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I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet wa

by vidarh 3y ago

I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious". But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new. Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the iPhone came. A lot of us dismissed them at first because we'd seen that fad come and go, without realising that the genius of Apple with respect to those devices was not in the technical innovation, but in recognising when enough percent-point improvements had been made to unlock something that'd actually appeal to the general public. "Our" tablet was tethered to a custom DECT base station (wifi wasn't widespread yet), had about 2 hours of battery. The resistive touch was awful, the screen resolution was small, and I had to cram Linux and the GUI, with space left over for a port of Opera, in to 16MB of flash and 16MB RAM in the original prototype... In retrospect it had no chance in hell. But to a geek like me it was amazingly cool. Other tablets and pda's with or without network and phone of that era were either attempts at slimming down laptops (e.g. I had a laptop with a touch screen on a swivel back then) that were still way too big, or they were devices like ours, with all sorts of limitations that geeks were fine with, and regular people weren't. So when these devices disappeared one after the other, many of us dismissed the concept as a whole as tried and failed, rather than realise that the problem was one of enough percent-point improvements and not the concept. And for all of the many issues I have with Apple, while they were not first, they still deserve plenty of credit for simply being smart enough to recognise when the time was right for this category of devices. Because a whole lot of companies got that timing extremely wrong.

fragmede 3y ago
I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Being usable was largely about timing, though. None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance. Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues. There were no good, cheap enough touch screens, or displays, or cheap enough RAM, or cheap enough flash, to deliver what they did later at that time at any price, much less affordable enough. Timing it when the available components were good enough and cheap enough was how they got it usable and affordable. Trying too early and drawing the wrong conclusions was also why a lot of their competitors had moved onto a very different track in terms of design. If you e.g. look at Palm devices that started to get network connectivity etc., from ~2000, you'll see the grid of (user-installable) apps w/touch and no keyboard, and Blackberry-like devices w/keyboard "won" for a while because people took users rejection of crappy, limited resistive touch as a rejection of touch. (I walked around with a Palm device for several years from '98 or so, and couldn't understand why "normal people" rejected them - it felt like scifi) [EDIT: UMPC was from 2006; and not the type of devices I'm talking about - they're a couple of generations of hardware later; the UMPC if anything were part of that bastardization of the earlier touch focused devices as manufacturers declared the "cleaner" devices dead and buried in the market place without understanding why]
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    > Being usable was largely about timing, though. Most breakthrough inventions, in areas where people fumbled for years or decades, could have been released long before with earlier insight. Maybe not as advanced, but if the right things were done right they still would have been a win. Many of those "right things" were more practicality, psychological, or fit for market, not just waiting around to jump the moment the "right" tech component arrived. Breakthrough products also tend to take competitors by surprise. If the breakthrough product didn't happen, it could be years before any other team comes together with the same focus and insights. So timing a little bit. The vision is important, but often was a common dream. The real rare resources are a very clear vision, stable highly supportive management, a densely talented team, and an intensely iterative focus, and a willingness to go deep and get previously unavailable specialized components made. Somehow "timing" always follows those last resources.
alpaca128 3y ago
I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers. Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The touch certainly was a big issue. I think gestures would've been less of an issue vs. getting decent capacitative touch instead of those horrible resistive screens. This is the one I worked on then: https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swedens-screen-phone-a/ https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed... The screenshots you see are real (the phone dialler even has the name of one of the employees up...). The GUI was NanoX, which is still around (and despite the name it's not an X11 server, but has partial X11 source-level compatibility; we built our own toolkit for it). And even that, of course, was a testament to the limitations - we picked NanoX and writing our own toolkit not because we wanted to but because fitting an actual X11 server cost too much in terms of extra RAM and flash. It added many months of engineering. Fun months, but time that'd have been better spent on more applications. I still love that project, but the hardware limitations gimped it so painfully.

by vidarh 3y ago

fragmede 3y ago

I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.

vidarh 3y ago
Being usable was largely about timing, though. None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance. Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues. There were no good, cheap enough touch screens, or displays, or cheap enough RAM, or cheap enough flash, to deliver what they did later at that time at any price, much less affordable enough. Timing it when the available components were good enough and cheap enough was how they got it usable and affordable. Trying too early and drawing the wrong conclusions was also why a lot of their competitors had moved onto a very different track in terms of design. If you e.g. look at Palm devices that started to get network connectivity etc., from ~2000, you'll see the grid of (user-installable) apps w/touch and no keyboard, and Blackberry-like devices w/keyboard "won" for a while because people took users rejection of crappy, limited resistive touch as a rejection of touch. (I walked around with a Palm device for several years from '98 or so, and couldn't understand why "normal people" rejected them - it felt like scifi) [EDIT: UMPC was from 2006; and not the type of devices I'm talking about - they're a couple of generations of hardware later; the UMPC if anything were part of that bastardization of the earlier touch focused devices as manufacturers declared the "cleaner" devices dead and buried in the market place without understanding why]
- Nevermark 3y ago
  > Being usable was largely about timing, though. Most breakthrough inventions, in areas where people fumbled for years or decades, could have been released long before with earlier insight. Maybe not as advanced, but if the right things were done right they still would have been a win. Many of those "right things" were more practicality, psychological, or fit for market, not just waiting around to jump the moment the "right" tech component arrived. Breakthrough products also tend to take competitors by surprise. If the breakthrough product didn't happen, it could be years before any other team comes together with the same focus and insights. So timing a little bit. The vision is important, but often was a common dream. The real rare resources are a very clear vision, stable highly supportive management, a densely talented team, and an intensely iterative focus, and a willingness to go deep and get previously unavailable specialized components made. Somehow "timing" always follows those last resources.

alpaca128 3y ago

I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers. Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.

vidarh 3y ago
The touch certainly was a big issue. I think gestures would've been less of an issue vs. getting decent capacitative touch instead of those horrible resistive screens. This is the one I worked on then: https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swedens-screen-phone-a/ https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed... The screenshots you see are real (the phone dialler even has the name of one of the employees up...). The GUI was NanoX, which is still around (and despite the name it's not an X11 server, but has partial X11 source-level compatibility; we built our own toolkit for it). And even that, of course, was a testament to the limitations - we picked NanoX and writing our own toolkit not because we wanted to but because fitting an actual X11 server cost too much in terms of extra RAM and flash. It added many months of engineering. Fun months, but time that'd have been better spent on more applications. I still love that project, but the hardware limitations gimped it so painfully.