Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If this quote is from September 1969... The movie 2001 was released in late spring 1968. In it the astronauts are using a color tablet computer laying on a table, no thicker than a modern iPad, to watch video.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/did-st...

View on HN

Those working in the industry often know what's coming. What they often get wrong is how it's economically deployed, when it arrives, or what effects it will have.

E.g. the first articles on capacitive touch screens dates to the 50's, and the "flat-panel" Aiken tube display dates to the early 50's as well:

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

Article on the Aiken tube from 1958 with pictures that predicts future models may be flat enough to "hang like picture frames":

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r98DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA104&re...

Seing the potential of going from normal TVs to that, it's certainly not a big leap to assume they'll get even thinner and smaller.

That movie is very special. A lot of it’s predictions like flat LCD screens, personal IFE on airplanes, iPads, and kids messing around on FaceTime are so mundane now it’s easy to overlook them when watching the film with a 21st century set of eyes

Yet its central “prediction”: that human travel into space would progress forward at a comparable rate to what was accomplished in the early 60s, was wildly off.

As was pointed out in an earlier comment, 2001 really only got the economics of space travel wrong. It's possible that we could have done it, technologically speaking, but that it just would have been a huge waste of capital.

And also after the Mother of All Demos in December 1968.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com