5 ms·

For those that read this article, I highly recommend you watch the 1998 COMDEX video it references. [1] It's both sad and amazing that much of what we use toda

For those that read this article, I highly recommend you watch the 1998 COMDEX video it references. [1] It's both sad and amazing that much of what we use today was "coming soon" 23 years ago. [1] https://archive.org/details/CC1634COMDEX https://archive.org/details/CC1634COMDEX

prideout 5y ago
Interesting how the device in the video looks slightly different from the prototype. I love how the 3 LEDs in the top-right animate like the front of the car in Knight Rider. Brings back memories to see Stewart Cheifet giving an interview!
jpfr 5y ago
There were only 9 years between the 1998 Comdex and the iPhone release in 2007. Of the 23 years we have had iPhones for 14 years... Time perception is sometimes strange.
- sjcoles 5y ago
  The 10 year span between 2000 and 2010 also had one of the largest relative uplifts in transistor density. Going from 130nm to 28nm was HUGE. I think people forget how quickly computers (especially in efficiency!) improved from just 2000-2005 and again from 2005-2010. Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. I think we'll see another 5 year growth spurt once stacked designs become common end of 2022ish. Though TSV vs EMIB is a whole other argument/ball of wax.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    > Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. You can say that again. I'm typing this on a desktop PC powered by a Xeon that is approaching 10 years old and I don't have any complaints. The cost of upgrading it over the years has been modest. In comparison I have a Nexus 5 that is about the same age and getting modern Android on it is a pain, the processor really struggles and the physical device itself has seen much better days.
    - Lammy 5y ago
      Anecdote: I'm typing this on a 2013 Xeon (Haswell E3v3), and it's acceptable for web/productivity, but the x265 encode performance is absolutely abysmal compared to newer CPUs, especially AMD's. GPU encoding is good for ephemeral streams, but good archival encoding is all CPU-bound: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1908148#post1908148 https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1908148#post1908148 """Luckily""" for me I do mostly standard-definition encodes and can get a sustained ~11FPS with my own ICC-built x265 binaries and my own custom "SD" encoder tuning. Every time I encode an HD video I wonder why I haven't replaced this system yet. Then I look at component prices and remember why.
    - humaniania 5y ago
      The big jump has been in storage. HDD to SSD is 4-10x and from SSD to NVMe is 4-10x again.
      - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
        Yes, I was going to say -- the increase in IOPS is off the charts. I worked at an ad-tech startup in 2010 and that was the biggest bottleneck for what we were trying to do. At that point SSDs were a thing on the desktop, but not really in the datacenter still. Too pricey. Kids today with their insanely high IOPS! They don't know the pain!
  - Nition 5y ago
    The 1990s felt similarly insane. In 1991 we we had Hovertank 3D, in 1993 we had Doom, in 1998 we had Half-Life, and in 2000 we had Deus Ex. Go back nine years today and things don't feel that different from now. People still buy Skyrim.
    - gamacodre 5y ago
      AR is probably in its "hovertank" era right now, after years of interesting but largely useless demos. Someday we're going to wonder how anyone managed to navigate or buy things in shops without realtime vision markup.
      - Nition 5y ago
        I just want a little note that reminds me of a person's name and how I know them.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      That probably has more to do with the human bottleneck in games, than anything else. Big open world is good, if you can manage to fill the big open world with stuff. But procedural generation is annoying and repetitive, but at the same time handcrafting a world is time and labor intensive. See: Cyberpunk 2077
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - fernly 5y ago
    > 28nm was HUGE ... so to speak.
  - ezconnect 5y ago
    I remember upgrading my CPU and GPU every year because of the exciting new technology being released almost constantly.
- tcse_12 5y ago
  Isn't that the truth. I recently came across a meme that I suspect will drive this point home for many in this community. https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/mj9mim/loz_ww_decided_to_make_my_friends_feel_old_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/mj9mim/loz_ww_decide...
- mschaef 5y ago
  The one that gets me is that ENIAC was (mostly) live in 1946 and the IBM PC first shipped in 1981. The upshot of this is that there's more time between now and the IBM PC than there is between the IBM PC and ENIAC. (18K vacuum tunes, filled a room, and and was programmed via physical rewiring, at least initlally.) > Time perception is sometimes strange. Agreed.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  It's funny how much Apple dominates our memory. It was only a couple years between the 1998 Comdex and when I got my first wifi PalmOS device with a color screen. At some point my handheld devices acquired the ability to connect directly to a cellular network, which was nice, and then became really nice with the iPhone. But I don't think that was ever a planned feature for the WebPad in the first place. The form factor is perhaps more interesting. We did have to wait 12 years until Apple legitimized the idea of a device along these lines that doesn't fit in a pocket.
  - gamacodre 5y ago
    The Palm devices were great, I had one of the originals, then Samsung had a flip-phone version, and Treos followed after. I used the heck out of all of them, and even wrote some code for the platform. It was really sad that they lost their way. "Form factor" can be a slippery notion. The genius of the iPad design, I think, is that it _couldn't_ be mistaken for an educational device. It actually looked like it belonged in a leather folio next to some important papers, not in your kids' school bag.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I fired up one of my old laptops from 1995 or so. It was a cutting edge machine at the time, very nice. It seemed completely unusable today. The tiny disk drive, for instance.
  - rootbear 5y ago
    For me it's the displays. Old laptops had terrible TN panels and are painful to look at today. It makes them near useless even for basic web browsing.
bdcravens 5y ago
Taking that into consideration, and the many ideas that failed but are now succeeding, I wonder what businesses of today will fail yet be fully implemented in 20 years?
hathawsh 5y ago
From my perspective, screen technology was still being developed. As shown in that archive.org video, CRTs were still dominant at that time because they were much cheaper than large full color LCDs. Those who could afford a large color LCD generally preferred a laptop. Only after the price of color LCDs came down did it make sense for people to buy tablets. Precision multi-touch sensitivity also turned out to be a turning point in adoption.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  I imagine software was a big deal too. It's important not to forget the magnitude of the advantage that iTunes delivered for Apple. I think there's a sound argument to be made that, without iTunes, that iOS devices would have never achieved the same success. iTunes provided a platform to get a critical mass of users accustom to buying $0.89-$20 digital downloads. Which made the transition of iTunes into an "app store" a minor one for users. They are there to buy music, but maybe in the future, they might find some apps for their iPhone useful. Once Apple had a critical mass of developers building non-trivial apps for the iPhone. It was a (kind of) baby step to supporting tablets. Lots of people tried to invent the tablet. I think they failed because of a lack of software, rather than poor hardware.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    As someone who "tried to invent the tablet" (we were not first, and we'd all seen Star Trek and the like; nobody at the time thought we were inventing anything new), it was very much the hardware. It's possible software would have stopped wide adoption, but software was a solvable problem - porting Linux apps to our platform was comparatively easy, for example, and we could run Flash, so we could show fairly fancy demos. But it never got far enough for most of these platforms for software to become a problem, other than for Palm who had apps, but stumbled in all kinds of other ways, not least in never shaking the image as a serious PDA, which instantly made it a niche product. The devices were hampered by all kinds of hardware limitations. Screens were awful. The touch panels were awful. Even really expensive devices felt like toys because of it. CPUs were awfully slow. Lack of wifi was a big issue with the first generation tablets and solved in all kinds of awful ways. Flash was ludicrously expensive - we agonised over 16MB vs. 32MB storage. We used NanoX [1] rather than X11 for our windowing system because the engineering cost of adapting NanoX and writing our own widgets for it was worth it to save a few MB of flash and a few MB of RAM. And so getting distributors and retailers and the like to commit crashed and burned before you got to the point of what software you could launch it with. [1] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows
grilledcheez 5y ago
It seems web pages loaded at least as quickly in 1998 as in 2021
- darknavi 5y ago
  I was about to say it looked like they loaded much faster. I can't believe the bloat some websites have now.
vidarh 5y ago
In '98-'99 I was working on this one: https://metalab.at/wiki/Freepad https://metalab.at/wiki/Freepad While it's sad, one of my biggest lessons from it was that the greatest genius with the iPhone and iPad was understanding the market. Showing our tablet to techies worked great. People were excited about the hardware, about the fact it ran Linux, about it running Opera, and in general geeked out over it. But it was tethered to your house - few places had more than 9600 bps GSM data, so it used a DECT extension (wifi was not well established) to provide an internet connection tied to your house. And it had a crappy resistive touch screen. Low resolution. Too slow CPU. Too little RAM. Too little flash. Imagine a slow, heavy tablet with low resolution and janky touch that you could take no further than your garden (if you were lucky). So what we use today superficially looks like more modern versions (that bezel size...) of things on offer back then. But really a lot of the time while they worked well as prototypes, we just didn't have the sense (or opportunity) to say "the time isn't right for this product yet, let's pick it up again when x,y,z has happened."
- buescher 5y ago
  I remember the guys from ViA Inc (not the same Via as the processors) with their tablets tethered to their wearable belt computer. They'd carry the tablet in a thigh holster.
- ska 5y ago
  > greatest genius [...] was understanding the market. So many people doing product development work of one sort or another fail to understand this to their detriment. You have to screw up the engineering for it to kill a product; a mediocre implementation is often times just fine, especially if you are early. But if you are building the wrong thing, no amount of implementation talent can save you.
- mc32 5y ago
  For me what catapulted the iPhone over its competitors (Palm, BB and WinCE phones) was it was phone + music player + GPS and you had an app store in a sleek package (no stubby antenna or big bezels) From this I think the issue is vertical integration to produce a seamless product. In this sense, at the time, maybe Microsoft had some ideas but abandoned them before they were ready (Courier).
gmiller123456 5y ago
It's really just a laptop without a keyboard, not really that groundbreaking. The inflation calculator puts the advertised price at almost $1000 today. So, probably the only reason it was "coming soon" was there wasn't much of a market. It's a bit disingenuous to pretend that "what we use today" is the same thing. Today you can get the same functionality for about $100, only with modern specs. Something of equivalent specs could likely be gotten for free in a landfill.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  It might be incorrect, but it isn’t disingenuous. No one is trying to lie or hide or be insincere.
Gravityloss 5y ago
Newspad, envisioned in 1968: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529
whizzwr 5y ago
>there is even a .com button, so you don't have to type it out. 1998? Magnificent.
raffraffraff 5y ago
"Dictate. Where is the toilet, question mark. Where is the toilet, question mark. Let try that again. Where is the toilet, question mark" It's amazing that the webpad was due to launch the same year that The Matrix was in theatres.
marwis 5y ago
Websites loaded so fast back then!

prideout 5y ago

Interesting how the device in the video looks slightly different from the prototype. I love how the 3 LEDs in the top-right animate like the front of the car in Knight Rider. Brings back memories to see Stewart Cheifet giving an interview!

jpfr 5y ago

There were only 9 years between the 1998 Comdex and the iPhone release in 2007. Of the 23 years we have had iPhones for 14 years... Time perception is sometimes strange.

sjcoles 5y ago
The 10 year span between 2000 and 2010 also had one of the largest relative uplifts in transistor density. Going from 130nm to 28nm was HUGE. I think people forget how quickly computers (especially in efficiency!) improved from just 2000-2005 and again from 2005-2010. Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. I think we'll see another 5 year growth spurt once stacked designs become common end of 2022ish. Though TSV vs EMIB is a whole other argument/ball of wax.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  > Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. You can say that again. I'm typing this on a desktop PC powered by a Xeon that is approaching 10 years old and I don't have any complaints. The cost of upgrading it over the years has been modest. In comparison I have a Nexus 5 that is about the same age and getting modern Android on it is a pain, the processor really struggles and the physical device itself has seen much better days.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    Anecdote: I'm typing this on a 2013 Xeon (Haswell E3v3), and it's acceptable for web/productivity, but the x265 encode performance is absolutely abysmal compared to newer CPUs, especially AMD's. GPU encoding is good for ephemeral streams, but good archival encoding is all CPU-bound: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1908148#post1908148 https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1908148#post1908148 """Luckily""" for me I do mostly standard-definition encodes and can get a sustained ~11FPS with my own ICC-built x265 binaries and my own custom "SD" encoder tuning. Every time I encode an HD video I wonder why I haven't replaced this system yet. Then I look at component prices and remember why.
  - humaniania 5y ago
    The big jump has been in storage. HDD to SSD is 4-10x and from SSD to NVMe is 4-10x again.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      Yes, I was going to say -- the increase in IOPS is off the charts. I worked at an ad-tech startup in 2010 and that was the biggest bottleneck for what we were trying to do. At that point SSDs were a thing on the desktop, but not really in the datacenter still. Too pricey. Kids today with their insanely high IOPS! They don't know the pain!
- Nition 5y ago
  The 1990s felt similarly insane. In 1991 we we had Hovertank 3D, in 1993 we had Doom, in 1998 we had Half-Life, and in 2000 we had Deus Ex. Go back nine years today and things don't feel that different from now. People still buy Skyrim.
  - gamacodre 5y ago
    AR is probably in its "hovertank" era right now, after years of interesting but largely useless demos. Someday we're going to wonder how anyone managed to navigate or buy things in shops without realtime vision markup.
    - Nition 5y ago
      I just want a little note that reminds me of a person's name and how I know them.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    That probably has more to do with the human bottleneck in games, than anything else. Big open world is good, if you can manage to fill the big open world with stuff. But procedural generation is annoying and repetitive, but at the same time handcrafting a world is time and labor intensive. See: Cyberpunk 2077
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- fernly 5y ago
  > 28nm was HUGE ... so to speak.
- ezconnect 5y ago
  I remember upgrading my CPU and GPU every year because of the exciting new technology being released almost constantly.
tcse_12 5y ago
Isn't that the truth. I recently came across a meme that I suspect will drive this point home for many in this community. https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/mj9mim/loz_ww_decided_to_make_my_friends_feel_old_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/mj9mim/loz_ww_decide...
mschaef 5y ago
The one that gets me is that ENIAC was (mostly) live in 1946 and the IBM PC first shipped in 1981. The upshot of this is that there's more time between now and the IBM PC than there is between the IBM PC and ENIAC. (18K vacuum tunes, filled a room, and and was programmed via physical rewiring, at least initlally.) > Time perception is sometimes strange. Agreed.
mumblemumble 5y ago
It's funny how much Apple dominates our memory. It was only a couple years between the 1998 Comdex and when I got my first wifi PalmOS device with a color screen. At some point my handheld devices acquired the ability to connect directly to a cellular network, which was nice, and then became really nice with the iPhone. But I don't think that was ever a planned feature for the WebPad in the first place. The form factor is perhaps more interesting. We did have to wait 12 years until Apple legitimized the idea of a device along these lines that doesn't fit in a pocket.
- gamacodre 5y ago
  The Palm devices were great, I had one of the originals, then Samsung had a flip-phone version, and Treos followed after. I used the heck out of all of them, and even wrote some code for the platform. It was really sad that they lost their way. "Form factor" can be a slippery notion. The genius of the iPad design, I think, is that it _couldn't_ be mistaken for an educational device. It actually looked like it belonged in a leather folio next to some important papers, not in your kids' school bag.
WalterBright 5y ago
I fired up one of my old laptops from 1995 or so. It was a cutting edge machine at the time, very nice. It seemed completely unusable today. The tiny disk drive, for instance.
- rootbear 5y ago
  For me it's the displays. Old laptops had terrible TN panels and are painful to look at today. It makes them near useless even for basic web browsing.

bdcravens 5y ago

Taking that into consideration, and the many ideas that failed but are now succeeding, I wonder what businesses of today will fail yet be fully implemented in 20 years?

hathawsh 5y ago

From my perspective, screen technology was still being developed. As shown in that archive.org video, CRTs were still dominant at that time because they were much cheaper than large full color LCDs. Those who could afford a large color LCD generally preferred a laptop. Only after the price of color LCDs came down did it make sense for people to buy tablets. Precision multi-touch sensitivity also turned out to be a turning point in adoption.

mywittyname 5y ago
I imagine software was a big deal too. It's important not to forget the magnitude of the advantage that iTunes delivered for Apple. I think there's a sound argument to be made that, without iTunes, that iOS devices would have never achieved the same success. iTunes provided a platform to get a critical mass of users accustom to buying $0.89-$20 digital downloads. Which made the transition of iTunes into an "app store" a minor one for users. They are there to buy music, but maybe in the future, they might find some apps for their iPhone useful. Once Apple had a critical mass of developers building non-trivial apps for the iPhone. It was a (kind of) baby step to supporting tablets. Lots of people tried to invent the tablet. I think they failed because of a lack of software, rather than poor hardware.
- vidarh 5y ago
  As someone who "tried to invent the tablet" (we were not first, and we'd all seen Star Trek and the like; nobody at the time thought we were inventing anything new), it was very much the hardware. It's possible software would have stopped wide adoption, but software was a solvable problem - porting Linux apps to our platform was comparatively easy, for example, and we could run Flash, so we could show fairly fancy demos. But it never got far enough for most of these platforms for software to become a problem, other than for Palm who had apps, but stumbled in all kinds of other ways, not least in never shaking the image as a serious PDA, which instantly made it a niche product. The devices were hampered by all kinds of hardware limitations. Screens were awful. The touch panels were awful. Even really expensive devices felt like toys because of it. CPUs were awfully slow. Lack of wifi was a big issue with the first generation tablets and solved in all kinds of awful ways. Flash was ludicrously expensive - we agonised over 16MB vs. 32MB storage. We used NanoX [1] rather than X11 for our windowing system because the engineering cost of adapting NanoX and writing our own widgets for it was worth it to save a few MB of flash and a few MB of RAM. And so getting distributors and retailers and the like to commit crashed and burned before you got to the point of what software you could launch it with. [1] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows

grilledcheez 5y ago

It seems web pages loaded at least as quickly in 1998 as in 2021

darknavi 5y ago
I was about to say it looked like they loaded much faster. I can't believe the bloat some websites have now.

vidarh 5y ago

In '98-'99 I was working on this one: https://metalab.at/wiki/Freepad https://metalab.at/wiki/Freepad While it's sad, one of my biggest lessons from it was that the greatest genius with the iPhone and iPad was understanding the market. Showing our tablet to techies worked great. People were excited about the hardware, about the fact it ran Linux, about it running Opera, and in general geeked out over it. But it was tethered to your house - few places had more than 9600 bps GSM data, so it used a DECT extension (wifi was not well established) to provide an internet connection tied to your house. And it had a crappy resistive touch screen. Low resolution. Too slow CPU. Too little RAM. Too little flash. Imagine a slow, heavy tablet with low resolution and janky touch that you could take no further than your garden (if you were lucky). So what we use today superficially looks like more modern versions (that bezel size...) of things on offer back then. But really a lot of the time while they worked well as prototypes, we just didn't have the sense (or opportunity) to say "the time isn't right for this product yet, let's pick it up again when x,y,z has happened."

buescher 5y ago
I remember the guys from ViA Inc (not the same Via as the processors) with their tablets tethered to their wearable belt computer. They'd carry the tablet in a thigh holster.
ska 5y ago
> greatest genius [...] was understanding the market. So many people doing product development work of one sort or another fail to understand this to their detriment. You have to screw up the engineering for it to kill a product; a mediocre implementation is often times just fine, especially if you are early. But if you are building the wrong thing, no amount of implementation talent can save you.
mc32 5y ago
For me what catapulted the iPhone over its competitors (Palm, BB and WinCE phones) was it was phone + music player + GPS and you had an app store in a sleek package (no stubby antenna or big bezels) From this I think the issue is vertical integration to produce a seamless product. In this sense, at the time, maybe Microsoft had some ideas but abandoned them before they were ready (Courier).

gmiller123456 5y ago

It's really just a laptop without a keyboard, not really that groundbreaking. The inflation calculator puts the advertised price at almost $1000 today. So, probably the only reason it was "coming soon" was there wasn't much of a market. It's a bit disingenuous to pretend that "what we use today" is the same thing. Today you can get the same functionality for about $100, only with modern specs. Something of equivalent specs could likely be gotten for free in a landfill.

compiler-guy 5y ago
It might be incorrect, but it isn’t disingenuous. No one is trying to lie or hide or be insincere.

Gravityloss 5y ago

Newspad, envisioned in 1968: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529

whizzwr 5y ago

>there is even a .com button, so you don't have to type it out. 1998? Magnificent.

raffraffraff 5y ago

"Dictate. Where is the toilet, question mark. Where is the toilet, question mark. Let try that again. Where is the toilet, question mark" It's amazing that the webpad was due to launch the same year that The Matrix was in theatres.

marwis 5y ago

Websites loaded so fast back then!