Predictions of the Future From the 1960s | Hacker News Reader

Predictions of the Future From the 1960s

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19 pointskkleiner12 comments

There was a short story written in 1968 that I read when I was a kid, and even though the world described in it was utterly alien, its details stuck in my memory. As time went on, whenever a new technology was introduced into every day life, I would get the strangest sense of recognition. In any case, this discussion has triggered my memory, and I was able to find the original story online. Rereading it 20 years since, I recognize the underlying premise as pretty naive and laughable, but I still marvel at how many details the author was able to get right writing this piece 45 years ago:

http://www.univeros.com/usenet/cache/alt.binaries.ebooks/10....

The democratization of technology has rapidly brought it to the masses in the past two decades. Information is much more easily available and for the most part free. I couldn't imagine trying to predict what is going to happen in the next 50 let alone 10 years. Just like the iPhone several years ago surely the next disruptive technology will come out of left field.

Is the iPhone really an amazing new discovery that came out of nowhere?

I see it more as the result of inevitable cost reductions in recent technology (fast/low power CPUs, capacitive screens, better LCDs, higher density batteries/flash/RAM)...combined with a willingness to tell the phone carriers to suck it and do a phone the way Apple wanted to do it.

hah, technologies always seem obvious after they are created! Certainly an iphone like device was eventually inevitable - most inventions are. But Apple introduced it with a speed and quality that the rest of the industry would likely have taken many years, perhaps even a decade to innovate without Apple leading the way.

It's true, I can't think of any big technology breakthroughs that weren't widely predicted by futurists for many years in advance. The trick is predicting which ideas will be realized and how exactly it will happen.

Ever since the first Palm PDA came out, it was obvious that the iPhone was going to happen. I was drooling for something like it back in '98 ... '99, or whenever it was that I bought my first Palm. I was like, "okay, now let's combine this with a cell phone, and add more CPU, and more memory, and a color screen, and..."

Alas, it was not to be, yet. But then it did happen.

Well, you can go back farther to Alan Kay's Dynabook (1968) to predict the iPhone. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook)

Even Jobs has wanted to make a Dynabook from the early days (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt).

There was also the crew from UIUC that won Apple's "Design the Computer of the Year 2000" back in 1987. Their design? A tablet.

> the crew from UIUC that won Apple's "Design the Computer of the Year 2000" back in 1987. Their design? A tablet.

Star Trek TNG also featured imagined tablets, and they started out roughly around the same time. The design just makes sense, it's natural.

Hardware-wise, yeah, all of the components were easily predictable.

But I'd wager the vast majority of people would have still expected a new device using those components to have software full of "computery" things such as scroll bars (probably operated via a stylus) and a task manager instead of the iPhone OS's fluid, natural, free-of-computer-administrative-debris interface.

That's what made the iPhone appeal to people who would have never even considered any other smartphone that was available before it and that's what seemed to come out of nowhere.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, I agree with you that the touch interface is probably the largest leap technologically that the iPhone presented to the market.

Modal interface, nothing that needed a stylus, intelligent button centering, usable gestures. It all added up to a very usable package. The stylus-based phones were just so unusable to me.

I wonder if the global cooling predictions of the 1960s and 1970s should be mentioned.

I see no evidence that we're any better now at predicting the climate long term. There are still people saying we're on the cusp of another ice age, and others saying we're in out-of-control warming.

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