3 ms·
Gordon Bell and Engelbart were surprisingly spot-on regarding connectivity. It seems that for the people who are canonically regarded as visionaries, massive co
by dmazin 8y ago
Gordon Bell and Engelbart were surprisingly spot-on regarding connectivity. It seems that for the people who are canonically regarded as visionaries, massive connectivity through tiny devices was obvious. For Bill Gates, not so much.
BYTE: Let's discuss the subject of portability. Do you think we'll have notebook computers or pocket computers? How do you think the size will evolve?
Gordon Bell: The computer will disappear by another 10 years in [its present form]. There will be zero-cost notebook-size computers with one chip in them that will have about 32 megabytes. So people will be carrying around these sort of minicellular, really connected, computers that go into their own databases somewhere.
Doug Engelbart: Everyone’s going to have a computer-carried around, or surgically implanted, or sitting on your hat or your spectacles or what-and they’re all going to be connected into networks just totally, [and] those networks will be wireless.
BYTE: This sounds more like a portable office than a portable computer. Do you really think cellular phones and faxes will enter the notebook arena?
Bill Gates: That's a little radical. I don't think it's necessary. If you can connect up every few hours, that's good enough. The machine in the office will just have this optic fiber that will go off to the world net work out there. It will directly connect to some kind of server and will have a lot of storage.
- 9erdelta 8y agoWow Bill Gates' perspective is interesting because what is radical now is for a phone to NOT be continuously connected. If my phone has no internet, that is a bad time. So easy to become complacent and rely on an internet connection for pretty much all useful information.
- smacktoward 8y agoGates' blind spot regarding connectivity and the Internet was still in full effect five years later, when his book The Road Ahead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...) came out. I vividly remember sitting there in 1995 reading the hardcover first edition and thinking "man, this guy just does not get it." Fortunately for Microsoft, he eventually did get it, though only just in time -- not long after the book hit the shelves.
- hakfoo 8y agoHonestly, a continuous connectivity model was an ambitious bet early on. Wasn't cellular data at the time basically using the phone as a 9600bps modem at astronomical per-minute prices? If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection. For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later. I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.