7 ms·

What happened to the laptop computer? (1985)

147 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

chrisau 12y ago
Love this line: "Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Obviously it wasn't then, but we've certainly grafter ourselves to our smartphone keyboards now. So, it turned out the "microcomputer" industry was right. Just took 20 years longer.
drKarl 12y ago
Epic wrong predictions... like "640Kb of RAM will be enough for everyone"
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Except not so apocryphal.
rwc 12y ago
"On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper." Amusingly self-serving from the NYT.
- nl 12y ago
  I don't think it really occurred to most writers that a laptop was competition for newspapers back then.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    I don't think it occurred to writers that a portable computing device would be able to access news article in real time from multiple competing sources. It's not paper-vs-laptop that's the relevant competition, but NYT-vs-WaPo-vs-blogs-vs-... that's the relevant competition.
rayiner 12y ago
Not a great example of a wrong prediction, IMHO. People did never end up taking laptops fishing. Tablets, ebooks, and cell phones are fundamentally different things that address the key problems noted in the article (screens and keyboards). The thing about predictions that gets ignored in retrospect is that there are always implicit qualifiers, because it's not very interesting to hypothesize about the totally unconstrained future.
- uberalex 12y ago
  You're right. For me, it does point to the fact that most predictions are wrong at some point, right at some point, and irrelevant before and after. The things that was a laptop then (5kg beasts like this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000) were nothing like today's machines. The T1100 seems to have been the first close thing. It's impressive to think that it took 20 years from that article for notebooks to outsell pc. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sales-desktop-computers http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sa... also fun to see how net books are a focus of attention for that article. I wonder what level of accordance will be needed for a wearable to seriously compete with the current mode of computing.
  - RockyMcNuts 12y ago
    The TRS-80 model 100 had a bit of a following of the 1983 crop as I recall. Journalists could write a story and file it by modem. The luggable Compaq had some use cases but I think was sort of a novelty. The others of that generation didn't really take off. The Toshiba T1100, might have been announced in 1985 but I think came out later. I remember them as a new thing after I started my first job in late '86. So I could see laptops as something that had been hyped in '83 and by '85 still not ready for mainstream adoption. Those later Toshibas were usable for Lotus 1-2-3 and text-mode MS-Word. First Mac portable around '90 was still not ready for prime time. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100
mblevin 12y ago
Don't forget the author (Erik Sandberg-Diment) of that piece's FIRST comically wrong prediction about the imminent failure of Microsoft Windows (and general non-command line interfaces): http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing-is-questioned.html http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing... Before there was Paul Krugman writing "the internet is a fad" in the NYT, there was Erik Sandberg-Diment.
- p1mrx 12y ago
  Well he's not completely wrong. Displaying multiple windows is still possible today, but most people would prefer to interact with their computer using a tab-like model.
  - woah 12y ago
    With multiple desktops I almost never use windows. The only time I do is when I am forced to use drag and drop for something.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Actually, the author makes some really good points in the conclusion, "The windows could be individually expanded, of course, or the text in them scrolled, in order to see more. But that took considerably more time and effort than simply thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Windows were a great idea until you compared them with the old-fashioned, uncomputerized desk, at which point it became obvious that they were simply too complicated to be dealt with efficiently. They made life more difficult, not easier, and they will continue to do so until a video display the size of a desktop can make visible a number of complete documents, each in its own window. That is something unlikely to occur, if for no other reason than cost, for at least a decade." It's true, that windows really started to take off around 1993/1994, with windows for workgroups - coincident with higher resolution monitors. It's also true (to this day), that there are challenges with dealing with documents on a tablet/display screen, that don't exist when you have a sheaf of papers in front of you. I personally haven't printed anything in 2+ years, but I know there are a lot of people who just can't handle not having everything at their fingertip. All in all, no as bad a series of predictions as one might think.
resoluteteeth 12y ago
It's somewhat disorienting to read this, because it was increasingly wrong for such a long time and then in a strange way has bizarrely become almost right again in a limited sense. When connectivity and computers have become so ubiquitous, most people hardly find it necessary to lug a laptop onto the train to try to squeeze a few more minutes of keyboard-based work into their commute, and smartphones and tablets fill people's needs for general communication and entertainment so well. Even though travel is one situation where many people might find it necessary to bring a computer, it seems like laptop use on planes is way down, too.
- jon-wood 12y ago
  It's by no means the majority, but in any carriage on the commuter trains I ride there'll usually be two or three people on a laptop, generally with some Office application open.
ghaff 12y ago
This article popped up a few months ago too. The big problem at the time was price. PCs, including luggable ones, were pretty pricey by today's standards. The early laptops were even more do. You're probably talking $4K-$5K for a configured system in 1985 dollars. Early LCD screens were also pretty bad. Darker grey or grey. Or Plasma screens that cost more and had to run off AC. It's easy to make fun of predictions like these. More interesting to consider the reasons they were wrong.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  The article directly addresses the issue of price. I think it's really that most people weren't too interested in computers at the time. Even if you would get a laptop for $5 and everyone could have one, most people probably still wouldn't have regularly used one.
  - uberalex 12y ago
    Price is huge. 7,000 for something that doesn't even run the same software? And weighs 5+ kg? They did to some extent have that $5 option in in the form Of a few floppies in a brief case as the article points out.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email, especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win. I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 12y ago
30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer. And it can be a $300 machine or a $900 machine the size of a piece of paper with 10+ hours of battery life. Who could fathom a $4,000 laptop in this day and age, much less whatever that is in today's dollars. Back then there was no connectivity outside of modems, color screens were a luxury much less something with the power to run a GUI. The laptop industry went through so many changes and fads, even to the point of Canon building one with a built-in inkjet printer. It's amazing how far technology has come.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  > 30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer. You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop. It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN. I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work. The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks". But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.
  - leoc 12y ago
    Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.
VJth 12y ago
Not exactly wrong prediction though. It took so many years to get people carry laptops to fishing. What is important is that the author couldn't predict the advancement in Internet and Cloud computing which brought a whole new set of capabilites for laptop.
- visakanv 12y ago
  So the interesting problem/challenge is– there will always be advancements and shocks and changes that we can't predict, that will completely invalidate the assumptions that we build our predictions on. It might be helpful for prediction-makers to list all the assumptions we make when we're making predictions. I suppose the problem is that we always make more assumptions than we even realize.
AshleysBrain 12y ago
Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts: - the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years) - the price always comes down - "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.
- funkyy 12y ago
  >went on to succeed even the laptop Maybe if you are using your laptop/tablet just for casual games and checking Facebook/Email. As a person working on my laptop 6-8 hours a day I cant imagine how long it would take me to do the same on tablet. Tablet/Phone can be a support to Laptop, that's it.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Tablets and phones won't usurp the laptop until they become self-hosting. All classes between mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers and ultimately PCs underwent this vitally important cycle.
    - marvy 12y ago
      If I take my tablet and plug in a big screen and keyboard, is it self-hosting as long as the compiler is running on the device?
      - alextgordon 12y ago
        At that point you might as well just carry around a USB flash drive. The "computer" is the screen. People buy tablets and laptops because it's a portable screen (that incidentally has a computer inside). They want to be able to take their screen to a hotel room, airport, cafe, etc.
        deleted 12y ago
lvs 12y ago
It is at least nice to see someone holding to account the "futurists" and those who speak from armchairs and barstools and blogs (and newspapers) with unlimited certitude in their predictions of the future, if that's the purpose of the post. This was a somewhat pessimistic prediction, but the unbridled optimistic ones should be held with equal skepticism. What will and will not take hold in society is perhaps as much a matter of chance as of vision or wisdom or foresight.
copperx 12y ago
I believe that if the Internet had never become popular, the predictions would have been true.
visakanv 12y ago
It's always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston's "Show HN: Dropbox" thread has a famous "Why would anybody need this, I can do the same with <complicated procedure>" [3]. It's tempting to think, "Ah, people! So terrible at predicting things." I think it's interesting to think about why that is. The main problem, I think, isn't that people make wrong predictions altogether. It's that it's very hard to see how things will change and evolve over time, and how the ecosystem will change with it. The "One Laptop Per Child" idea [4] sounds a little dated and silly now. I suppose if we just remember that progress is continuous rather than discrete, and that a lot of seeming limitations can be overcome with currently-unlikely innovations, then a lot of predictions will be forced to be a lot more precise. Perhaps the Newsweek prediction might've been amended to, "In its present form, the Internet is unlikely to change the world." The problem with predictions is– things rarely stay in their present forms, and the world around them rarely stays the same, either. I think pg addresses this in his most recent essay, "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" [5] In his words– "they practically all seemed lame at first." So we have to learn to live in a world where our initially valid assessments of a thing might become rapidly invalid because of change. And this is where Nassim Taleb's work about the problem of prediction [6] comes into play. Rather than trying to predict a particular outcome, it makes much more sense to focus on evaluating robustness and antifragility– "How will this thing respond to change? What are the potential upsides, what are the potential downsides? What will kill it? What will give it more utility?" Even if the odds are really low that something might come around, if the payoff is high enough, it might be worth betting on. I think that's the whole point of things like YC. ___ [1] http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/#comments https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadg... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child [5] http://paulgraham.com/altair.html http://paulgraham.com/altair.html [6] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680 http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...
thought_alarm 12y ago
Somewhat related, here's a facinating look back at the portable computers used by field reporters in the 70s and 80s: http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html From the mid-70s to mid-80s the only option available to reporters out in the field was the Teleram P-1800, about which surprisingly little information is available. http://mccworkshop.com/computers/comphistory10.htm http://mccworkshop.com/computers/comphistory10.htm It was essentially a CPU-less serial terminal with modem, CRT screen, and 2 kB of RAM. It included a rudimentary word processor (with text search-and-replace) implemented entirely in TTL logic. 2 kB pages of text were saved to cassette before being transferred to the home office via 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. These rare and very expensive machines were eventually replaced by the small, simple, and inexpensive TRS-80 Model 100 portable. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 Instant power up, no disk or fans, MS-DOS and word processor in ROM, 32K of non-volatile RAM, 40x8 character LCD screen, serial I/O, and a full-sized, full stroke keyboard. It's interesting that it took us 25+ years to get back to that ideal portable form factor.
stevebot 12y ago
This is an amusing bit of opinion. It is always a risk to show an opinion for this very reason. At this moment, their are people siding one way or the other about tech bubbles, smartwatches, drones and self driving cars. 30 years from now it will be entertaining to see how it all ends up.
daurnimator 12y ago
Interesting that this article reflects my current views. I'd rather have a desktop at work and a desktop at home than lug around my laptop with me. It's also more cost effective: I just regrettably got a new laptop (dell m3800) which is far over $2000, when an equivalently powered desktop would be under $1000.
- marvy 12y ago
  Um, why did you get it? If you already regret it, why not return it for a refund?
  - daurnimator 12y ago
    Because starting this month I need to work from multiple locations; and one of them isn't secure enough to leave a desktop. I regret having a laptop at all (rather than the particular model I got)
    - marvy 12y ago
      Ah. That makes sense.
paul 12y ago
"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)
egypturnash 12y ago
Summary: laptops have come a long way since 1983, when they were barely functional. 1983! This is the year Commodore released what Wikipedia says was "the first full-color portable computer", the SX-64[1] - a Commodore 64 stuffed into the same box as a 5.24" drive and a tiny, tiny CRT. 23 pounds. I think my 15" Macbook Air probably weighs less than its keyboard. I don't take my Air fishing, but I regularly take it out to the park and sit out among birdsong and trees to get work done. We've come a long way. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64
- nekopa 12y ago
  Hah! I hopefully still own one of those. (I left it with a friend when I moved from the US to Europe 10 years ago, I really should look into how much it would cost to have it shipped here.) I could really be a super hipster if I could figure out a way to hook WiFi to it. Maybe a raspberry pi strapped to the side and hooked through the 232 port...
daedecai 12y ago
Favorite part: "The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Makes me think they knew something about work life balance that we don't.. or maybe it's just not work anymore but a way to live.
- ramidarigaz 12y ago
  The "sports or business section of the newspaper" is the internet these days...
  - platz 12y ago
    "Its not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We werent driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon....They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us." http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remark...
kenrikm 12y ago
Even those whose job it is to get these things right routinely don't. Example A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U I always wonder at what point it was that Balmer realized their strategy was a failure.
- sumedh 12y ago
  Using Ballmer to make your point is like cheating. He was not a tech guy, I guess that is one of the reason why MS went back to a techie like Satya.
CurtMonash 12y ago
His big miss was not to be more positive about the possibility that his technical objections would be obviated. He was right about salespeople being the first big corporate market -- that was behind the rise of Siebel Systems. He was right about widespread business use depending on people being happy (or happy enough) with the screens. He was right about widespread use depending on the price gap vs. desktops being not too high. His two mistakes were not foreseeing favorable answers to all those challenges, and not foreseeing the technology that made even handheld devices usable.
edward 12y ago
Previous discussion when this was posted 48 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767
frade33 12y ago
>Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized?
bastomi29 12y ago
http://agrowisata.livejournal.com/637.html http://agrowisata.livejournal.com/637.html
DonHopkins 12y ago
"I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing." He also couldn't imagine the average user spending hours of their day on a laptop simulating farming.
smoyer 12y ago
It might be a good thing if we remembered how to leave our computing devices behind on occasion ... I saw people texting during a wedding ceremony. Apparently they just couldn't wait, or maybe the bride and groom were boring them. Maybe they just came to instagram the food at the reception?

147 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

Love this line: "Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Obviously it wasn't then, but we've certainly grafter ourselves to our smartphone keyboards now. So, it turned out the "microcomputer" industry was right. Just took 20 years longer.

drKarl 12y ago

Epic wrong predictions... like "640Kb of RAM will be enough for everyone"

stormbrew 12y ago
Except not so apocryphal.

rwc 12y ago

"On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper." Amusingly self-serving from the NYT.

nl 12y ago
I don't think it really occurred to most writers that a laptop was competition for newspapers back then.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  I don't think it occurred to writers that a portable computing device would be able to access news article in real time from multiple competing sources. It's not paper-vs-laptop that's the relevant competition, but NYT-vs-WaPo-vs-blogs-vs-... that's the relevant competition.

rayiner 12y ago

Not a great example of a wrong prediction, IMHO. People did never end up taking laptops fishing. Tablets, ebooks, and cell phones are fundamentally different things that address the key problems noted in the article (screens and keyboards). The thing about predictions that gets ignored in retrospect is that there are always implicit qualifiers, because it's not very interesting to hypothesize about the totally unconstrained future.

uberalex 12y ago
You're right. For me, it does point to the fact that most predictions are wrong at some point, right at some point, and irrelevant before and after. The things that was a laptop then (5kg beasts like this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000) were nothing like today's machines. The T1100 seems to have been the first close thing. It's impressive to think that it took 20 years from that article for notebooks to outsell pc. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sales-desktop-computers http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sa... also fun to see how net books are a focus of attention for that article. I wonder what level of accordance will be needed for a wearable to seriously compete with the current mode of computing.
- RockyMcNuts 12y ago
  The TRS-80 model 100 had a bit of a following of the 1983 crop as I recall. Journalists could write a story and file it by modem. The luggable Compaq had some use cases but I think was sort of a novelty. The others of that generation didn't really take off. The Toshiba T1100, might have been announced in 1985 but I think came out later. I remember them as a new thing after I started my first job in late '86. So I could see laptops as something that had been hyped in '83 and by '85 still not ready for mainstream adoption. Those later Toshibas were usable for Lotus 1-2-3 and text-mode MS-Word. First Mac portable around '90 was still not ready for prime time. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100

mblevin 12y ago

Don't forget the author (Erik Sandberg-Diment) of that piece's FIRST comically wrong prediction about the imminent failure of Microsoft Windows (and general non-command line interfaces): http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing-is-questioned.html http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing... Before there was Paul Krugman writing "the internet is a fad" in the NYT, there was Erik Sandberg-Diment.

p1mrx 12y ago
Well he's not completely wrong. Displaying multiple windows is still possible today, but most people would prefer to interact with their computer using a tab-like model.
- woah 12y ago
  With multiple desktops I almost never use windows. The only time I do is when I am forced to use drag and drop for something.
ghshephard 12y ago
Actually, the author makes some really good points in the conclusion, "The windows could be individually expanded, of course, or the text in them scrolled, in order to see more. But that took considerably more time and effort than simply thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Windows were a great idea until you compared them with the old-fashioned, uncomputerized desk, at which point it became obvious that they were simply too complicated to be dealt with efficiently. They made life more difficult, not easier, and they will continue to do so until a video display the size of a desktop can make visible a number of complete documents, each in its own window. That is something unlikely to occur, if for no other reason than cost, for at least a decade." It's true, that windows really started to take off around 1993/1994, with windows for workgroups - coincident with higher resolution monitors. It's also true (to this day), that there are challenges with dealing with documents on a tablet/display screen, that don't exist when you have a sheaf of papers in front of you. I personally haven't printed anything in 2+ years, but I know there are a lot of people who just can't handle not having everything at their fingertip. All in all, no as bad a series of predictions as one might think.

resoluteteeth 12y ago

It's somewhat disorienting to read this, because it was increasingly wrong for such a long time and then in a strange way has bizarrely become almost right again in a limited sense. When connectivity and computers have become so ubiquitous, most people hardly find it necessary to lug a laptop onto the train to try to squeeze a few more minutes of keyboard-based work into their commute, and smartphones and tablets fill people's needs for general communication and entertainment so well. Even though travel is one situation where many people might find it necessary to bring a computer, it seems like laptop use on planes is way down, too.

jon-wood 12y ago
It's by no means the majority, but in any carriage on the commuter trains I ride there'll usually be two or three people on a laptop, generally with some Office application open.

ghaff 12y ago

This article popped up a few months ago too. The big problem at the time was price. PCs, including luggable ones, were pretty pricey by today's standards. The early laptops were even more do. You're probably talking $4K-$5K for a configured system in 1985 dollars. Early LCD screens were also pretty bad. Darker grey or grey. Or Plasma screens that cost more and had to run off AC. It's easy to make fun of predictions like these. More interesting to consider the reasons they were wrong.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
The article directly addresses the issue of price. I think it's really that most people weren't too interested in computers at the time. Even if you would get a laptop for $5 and everyone could have one, most people probably still wouldn't have regularly used one.
- uberalex 12y ago
  Price is huge. 7,000 for something that doesn't even run the same software? And weighs 5+ kg? They did to some extent have that $5 option in in the form Of a few floppies in a brief case as the article points out.
- ghaff 12y ago
  It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email, especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win. I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.

deleted 12y ago

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bluedino 12y ago

30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer. And it can be a $300 machine or a $900 machine the size of a piece of paper with 10+ hours of battery life. Who could fathom a $4,000 laptop in this day and age, much less whatever that is in today's dollars. Back then there was no connectivity outside of modems, color screens were a luxury much less something with the power to run a GUI. The laptop industry went through so many changes and fads, even to the point of Canon building one with a built-in inkjet printer. It's amazing how far technology has come.

nknighthb 12y ago
> 30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer. You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop. It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN. I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work. The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks". But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.
- leoc 12y ago
  Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.

VJth 12y ago

Not exactly wrong prediction though. It took so many years to get people carry laptops to fishing. What is important is that the author couldn't predict the advancement in Internet and Cloud computing which brought a whole new set of capabilites for laptop.

visakanv 12y ago
So the interesting problem/challenge is– there will always be advancements and shocks and changes that we can't predict, that will completely invalidate the assumptions that we build our predictions on. It might be helpful for prediction-makers to list all the assumptions we make when we're making predictions. I suppose the problem is that we always make more assumptions than we even realize.

AshleysBrain 12y ago

Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts: - the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years) - the price always comes down - "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.

funkyy 12y ago
>went on to succeed even the laptop Maybe if you are using your laptop/tablet just for casual games and checking Facebook/Email. As a person working on my laptop 6-8 hours a day I cant imagine how long it would take me to do the same on tablet. Tablet/Phone can be a support to Laptop, that's it.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Tablets and phones won't usurp the laptop until they become self-hosting. All classes between mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers and ultimately PCs underwent this vitally important cycle.
  - marvy 12y ago
    If I take my tablet and plug in a big screen and keyboard, is it self-hosting as long as the compiler is running on the device?
    - alextgordon 12y ago
      At that point you might as well just carry around a USB flash drive. The "computer" is the screen. People buy tablets and laptops because it's a portable screen (that incidentally has a computer inside). They want to be able to take their screen to a hotel room, airport, cafe, etc.
      - deleted 12y ago

lvs 12y ago

It is at least nice to see someone holding to account the "futurists" and those who speak from armchairs and barstools and blogs (and newspapers) with unlimited certitude in their predictions of the future, if that's the purpose of the post. This was a somewhat pessimistic prediction, but the unbridled optimistic ones should be held with equal skepticism. What will and will not take hold in society is perhaps as much a matter of chance as of vision or wisdom or foresight.

copperx 12y ago

I believe that if the Internet had never become popular, the predictions would have been true.

visakanv 12y ago

It's always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston's "Show HN: Dropbox" thread has a famous "Why would anybody need this, I can do the same with <complicated procedure>" [3]. It's tempting to think, "Ah, people! So terrible at predicting things." I think it's interesting to think about why that is. The main problem, I think, isn't that people make wrong predictions altogether. It's that it's very hard to see how things will change and evolve over time, and how the ecosystem will change with it. The "One Laptop Per Child" idea [4] sounds a little dated and silly now. I suppose if we just remember that progress is continuous rather than discrete, and that a lot of seeming limitations can be overcome with currently-unlikely innovations, then a lot of predictions will be forced to be a lot more precise. Perhaps the Newsweek prediction might've been amended to, "In its present form, the Internet is unlikely to change the world." The problem with predictions is– things rarely stay in their present forms, and the world around them rarely stays the same, either. I think pg addresses this in his most recent essay, "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" [5] In his words– "they practically all seemed lame at first." So we have to learn to live in a world where our initially valid assessments of a thing might become rapidly invalid because of change. And this is where Nassim Taleb's work about the problem of prediction [6] comes into play. Rather than trying to predict a particular outcome, it makes much more sense to focus on evaluating robustness and antifragility– "How will this thing respond to change? What are the potential upsides, what are the potential downsides? What will kill it? What will give it more utility?" Even if the odds are really low that something might come around, if the payoff is high enough, it might be worth betting on. I think that's the whole point of things like YC. ___ [1] http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/#comments https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadg... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child [5] http://paulgraham.com/altair.html http://paulgraham.com/altair.html [6] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680 http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...

thought_alarm 12y ago

Somewhat related, here's a facinating look back at the portable computers used by field reporters in the 70s and 80s: http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html From the mid-70s to mid-80s the only option available to reporters out in the field was the Teleram P-1800, about which surprisingly little information is available. http://mccworkshop.com/computers/comphistory10.htm http://mccworkshop.com/computers/comphistory10.htm It was essentially a CPU-less serial terminal with modem, CRT screen, and 2 kB of RAM. It included a rudimentary word processor (with text search-and-replace) implemented entirely in TTL logic. 2 kB pages of text were saved to cassette before being transferred to the home office via 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. These rare and very expensive machines were eventually replaced by the small, simple, and inexpensive TRS-80 Model 100 portable. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 Instant power up, no disk or fans, MS-DOS and word processor in ROM, 32K of non-volatile RAM, 40x8 character LCD screen, serial I/O, and a full-sized, full stroke keyboard. It's interesting that it took us 25+ years to get back to that ideal portable form factor.

stevebot 12y ago

This is an amusing bit of opinion. It is always a risk to show an opinion for this very reason. At this moment, their are people siding one way or the other about tech bubbles, smartwatches, drones and self driving cars. 30 years from now it will be entertaining to see how it all ends up.

daurnimator 12y ago

Interesting that this article reflects my current views. I'd rather have a desktop at work and a desktop at home than lug around my laptop with me. It's also more cost effective: I just regrettably got a new laptop (dell m3800) which is far over $2000, when an equivalently powered desktop would be under $1000.

marvy 12y ago
Um, why did you get it? If you already regret it, why not return it for a refund?
- daurnimator 12y ago
  Because starting this month I need to work from multiple locations; and one of them isn't secure enough to leave a desktop. I regret having a laptop at all (rather than the particular model I got)
  - marvy 12y ago
    Ah. That makes sense.

paul 12y ago

"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)

egypturnash 12y ago

Summary: laptops have come a long way since 1983, when they were barely functional. 1983! This is the year Commodore released what Wikipedia says was "the first full-color portable computer", the SX-64[1] - a Commodore 64 stuffed into the same box as a 5.24" drive and a tiny, tiny CRT. 23 pounds. I think my 15" Macbook Air probably weighs less than its keyboard. I don't take my Air fishing, but I regularly take it out to the park and sit out among birdsong and trees to get work done. We've come a long way. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64

nekopa 12y ago
Hah! I hopefully still own one of those. (I left it with a friend when I moved from the US to Europe 10 years ago, I really should look into how much it would cost to have it shipped here.) I could really be a super hipster if I could figure out a way to hook WiFi to it. Maybe a raspberry pi strapped to the side and hooked through the 232 port...

daedecai 12y ago

Favorite part: "The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so." Makes me think they knew something about work life balance that we don't.. or maybe it's just not work anymore but a way to live.

ramidarigaz 12y ago
The "sports or business section of the newspaper" is the internet these days...
- platz 12y ago
  "Its not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We werent driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon....They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us." http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remark...

kenrikm 12y ago

Even those whose job it is to get these things right routinely don't. Example A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U I always wonder at what point it was that Balmer realized their strategy was a failure.

sumedh 12y ago
Using Ballmer to make your point is like cheating. He was not a tech guy, I guess that is one of the reason why MS went back to a techie like Satya.

CurtMonash 12y ago

His big miss was not to be more positive about the possibility that his technical objections would be obviated. He was right about salespeople being the first big corporate market -- that was behind the rise of Siebel Systems. He was right about widespread business use depending on people being happy (or happy enough) with the screens. He was right about widespread use depending on the price gap vs. desktops being not too high. His two mistakes were not foreseeing favorable answers to all those challenges, and not foreseeing the technology that made even handheld devices usable.

edward 12y ago

Previous discussion when this was posted 48 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767

frade33 12y ago

>Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized?

bastomi29 12y ago

http://agrowisata.livejournal.com/637.html http://agrowisata.livejournal.com/637.html

DonHopkins 12y ago

"I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing." He also couldn't imagine the average user spending hours of their day on a laptop simulating farming.

smoyer 12y ago

It might be a good thing if we remembered how to leave our computing devices behind on occasion ... I saw people texting during a wedding ceremony. Apparently they just couldn't wait, or maybe the bride and groom were boring them. Maybe they just came to instagram the food at the reception?