6 ms·

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet and PC (1974)

127 points by zeeshanm 12y ago

psgbg 12y ago
Relevant: The Oracle: We can never see past the choices we don't understand.
StandardFuture 12y ago
He also predicts that the entire workforce will become purely remote workers (telecommuters). While this is technically possible, it has met quite the opposition (and lack of proper tooling to make it as efficient and effective as it needs to be). Of course, maybe that is the idealist view. The realist view is that it will only lead to easier outsourcing? :p
- sjwright 12y ago
  > He also predicts that the entire workforce will become purely remote workers Did he make that statement elsewhere? In this video he just said "it would make it possible to live anywhere we like. Any businessman or executive could live almost anywhere on earth and still do his business". That's largely true today.
  - stephenc_c_ 12y ago
    It's possible, yet we still see the majority of jobs in cities where people either have to live or commute to - at the expense of time and money. And funnily enough, Silicon Valley, part of the industry that makes it possible to work remotely is highly localised.
  - StandardFuture 12y ago
    He explicitly says that we would not have to live in cities, etc. Remote work was exactly what he was implying. He does not have to use that exact phrase.
BrindsleyQuives 12y ago
He's a bit late isn't he? Both have existed for years.... Mind you, he has been dead quite a while, so he's likely a bit out of touch.
Quai 12y ago
Isn't it a bit late to predict that NOW!?.. :P I really enjoyed books like "Rendezvous with Rama". It isn't often that books written about the future in the 70's still are as mesmerizing today.
skuunk1 12y ago
I wonder where the interviewer's son Jonathan is now and what his thoughts are?
thisjepisje 12y ago
THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster (1909) http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- jacobsimon 12y ago
  Seconded. This is such an awesome short story. Forster isn't remembered as a prolific sci-fi author, but this story does a great job of predicting the problems of modern technology.
zacfinger 12y ago
Prescient. However the earliest accurate prediction of the Internet and personal computing I've yet come across is still Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm
- theoh 12y ago
  How about Paul Valery in around 1900: "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign." Sure, it doesn't use the language and notion of the computer, but how important is computing per se to 95% of Internet users?
  - theoh 12y ago
    I'm sorry to say that I have discovered that this first appeared in an essay, The Conquest of Ubiquity, published in 1928. So, not quite as amazing as I thought. Walter Benjamin didn't identify the precise source when he quoted it.
ekianjo 12y ago
It's a nice video but this was in 1974, not THAT long ago despite the fact it's in black and white. Let's not forget that a lot of people actively try to achieve things that take longer than they expect to come to market, so it's not completely surprising someone back then had a clear vision of what could the future be like (and happened to be right. But for each good prediction there's a 100 out there which were wrong, so let's not forget that).
blazespin 12y ago
Yeah, Arthur C Clark had some doozies. The bio-engineered monkeys as servants was a good one. :) http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predicts-future-1964 http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predict...
wfn 12y ago
It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world. In the same way any kind of picture, drawing, or print can be transferred from on place to another. It will be possible to operate millions of such instruments from a single station. Thus it will be a simple matter to keep the uttermost parts of the world in instant tough with each other. The song of a great singer, the speech of a political leader, the sermon of a great divine, the lecture of a man of science may thus be delivered to an audience scattered all over the world. - Tesla, 1909 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq=tesla&pg=PA476&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq... http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3.jpg http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3.... He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it.
- Osmium 12y ago
  > The song of a great singer, the speech of a political leader, the sermon of a great divine, the lecture of a man of science may thus be delivered to an audience scattered all over the world. "...and videos of cats." I find it endearing that our visions of the future always see the best (or worst) of humanity, but never the mundane or banal. > He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it. I had a search. Maybe this one? "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm though I think that's actually one of the less interesting things to be found in that interview... Tesla really was quite the interesting person, it seems.
doomlaser 12y ago
This is from 1974. It's worth noting that by 1974, the TCP/IP spec was already written, what many consider the first PC (the Altair 8800) was out, and ARPANet had been around for years, with transatlantic nodes already in existence.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > what many consider the first PC (the Altair 8800) was out There's a good case to be made that the first personal computer was introduced in 1971, and had actually ceased production in 1973: http://www.kenbak-1.net/ http://www.kenbak-1.net/ The Altair 8800 is more important as a predecessor on the main line of microcomputer development, but the basic idea of a computer a single individual human being who wasn't massively wealthy could own was actually, to some small extent, achieved a few years before anything that would evolve into the rest of the microcomputer line was in existence. (To be technical, the Kenbak-1 can't be in the microcomputer line because it wasn't a microcomputer, because its CPU was built out of discrete components as opposed to having been a microprocessor.)
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Seems to me that the computers that come and then fade again have one thing in common, limited expandability. The Altair 8800 brought with it the S-100 bus. And you find a similar bus (ISA) on the early IBM PC. both of these meant that a single "core structure" could be made to do multiple things.
  - KC8ZKF 12y ago
    The Altair took advantage of the recent microprocessor, which was the real innovation AFIC.
- vidarh 12y ago
  And Alay Kays Dynabook proposal [1] was written in 1972, based on work dating back to the late 60's. There's the interesting question of what developments Clarke were aware of at the time, but yes, multiple people were envisioning these things back then. Many of them were also extrapolating from Vannevar Bush's Memex, as described in As We May Think, in the Atlantic in 1945 [2] taking account the intervening advances in technology. [1] http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...
sparkzilla 12y ago
I interviewed Clarke in Sri Lanka in 2003 and asked him what he predicted for the future. He pointed to a bookcase full of his books. Then he told me a joke: http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-mark-a-joke/ http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-...
- playhard 12y ago
  Thanks for sharing. The joke was really funny!
BorisMelnik 12y ago
Crazy - not only predicted the internet and the PC but nailed the commerce portion of it as well almost down to a T.
aaroninsf 12y ago
...but Robert Heinlein predicted why or rather how the web would work on us. In 'Friday,' he gets wrong that it will be a system with metered, limited access... ...but (to my mind, remarkably) predicts that multimedia-enabled hypertext will lead to associative impulsive serendipitous browsing, not structured intentional behavior. The one scene in which the eponymous character interacts with the network is given primarily to a discussion of her own digression into subjects far afield from her nominal research topic. ...he also predicts that this might provide surprising value. RIP RAL!
- dalke 12y ago
  He also described it as a hierarchical system: Set your terminal to "research." Punch parameters in succession "North American culture," "English-speaking," "mid-twentieth century," "comedians,", "the World's Greatest Authority." The answer you can expect is "Professor Irwin Corey." You'll find his routines timeless humor. Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm. In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  I guess it comes down to how one consider "metered". Seems the various carriers and ISPs have discovered that they earn more by offering package deals, because the customer is likely to overshoot on the package to avoid the overcharge fees. But in many places net access was/is metered, by virtue of it being done over the metered phone network. For me the biggest deal with DSL and later was that the metering of dial-up went away (tho at least one ISP tried to introduce a stair step payment system).
nbevans 12y ago
He also predicted in this video "digital nomadism" when he mentions about being able to live anywhere in the world and still work. Yeah, I'm British but I'm posting this from Singapore. #yolo
pwr22 12y ago
> Computer dependent society Yep!
mcv 12y ago
To be accurate, he predicted not the PC and the internet in this clip, but having a terminal (console) at home that connects to a computer somewhere else. My dad had that in the late 1970s: a big (printer) terminal that connected by 300 baud modem to his office.
- efaref 12y ago
  Most people only really use their computer as a terminal to connect (via HTTP) to a computer somewhere else (facebook.com).
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Computing seems to be about reinventing the old in a more glossy exterior every other generation or so. The "cloud" seems to be a new go at the virtualization uses that has been done on mainframes since the 70s. One may go as far as to say that the cluster rack is the mainframe v2.
Zuider 12y ago
Clarke also predicted genetically engineered chimpanzee slaves, the 'Superchimp' (or 'Simp' for short). Leaving aside the ethical issues this raises, it indicates that he thought that it was more likely that such a creature would be created than intelligent robots. http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/ http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/

127 points by zeeshanm 12y ago

psgbg 12y ago

Relevant: The Oracle: We can never see past the choices we don't understand.

He also predicts that the entire workforce will become purely remote workers (telecommuters). While this is technically possible, it has met quite the opposition (and lack of proper tooling to make it as efficient and effective as it needs to be). Of course, maybe that is the idealist view. The realist view is that it will only lead to easier outsourcing? :p

sjwright 12y ago
> He also predicts that the entire workforce will become purely remote workers Did he make that statement elsewhere? In this video he just said "it would make it possible to live anywhere we like. Any businessman or executive could live almost anywhere on earth and still do his business". That's largely true today.
- stephenc_c_ 12y ago
  It's possible, yet we still see the majority of jobs in cities where people either have to live or commute to - at the expense of time and money. And funnily enough, Silicon Valley, part of the industry that makes it possible to work remotely is highly localised.
- StandardFuture 12y ago
  He explicitly says that we would not have to live in cities, etc. Remote work was exactly what he was implying. He does not have to use that exact phrase.

BrindsleyQuives 12y ago

He's a bit late isn't he? Both have existed for years.... Mind you, he has been dead quite a while, so he's likely a bit out of touch.

Quai 12y ago

Isn't it a bit late to predict that NOW!?.. :P I really enjoyed books like "Rendezvous with Rama". It isn't often that books written about the future in the 70's still are as mesmerizing today.

skuunk1 12y ago

I wonder where the interviewer's son Jonathan is now and what his thoughts are?

thisjepisje 12y ago

THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster (1909) http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

jacobsimon 12y ago
Seconded. This is such an awesome short story. Forster isn't remembered as a prolific sci-fi author, but this story does a great job of predicting the problems of modern technology.

zacfinger 12y ago

Prescient. However the earliest accurate prediction of the Internet and personal computing I've yet come across is still Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

theoh 12y ago
How about Paul Valery in around 1900: "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign." Sure, it doesn't use the language and notion of the computer, but how important is computing per se to 95% of Internet users?
- theoh 12y ago
  I'm sorry to say that I have discovered that this first appeared in an essay, The Conquest of Ubiquity, published in 1928. So, not quite as amazing as I thought. Walter Benjamin didn't identify the precise source when he quoted it.

ekianjo 12y ago

It's a nice video but this was in 1974, not THAT long ago despite the fact it's in black and white. Let's not forget that a lot of people actively try to achieve things that take longer than they expect to come to market, so it's not completely surprising someone back then had a clear vision of what could the future be like (and happened to be right. But for each good prediction there's a 100 out there which were wrong, so let's not forget that).

blazespin 12y ago

Yeah, Arthur C Clark had some doozies. The bio-engineered monkeys as servants was a good one. :) http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predicts-future-1964 http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predict...

wfn 12y ago

It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world. In the same way any kind of picture, drawing, or print can be transferred from on place to another. It will be possible to operate millions of such instruments from a single station. Thus it will be a simple matter to keep the uttermost parts of the world in instant tough with each other. The song of a great singer, the speech of a political leader, the sermon of a great divine, the lecture of a man of science may thus be delivered to an audience scattered all over the world. - Tesla, 1909 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq=tesla&pg=PA476&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq... http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3.jpg http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3.... He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it.

Osmium 12y ago
> The song of a great singer, the speech of a political leader, the sermon of a great divine, the lecture of a man of science may thus be delivered to an audience scattered all over the world. "...and videos of cats." I find it endearing that our visions of the future always see the best (or worst) of humanity, but never the mundane or banal. > He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it. I had a search. Maybe this one? "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm though I think that's actually one of the less interesting things to be found in that interview... Tesla really was quite the interesting person, it seems.

doomlaser 12y ago

This is from 1974. It's worth noting that by 1974, the TCP/IP spec was already written, what many consider the first PC (the Altair 8800) was out, and ARPANet had been around for years, with transatlantic nodes already in existence.

cbd1984 12y ago
> what many consider the first PC (the Altair 8800) was out There's a good case to be made that the first personal computer was introduced in 1971, and had actually ceased production in 1973: http://www.kenbak-1.net/ http://www.kenbak-1.net/ The Altair 8800 is more important as a predecessor on the main line of microcomputer development, but the basic idea of a computer a single individual human being who wasn't massively wealthy could own was actually, to some small extent, achieved a few years before anything that would evolve into the rest of the microcomputer line was in existence. (To be technical, the Kenbak-1 can't be in the microcomputer line because it wasn't a microcomputer, because its CPU was built out of discrete components as opposed to having been a microprocessor.)
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Seems to me that the computers that come and then fade again have one thing in common, limited expandability. The Altair 8800 brought with it the S-100 bus. And you find a similar bus (ISA) on the early IBM PC. both of these meant that a single "core structure" could be made to do multiple things.
- KC8ZKF 12y ago
  The Altair took advantage of the recent microprocessor, which was the real innovation AFIC.
vidarh 12y ago
And Alay Kays Dynabook proposal [1] was written in 1972, based on work dating back to the late 60's. There's the interesting question of what developments Clarke were aware of at the time, but yes, multiple people were envisioning these things back then. Many of them were also extrapolating from Vannevar Bush's Memex, as described in As We May Think, in the Atlantic in 1945 [2] taking account the intervening advances in technology. [1] http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

sparkzilla 12y ago

I interviewed Clarke in Sri Lanka in 2003 and asked him what he predicted for the future. He pointed to a bookcase full of his books. Then he told me a joke: http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-mark-a-joke/ http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-...

playhard 12y ago
Thanks for sharing. The joke was really funny!

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Crazy - not only predicted the internet and the PC but nailed the commerce portion of it as well almost down to a T.

aaroninsf 12y ago

...but Robert Heinlein predicted why or rather how the web would work on us. In 'Friday,' he gets wrong that it will be a system with metered, limited access... ...but (to my mind, remarkably) predicts that multimedia-enabled hypertext will lead to associative impulsive serendipitous browsing, not structured intentional behavior. The one scene in which the eponymous character interacts with the network is given primarily to a discussion of her own digression into subjects far afield from her nominal research topic. ...he also predicts that this might provide surprising value. RIP RAL!

dalke 12y ago
He also described it as a hierarchical system: Set your terminal to "research." Punch parameters in succession "North American culture," "English-speaking," "mid-twentieth century," "comedians,", "the World's Greatest Authority." The answer you can expect is "Professor Irwin Corey." You'll find his routines timeless humor. Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm. In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.
digi_owl 12y ago
I guess it comes down to how one consider "metered". Seems the various carriers and ISPs have discovered that they earn more by offering package deals, because the customer is likely to overshoot on the package to avoid the overcharge fees. But in many places net access was/is metered, by virtue of it being done over the metered phone network. For me the biggest deal with DSL and later was that the metering of dial-up went away (tho at least one ISP tried to introduce a stair step payment system).

nbevans 12y ago

He also predicted in this video "digital nomadism" when he mentions about being able to live anywhere in the world and still work. Yeah, I'm British but I'm posting this from Singapore. #yolo

pwr22 12y ago

> Computer dependent society Yep!

mcv 12y ago

To be accurate, he predicted not the PC and the internet in this clip, but having a terminal (console) at home that connects to a computer somewhere else. My dad had that in the late 1970s: a big (printer) terminal that connected by 300 baud modem to his office.

efaref 12y ago
Most people only really use their computer as a terminal to connect (via HTTP) to a computer somewhere else (facebook.com).
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Computing seems to be about reinventing the old in a more glossy exterior every other generation or so. The "cloud" seems to be a new go at the virtualization uses that has been done on mainframes since the 70s. One may go as far as to say that the cluster rack is the mainframe v2.

Zuider 12y ago

Clarke also predicted genetically engineered chimpanzee slaves, the 'Superchimp' (or 'Simp' for short). Leaving aside the ethical issues this raises, it indicates that he thought that it was more likely that such a creature would be created than intelligent robots. http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/ http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/