Other vendors assumed that the UI would be too clunky to display full pages on a small screen. Apple, again, worked on the UI and made it work.
Whether the answer is "Is it PC compatible?" or "Is it IBM compatible?" with those spec's it would easily run an emulator to provide any desired compatibility (hardware or software wise, who cares).
It is this kind of limited thinking that often causes predictions to be way of the mark!