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.'"

Comments

It is art

[art6217]

It is art, no prediction. It is obvious from the first glance. And the article confirms it:

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.

Re:It was a "joke" back then

[Cryacin]

This reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Elevator Fallacy. If we imagine ourselves back in the 1800's when buildings were no taller than 10 stories, and then talk about how towering behemoth buildings stretching 100 stories high exist, a science fiction writer would talk about how there would be sky lobbies so that meetings can be held along the way up the building, and that at the end of the day, to avoid the long trek back down the endless stair case, a slide would allow those at the top of the building to travel all the way down in a matter of minutes.

That, or the elevator would be invented.

It's exactly these unforseen technological changes that make us laugh at the predictions from earlier, as the pain points back then are completely irrelevant and solved today, only to have new ones exposed that were never even thought of. Who would have considered it abnormal back in the 80's to need to add and remove media constantly from their system, but would even have thought of software needing to be efficient because of power consumption?

Re:It was a "joke" back then

[zippthorne]

The slide would still be pretty neat, though...

Most unlikely technology in 1981: Handheld GPS

[dtmos]

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.

Re:It was a "joke" back then

[Dogtanian]

If you Google "Byte magazine covers", you'll see that the covers often took a certain amount of artistic license.

I'm not even sure that one needs to excuse it as "artistic license".

To me- and I suspect almost anyone at the time- that looks as if it were quite clearly intended as a non-literal but eye-catching metaphor for "one day we will have wrist watches as powerful as today's personal computers".

I honestly don't think for a second they were suggesting that such a machine would *actually* resemble a ludicrously miniaturised PC...

(Skims the actual article)

Okay, so even the article itself understands that the original image was tongue-in-cheek; something the summary doesn't make so clear. And I do understand the point it's trying to make about predictions of the future looking like the present with high-tech bells on. But at the same time it slightly weakens the point being made, as there are probably many seriously-intended examples of "future tech" that are almost as silly!