Fax on the beach: The audacious, visionary, calamitous iPad of the 90s

My takeaway here is that this just further proves the excruciating reality, that bringing new innovative technology to the market is inextricably incentivized to involve litigation, politics, infighting, backstabbing etc... in other words normal business practices in a highly competitive market. Competition for dollars just fundamentally makes this a reality.

I certainly wouldn't offer that there is any better system/process for this, but it remains disheartening for idealistic (some could say naiive) technologists that this is the case.

I think it's worth keeping that in mind when thinking through how to create the "next big thing", or even some next small things.

I posted earlier about the Momenta Pen Computer, which debuted in 1991, when "pen computing" was all the rage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492195

>In 1991 when "pen computing" was all the rage, a start-up company called "Momenta" came out with a "pentop" MS-DOS based pen computer with a pie-menu-like "command compass", whose user interface was done in Smalltalk.

>Remember that this was in 1991, the same year Go Corporation finally released PenPoint, and a year before the 1992 founding of Palm Computing (which took over the Pen market for many years) and the release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 in 1992 (the first version of Windows that wasn't intolerably irritating), and the release of Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992 (which was a big flop). So there was a huge amount of excitement around pen computing.

[...and more about how their founder confused Smalltalk with Lisp, plus links to photos, reference manual excerpts, and more info about the Momenta pen computer...]

I saw a presentation about Go and PenPoint in the early 90s, probably at a Usenix conference, and I was very impressed. I was sorry it never went anywhere.

My other PenPoint story comes from a business trip I took to Japan in 1994. One weekend, I went to a gay bar in Tokyo (GB, in Shinjuku) and met an American who was working for Go and was in Japan to work on Asian language input (which was an interesting problem). I mentioned that I had a friend who was working on Hobbit software and it turned out my friend and this guy had exchanged email the week before! Two American gay nerds meet in a bar in Tokyo and find they know another gay nerd in common. Crazy.

I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention General Magic for context. It's really crazy how much of this was invented and reinvented but the infrastructure and performance just wasn't there during the 90's in a way to support mass adoption. It was close enough to build something, but all of those somethings failed until WiFi, cell technology and Moore's law supported small enough gadgets. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend the documentary on General Magic. https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/

My roommate and I went to that COMDEX in 1992 specifically to see this device. When we got to the booth they wouldn’t let us in, so my roommate, thinking much more quickly than me, told the dude at the booth entrance that we were developers (in fact we were juniors in the BYU CS department). Our status immediately switched to “VIP” and we were escorted inside, handed a device, and left on our own to play with it for half an hour.

I thought I was seeing the future of computing.

Unfortunately, Microsoft was also at COMDEX, in force, with its “Pen Windows” product. Which was clunky and stupid and very clearly only meant to crush GO. And it was clear even then to me as a 20 year old that that strategy was going to work.

I was working for a chip startup in the early 90s - we moved into office space in Sunnyvale that had recently been vacated by the GO corp (I think) .... above my desk were dozens of pencils embedded in the ceiling tiles ... some poor soul sitting there as the company company was dying has sat there throwing them up until they stuck ... hopefully he or she retired with both eyes .... I removed them before they came down on their own

>> “They started with the iPhone, and went to the iPad,” Kaplan says, referring to Apple. “But we were starting with the iPad and moving to the iPhone.”

That’s not true, from a development side.

Jobs stated that the development of the iPad started before the iPhone.

(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576854,00....)

I worked there until very close to the end, and the collapse of GO/Eo provided me with a priceless instant network of friends at dozens of companies around the SF Bay Area.

I met my spouse and some of my best friends through GO/Eo, and to this day still greatly value the connections made there for my personal and professional networks. Silver linings.

> AT&T eventually took control of EO, which it bought in mid-1993, and GO, which it purchased outright in early 1994. These acquisitions created a confusing corporate structure.

Yeah, AT&T was on a buying binge at that time. I got hired there in late '93 and started in '94. In addition to GO, they also bought NCR and a few other things, I think. All of it fell apart within about 2-4 years when they spun off Lucent and NCR into separate companies. It was pretty much a mess!

Wouldn't the "iPad of the 90s" be, you know, the Newton MessagePad by Apple?

The article says nothing else used the Hobbit processor, but that is not true; the BeBox used the Hobbit processor.

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

Similar to that AT&T campaign, I was struck by the prescience of Qwest's "Ride the Light" commercials: "All rooms have every movie ever made, in any language, anytime, day or night." This was in 1999, when Netflix had barely started mailing DVDs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRX4s8C9518&t=38

> "We could have had the iPhone 10 years earlier, at least."

The fate of prototype techs is almost always to be remembered with these kind of wistful statements about how they could have been [market leader] except for [reasons].

These statements betray an ignorance about just how category-defining products come into being. Making even a moderately successful, let alone category-defining product is super hard and it's nowhere near enough to just have an idea, whether represented on a napkin, or in a demo video, or even in a tangible prototype. Ideas are cheap, even ideas that are rather prescient.

Making successful products also requires TIMING, LEVERAGE, and EXECUTION.

TIMING - build something too early and you waste capital fighting uphill against a market not ready for the idea. Product-market fit is not always possible for any given idea at the current moment in time. For tech, things like battery density, speed, screen tech, internet bandwidth, cost etc are critical to time correctly.

Example: Youtube and Netflix appropriately timed the cost of storage and internet bandwidth so they were ready to go when streaming was just becoming cost-effective, versus earlier efforts like Broadcast.com. It wasn't a leap to conclude video streaming was a good idea even in the 80s or 90s, but it needed to be timed.

Additionally, timing things culturally matters a ton. People need to be ready for an idea, to incorporate a new product into their life. The window of what's cool or acceptable is a moving target, what's uncool now may be cool in 5 years. It's often other interim products that shift this window.

Example: Google's launch of consumer-focused Google Glass and the immediate blowback that resulted.

Finally, pioneers get arrows in their backs. You reveal your grand ideas too early and you've just paid for a ton of concept development R&D that others can just pick off for free.

LEVERAGE - Ideas require business leverage to succeed in market. Things like brand leverage where you're already trusted in the market and have a history of delivering quality, the ability to scale manufacturing to meet demand, business relationships and scale to get access to special components or lower component costs, a well-oiled organization with deep talent bench, etc.

Example: The iPhone would not have been what it is without the iPod. Apple leveraged its talent, its history of manufacturing iPods, its suppliers, and its huge consumer appeal. It also used that to negotiate with AT&T to have complete control of the UX and to get unlimited data plans.

EXECUTION - Lots of high-concept ideas are lousy at the exact details and execution of the idea. Cool, you can send a fax from the beach, but under what conditions? Is fax even the right modality? Is the UX cumbersome, or require a laborious setup process? Its often the little things that separate market defining products from abject failures, even when they check the same boxes.

Example: Galaxy Fold is great high concept product that doesn't execute on its promise because its too fragile and creates a screen crease.

It's also possible to do a great job on details, but within the wrong constraints. You can be efficient (doing things right) but still not be effective (doing the right things). Specifically in the case of this 'iPad of the 90s', they didn't have the enabling technologies to make a great experience - things like fast refresh rates, multi-touch, beautiful screen, etc. They probably did a fantastic job with the pen, but the pen was the wrong constraint.

Basically the creators are severely downplaying the timing, leverage, and execution required to make products successful, and seem to think this cool but barely-launched concept could have been the most successful product on earth (iPhone). I doubt the team would have been able to produce anything more than a PalmPilot or Treo, both of which were OK products for their time, but ultimately are just mostly forgotten preludes to the product that DID define the category.

I wonder if the name is related to Captain EO[0]? Or the Greek Goddess of Dawn for whom Captain EO is named?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_EO

> Technically, you can now send a fax from the beach — but who’s doing that in the year 2020?

I would bet good money that quite a few people do that today, via services like HelloFax.

I love the skeuomorphic BVVVVVVV sounds it makes when you tap the screen with the pen to send a fax.

Navigation graphics is still so much worse than in that ad.

other prior but non mainstream commercial products are demonstrated in many Alan Kay talks (sketchpad and the other diagram/pcb cad tool I forgot the name of)

Great read but oh man is the typography awful on that site.

What is the 2020 version of "fax on the beach"?

Pre Randal Stephenson AT&T when they were still a tech company that, you know, actually liked tech.