7 ms·

Throughout history most technological improvements could not be predicted ahead of time. In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In t

Throughout history most technological improvements could not be predicted ahead of time. In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world. In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming.

cafebabbe 10y ago
> I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming. Ah! You're talking about global warming :)
- pdog 10y ago
  Given that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activities[1], the surprise would be if it didn't happen. [1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
maxerickson 10y ago
Al Gore's apocryphal invention of the internet is based on a reality where he pushed to fund computing and networking initiatives throughout the 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno... One of the primary drivers of the various government bills was the notion that networks would be enormously beneficial economically. People had a pretty clear idea that a global network would be a big deal.
phil21 10y ago
> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. This this may be in danger of going into pedantic territory, I don't feel this is true at all. The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected. In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point. I still remember a day in 1994 when I played Chess over the Internet with someone in South Africa - thinking that holy crap, the world we had been dreaming and talking about for 10 years finally was coming true.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  Yeah. It was by no means an unexpected or even unanticipated thing. It wasn't hard to see coming.
- rsync 10y ago
  "In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point." Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet
- jamesrcole 10y ago
  >> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. > The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected. That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though. (On a separate note - I'm curious, do you recall if they thought it was going to be "a network for anyone and everyone"?) I remember when the web started becoming popular and that there was a lot of discussion about whether it would be passing fad, so it was far from obvious to a lot of people then.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though. Yes, but it's the same kind of "fairly small subset of people" that today would frequent a place like HN. So if today's devs and engineers don't think there'll be much in smartphone innovation, then it's like people in BBS in the 80s not believing in a networked future.
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    In my memory of the internet becoming a thing in the early 90s, there was an intense fight over the commercialization of it. There was a group that really didn't want it to support money-making enterprises. Even at the time it seemed like a losing battle, but I doubt anyone foresaw just how overwhelming the commercial forces would be.
yborg 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider 1975
petra 10y ago
>> In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world. But in 1965, when there was a viable path to scaling the technology, Moore predicted moore's law and personal computers being sold next to cosmetics: http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg/_82372637_de9dcc20-dd65-40cb-bf64-d4cad52b5d9f.jpg http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg... >> whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people Most people ? sure. But there are enough people to see a coarse vision of the future, or at least reasonable guesses.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And i can't help wonder if we have been coasting on Moore's law ever since. What is inside s smartphone today is not that different from what was inside a mainframe.
cgrubb 10y ago
The Thomas Watson quote (only a market for 5 computers) is a bit of an urban legend: http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-world-market-maybe-five-computers http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-wo...
legulere 10y ago
> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later The people that worked on it certainly had dreams about it. But those dreams might not necessarily have come true exactly. And there are a lot of people out there dreaming about technologies that will never come true/or are still more far off than believed. Currently VR and autonomous cars are seen as the next big thing, however so were wearables like smartwatches.
hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
> In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think there was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  anecdote but I still have and use an MP3 player. a smartphone is a poor replacement.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    ...because it's heavier? I can't think of any other conceivable way a smartphone is inferior to an MP3 player.
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      The battery life is worse, it's more awkward to transfer files, no tactile interface - can't change tracks without taking it out.
      - nradov 10y ago
        Yes the elimination of tactile hardware buttons is a perfect example of the end of innovation in smartphone hardware. The manufacturers have taken buttons away from us due to silly "design" principles, or to improve waterproofing. But I'd much prefer to have a few programmable buttons that I could use to change music tracks or answer a call or whatever purely by feel.
        hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        Speaking of hardware buttons, I still can't understand for the life of me why some phone manufacturers put the power button directly above the volume button (on the same edge of the phone). About a third of the time I want to turn the volume up I end up turning the phone off.
hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
> In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think the was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.
coldtea 10y ago
>In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In the immediate future (e.g. in 2007 when the iPhone appeared) no. But everybody though mobile phones will ultimately be little computers -- even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones. >* In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.* And he was right. Though he never really said it, it was more of a misattribution of a quote by another, "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." Which, if you think of it, is how Cloud computing works. Sure, there are not 5 computers -- but a huge part of the internet traffic is from 5 services and their data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc). >In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. People expected and talked of such a thing since the 50s and communication satellites. Heck, it was the main theme in books like Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement.
- ThrowawayR2 10y ago
  > even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones. Actually, Windows Mobile was the market leader for a while after PalmOS development fell behind and people gave up on Palm. I had to do a market analysis once and there were a couple hundred different models of WM 5.x / 6.0 devices, if I recall correctly. (As an aside, Google really should have foreseen Android's eventual fragmentation problem since WM had it in spades a decade earlier.) And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run. So, not so crappy after all.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run. So, not so crappy after all. From the openness aspect no. From any aspect that actually matters while using a device, yes.
wpietri 10y ago
You're definitely wrong about phones. In 2002-5, Palm was shipping a variety of Treos, which even at the time were clear early-adopter smartphones. Plenty of other companies were investigating the market and shipping early experiments. The IBM quote has no apparent basis in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib... And you're entirely wrong about 1990. Plenty of people thought there would be a global network. The WELL started in 1985, and plenty in that community had good notions about the future. The initial work on the Internet goes back to the 1970s, and many there too understood where it was going: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832... So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions.
- orcdork 10y ago
  > So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions. I always wonder if people predicting the future also thought that the internet would be so casually rude.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  You're amply correct on all points, and GP wrong. I'd point to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey for numerous aspects of technology, including talking computer interfaces, tablet computers, and voice communications. Vannevar Bush, in the 1940s, and H.G. Wells, in the 1930s, were proposing systems markedly similar to contemporary Internet-based systems. Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975) featured an all-in-one, solid-state, "Minisec", indistinguishable from a contemporary smartphone: pocket computer, communicator, video and audio recording device (along with ubiquitous appearances of people who were recording their entire lives with them, much to the annoyance of those about them). Also a run-in with a global surveillance secretariat, of sorts. There's "Ender's Game", the original novella (1977), which featured a Usenet (or Reddit)-like online communications forum ... used to manipulate global political discourse. The one element missing from most early formulations of a universal global computer network were the commercialisation and advertising-oriented nature of these, as their primary means of monetisation and economic support.
lacampbell 10y ago
In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Huh? It seemed pretty obvious to me in 2005 that phones (which were still getting more sophisticated) and handheld PCs would eventually merge. And this isn't bragging - it just seemed like the logical thing to happen. Phones were changing more rapidly then than they are now..
erikpukinskis 10y ago
In 2005 everyone in the interaction design world knew phones were garbage. Remember scrolling through a 4-line screen? I was in design school at the time and we did an exercise to redesign the phone and we ended up describing something almost exactly like the iPhone. It follows naturally from "mobile phones exist" + "laptops exist" + "interaction design makes things better". It's just that Apple was the only company that really believed in all three of those things, and was willing to put billions of dollars behind getting it into production. But to say it couldn't have been predicted was wrong. Conventional wisdom amongst business people at the time was that design doesn't matter, except to make your product pretty after it is specced. But the design community knew. We were just having a hard time convincing anyone to listen to us. Do you remember that at the time most tech companies weren't even hiring interaction designers? You had to convince a company that they even needed you. "Why do we need you? The programmers write the code and the graphic designer makes it look good."

cafebabbe 10y ago

> I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming. Ah! You're talking about global warming :)

pdog 10y ago
Given that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activities[1], the surprise would be if it didn't happen. [1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

maxerickson 10y ago

Al Gore's apocryphal invention of the internet is based on a reality where he pushed to fund computing and networking initiatives throughout the 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno... One of the primary drivers of the various government bills was the notion that networks would be enormously beneficial economically. People had a pretty clear idea that a global network would be a big deal.

phil21 10y ago

> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. This this may be in danger of going into pedantic territory, I don't feel this is true at all. The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected. In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point. I still remember a day in 1994 when I played Chess over the Internet with someone in South Africa - thinking that holy crap, the world we had been dreaming and talking about for 10 years finally was coming true.

1_2__3 10y ago
Yeah. It was by no means an unexpected or even unanticipated thing. It wasn't hard to see coming.
rsync 10y ago
"In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point." Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet
jamesrcole 10y ago
>> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. > The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected. That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though. (On a separate note - I'm curious, do you recall if they thought it was going to be "a network for anyone and everyone"?) I remember when the web started becoming popular and that there was a lot of discussion about whether it would be passing fad, so it was far from obvious to a lot of people then.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though. Yes, but it's the same kind of "fairly small subset of people" that today would frequent a place like HN. So if today's devs and engineers don't think there'll be much in smartphone innovation, then it's like people in BBS in the 80s not believing in a networked future.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  In my memory of the internet becoming a thing in the early 90s, there was an intense fight over the commercialization of it. There was a group that really didn't want it to support money-making enterprises. Even at the time it seemed like a losing battle, but I doubt anyone foresaw just how overwhelming the commercial forces would be.

yborg 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider 1975

petra 10y ago

>> In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world. But in 1965, when there was a viable path to scaling the technology, Moore predicted moore's law and personal computers being sold next to cosmetics: http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg/_82372637_de9dcc20-dd65-40cb-bf64-d4cad52b5d9f.jpg http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg... >> whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people Most people ? sure. But there are enough people to see a coarse vision of the future, or at least reasonable guesses.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
digi_owl 10y ago
And i can't help wonder if we have been coasting on Moore's law ever since. What is inside s smartphone today is not that different from what was inside a mainframe.

cgrubb 10y ago

The Thomas Watson quote (only a market for 5 computers) is a bit of an urban legend: http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-world-market-maybe-five-computers http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-wo...

legulere 10y ago

> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later The people that worked on it certainly had dreams about it. But those dreams might not necessarily have come true exactly. And there are a lot of people out there dreaming about technologies that will never come true/or are still more far off than believed. Currently VR and autonomous cars are seen as the next big thing, however so were wearables like smartwatches.

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago

> In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think there was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.

lacampbell 10y ago
anecdote but I still have and use an MP3 player. a smartphone is a poor replacement.
- tempestn 10y ago
  ...because it's heavier? I can't think of any other conceivable way a smartphone is inferior to an MP3 player.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    The battery life is worse, it's more awkward to transfer files, no tactile interface - can't change tracks without taking it out.
    - nradov 10y ago
      Yes the elimination of tactile hardware buttons is a perfect example of the end of innovation in smartphone hardware. The manufacturers have taken buttons away from us due to silly "design" principles, or to improve waterproofing. But I'd much prefer to have a few programmable buttons that I could use to change music tracks or answer a call or whatever purely by feel.
      - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        Speaking of hardware buttons, I still can't understand for the life of me why some phone manufacturers put the power button directly above the volume button (on the same edge of the phone). About a third of the time I want to turn the volume up I end up turning the phone off.

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago

> In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think the was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.

coldtea 10y ago

>In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In the immediate future (e.g. in 2007 when the iPhone appeared) no. But everybody though mobile phones will ultimately be little computers -- even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones. >* In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.* And he was right. Though he never really said it, it was more of a misattribution of a quote by another, "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." Which, if you think of it, is how Cloud computing works. Sure, there are not 5 computers -- but a huge part of the internet traffic is from 5 services and their data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc). >In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. People expected and talked of such a thing since the 50s and communication satellites. Heck, it was the main theme in books like Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement.

ThrowawayR2 10y ago
> even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones. Actually, Windows Mobile was the market leader for a while after PalmOS development fell behind and people gave up on Palm. I had to do a market analysis once and there were a couple hundred different models of WM 5.x / 6.0 devices, if I recall correctly. (As an aside, Google really should have foreseen Android's eventual fragmentation problem since WM had it in spades a decade earlier.) And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run. So, not so crappy after all.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run. So, not so crappy after all. From the openness aspect no. From any aspect that actually matters while using a device, yes.

wpietri 10y ago

You're definitely wrong about phones. In 2002-5, Palm was shipping a variety of Treos, which even at the time were clear early-adopter smartphones. Plenty of other companies were investigating the market and shipping early experiments. The IBM quote has no apparent basis in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib... And you're entirely wrong about 1990. Plenty of people thought there would be a global network. The WELL started in 1985, and plenty in that community had good notions about the future. The initial work on the Internet goes back to the 1970s, and many there too understood where it was going: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832... So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions.

orcdork 10y ago
> So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions. I always wonder if people predicting the future also thought that the internet would be so casually rude.
dredmorbius 10y ago
You're amply correct on all points, and GP wrong. I'd point to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey for numerous aspects of technology, including talking computer interfaces, tablet computers, and voice communications. Vannevar Bush, in the 1940s, and H.G. Wells, in the 1930s, were proposing systems markedly similar to contemporary Internet-based systems. Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975) featured an all-in-one, solid-state, "Minisec", indistinguishable from a contemporary smartphone: pocket computer, communicator, video and audio recording device (along with ubiquitous appearances of people who were recording their entire lives with them, much to the annoyance of those about them). Also a run-in with a global surveillance secretariat, of sorts. There's "Ender's Game", the original novella (1977), which featured a Usenet (or Reddit)-like online communications forum ... used to manipulate global political discourse. The one element missing from most early formulations of a universal global computer network were the commercialisation and advertising-oriented nature of these, as their primary means of monetisation and economic support.

lacampbell 10y ago

In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. Huh? It seemed pretty obvious to me in 2005 that phones (which were still getting more sophisticated) and handheld PCs would eventually merge. And this isn't bragging - it just seemed like the logical thing to happen. Phones were changing more rapidly then than they are now..

erikpukinskis 10y ago

In 2005 everyone in the interaction design world knew phones were garbage. Remember scrolling through a 4-line screen? I was in design school at the time and we did an exercise to redesign the phone and we ended up describing something almost exactly like the iPhone. It follows naturally from "mobile phones exist" + "laptops exist" + "interaction design makes things better". It's just that Apple was the only company that really believed in all three of those things, and was willing to put billions of dollars behind getting it into production. But to say it couldn't have been predicted was wrong. Conventional wisdom amongst business people at the time was that design doesn't matter, except to make your product pretty after it is specced. But the design community knew. We were just having a hard time convincing anyone to listen to us. Do you remember that at the time most tech companies weren't even hiring interaction designers? You had to convince a company that they even needed you. "Why do we need you? The programmers write the code and the graphic designer makes it look good."