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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Throughout history most technological improvements could not be predicted ahead of time. In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world. In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming.

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> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.

This this may be in danger of going into pedantic territory, I don't feel this is true at all. The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.

In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point.

I still remember a day in 1994 when I played Chess over the Internet with someone in South Africa - thinking that holy crap, the world we had been dreaming and talking about for 10 years finally was coming true.

Yeah. It was by no means an unexpected or even unanticipated thing. It wasn't hard to see coming.

"In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point."

Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

>> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.

> The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.

That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though.

(On a separate note - I'm curious, do you recall if they thought it was going to be "a network for anyone and everyone"?)

I remember when the web started becoming popular and that there was a lot of discussion about whether it would be passing fad, so it was far from obvious to a lot of people then.

>That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though.

Yes, but it's the same kind of "fairly small subset of people" that today would frequent a place like HN.

So if today's devs and engineers don't think there'll be much in smartphone innovation, then it's like people in BBS in the 80s not believing in a networked future.

In my memory of the internet becoming a thing in the early 90s, there was an intense fight over the commercialization of it. There was a group that really didn't want it to support money-making enterprises. Even at the time it seemed like a losing battle, but I doubt anyone foresaw just how overwhelming the commercial forces would be.

You have to account for selection/hindsight bias.

There were probably many more things predicted by various niche groups, just selectively looking at the few correct ones later does not mean that the overall prediction success ratio is high.

You're correct. The worldwide network was already assumed by 1990. The only question was whether or not it would become mainstream to muggles.

I gained internet access via my midwestern college in 1991. Within a few weeks, I was a regular on a MUD hosted somewhere in Bavaria, chatting (and arguing) with Israelis about middle eastern politics on newsgroups, and had (very slow) shell access on a system in Taipei thanks to a woman there I was flirting with. There was no question this was the future. The only question was: would this be limited to corporations, academia, and interested geeks? Or would this ever hit the general public? Considering the state of the interfaces in 1991, I vaugely remember I assumed it would be geek-only for a while, though I did my part in getting my non-technical friends online. Largely for the selfish reason of wanting them to have email so I didn't have to use the telephone as much.

> The only question was: would this be limited to corporations, academia, and interested geeks? Or would this ever hit the general public?

As a 14yo in 1994 I knew the internet was going to be huge the first time I the amount of porn that was already available.

I'd like to say this was some incredible insight into human nature but it really wasn't, I was around when VHS became popular (just) and remembered that the reason my father had wanted one had very little to do with the stated goal of "You can record your soaps when you are at work dear" and rather more to do with the VHS collection in the top drawer of the unit in my parents room.

I grew up reading Cyberpunk (the good and the bad) and I wanted the cyberspace from the books but I was willing to settle for 256 color boobs at 14.

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."

It's almost guaranteed that somewhere out there, the next big thing is incubating amongst a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next best thing. It's just that most of humanity thinks they're crazy geeks.

That's what it was like with the Internet. I got on it in 1994 and couldn't convince anyone else it was worth paying attention to. By 1995, gifted & talented enrichment programs were starting to suggest all their students check it out. By 1996, I could convince my parents to pay for it. By 1998 a bunch of our family friends were putting their life savings into dot-coms.

Maybe, I think the thing with that quote is that it's not always technology that is missing for things to get distributed. Technology, or affordable technology, has been missing for many things so far, but also organization. And I would say that the latter is increasingly the case, since technology is developing faster than we can make use of it. Last years smart phone processor is almost already obsolete, but it's a supercomputer for anything else.

I think the things that are going to get distributed in the next decade have already been invented and are just waiting to get organized. Much like the dotcom boom for that matter. Shopping online? So silly! People say that software is eating the world, but it's more like that software and the world is struggling to catch up with the opportunities provided by hardware.

I wish I could frame this comment in gold.

So let's make a list of all of the things that have a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next big thing. I can only think of two things:

* Bitcoin

* Self driving vehicles

Smart home. Virtual reality. Drones. Smartwatches (yes, some people still really like theirs). Rust. AI. IPFS. Federated wikis.

Probably others too. The scale that we're talking about is ~1000s of people, not millions. This doesn't even register in the news media - hell, HN probably has close to a few thousand people online at any given time, and there are 1000s of forums like Hacker News on the Internet.

Al Gore's apocryphal invention of the internet is based on a reality where he pushed to fund computing and networking initiatives throughout the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

One of the primary drivers of the various government bills was the notion that networks would be enormously beneficial economically.

People had a pretty clear idea that a global network would be a big deal.

>> In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.

But in 1965, when there was a viable path to scaling the technology, Moore predicted moore's law and personal computers being sold next to cosmetics: http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg...

>> whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people

Most people ? sure. But there are enough people to see a coarse vision of the future, or at least reasonable guesses.

And i can't help wonder if we have been coasting on Moore's law ever since. What is inside s smartphone today is not that different from what was inside a mainframe.

>In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all.

In the immediate future (e.g. in 2007 when the iPhone appeared) no. But everybody though mobile phones will ultimately be little computers -- even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones.

>* In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.*

And he was right. Though he never really said it, it was more of a misattribution of a quote by another, "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country."

Which, if you think of it, is how Cloud computing works. Sure, there are not 5 computers -- but a huge part of the internet traffic is from 5 services and their data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc).

>In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.

People expected and talked of such a thing since the 50s and communication satellites.

Heck, it was the main theme in books like Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement.

> even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones.

Actually, Windows Mobile was the market leader for a while after PalmOS development fell behind and people gave up on Palm. I had to do a market analysis once and there were a couple hundred different models of WM 5.x / 6.0 devices, if I recall correctly. (As an aside, Google really should have foreseen Android's eventual fragmentation problem since WM had it in spades a decade earlier.)

And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run.

So, not so crappy after all.

>And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run. So, not so crappy after all.

From the openness aspect no. From any aspect that actually matters while using a device, yes.

And i can't help wonder if we lost something in the transition.

Back then you had all manner of form factors.

HTC got big acting as the white box producer for a number of brands. And the range included devices with swivel hinge keyboards.

I think the capacitive touch screen has been more of a tradeoff that people want to admit.

> In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all.

Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think there was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.

anecdote but I still have and use an MP3 player. a smartphone is a poor replacement.

...because it's heavier? I can't think of any other conceivable way a smartphone is inferior to an MP3 player.

The battery life is worse, it's more awkward to transfer files, no tactile interface - can't change tracks without taking it out.

Yes the elimination of tactile hardware buttons is a perfect example of the end of innovation in smartphone hardware. The manufacturers have taken buttons away from us due to silly "design" principles, or to improve waterproofing. But I'd much prefer to have a few programmable buttons that I could use to change music tracks or answer a call or whatever purely by feel.

Speaking of hardware buttons, I still can't understand for the life of me why some phone manufacturers put the power button directly above the volume button (on the same edge of the phone). About a third of the time I want to turn the volume up I end up turning the phone off.

Funny thing it that buttons can be as water proof, if not more so, than a touch screen.

Nah, taking buttons away is mostly about keeping the SKUs down. As now they do not have to develop as many regional variants. Just slap another OSK together along with a barebones translation and call it a day.

Thanks for the reply. I don't know about more awkward to transfer files (maybe depends on the phone), but battery life and lack of hardware buttons definitely make sense.

there are smartphones with 10kmha, not sure what you mean for awkward file transfer, changing tracks depend on your pair of earphones and the app you use, a lot of apps allow controls through eg bluetooth earphones or simply the mic button on wired ones.

In 2005 everyone in the interaction design world knew phones were garbage. Remember scrolling through a 4-line screen?

I was in design school at the time and we did an exercise to redesign the phone and we ended up describing something almost exactly like the iPhone. It follows naturally from "mobile phones exist" + "laptops exist" + "interaction design makes things better".

It's just that Apple was the only company that really believed in all three of those things, and was willing to put billions of dollars behind getting it into production.

But to say it couldn't have been predicted was wrong. Conventional wisdom amongst business people at the time was that design doesn't matter, except to make your product pretty after it is specced. But the design community knew. We were just having a hard time convincing anyone to listen to us.

Do you remember that at the time most tech companies weren't even hiring interaction designers? You had to convince a company that they even needed you. "Why do we need you? The programmers write the code and the graphic designer makes it look good."

> I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming.

Ah! You're talking about global warming :)

Given that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activities[1], the surprise would be if it didn't happen.

[1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

You're definitely wrong about phones. In 2002-5, Palm was shipping a variety of Treos, which even at the time were clear early-adopter smartphones. Plenty of other companies were investigating the market and shipping early experiments.

The IBM quote has no apparent basis in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib...

And you're entirely wrong about 1990. Plenty of people thought there would be a global network. The WELL started in 1985, and plenty in that community had good notions about the future. The initial work on the Internet goes back to the 1970s, and many there too understood where it was going:

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...

So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions.

> So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions.

I always wonder if people predicting the future also thought that the internet would be so casually rude.

You're amply correct on all points, and GP wrong.

I'd point to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey for numerous aspects of technology, including talking computer interfaces, tablet computers, and voice communications.

Vannevar Bush, in the 1940s, and H.G. Wells, in the 1930s, were proposing systems markedly similar to contemporary Internet-based systems.

Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975) featured an all-in-one, solid-state, "Minisec", indistinguishable from a contemporary smartphone: pocket computer, communicator, video and audio recording device (along with ubiquitous appearances of people who were recording their entire lives with them, much to the annoyance of those about them).

Also a run-in with a global surveillance secretariat, of sorts.

There's "Ender's Game", the original novella (1977), which featured a Usenet (or Reddit)-like online communications forum ... used to manipulate global political discourse.

The one element missing from most early formulations of a universal global computer network were the commercialisation and advertising-oriented nature of these, as their primary means of monetisation and economic support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

1975

In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all.

Huh? It seemed pretty obvious to me in 2005 that phones (which were still getting more sophisticated) and handheld PCs would eventually merge. And this isn't bragging - it just seemed like the logical thing to happen.

Phones were changing more rapidly then than they are now..

> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later

The people that worked on it certainly had dreams about it. But those dreams might not necessarily have come true exactly.

And there are a lot of people out there dreaming about technologies that will never come true/or are still more far off than believed. Currently VR and autonomous cars are seen as the next big thing, however so were wearables like smartwatches.

The Thomas Watson quote (only a market for 5 computers) is a bit of an urban legend:

http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-wo...

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