Knight Ridder promo video from 1994 describes iPad-esque tablet device [video] | Hacker News Reader

Knight Ridder promo video from 1994 describes iPad-esque tablet device [video]

edibleapple.com

30 pointsoptiplex20 comments

That's a pretty interesting video and it's surprising to see how much carried on through newton, palm and so on to iPad.

As a completely unrelated aside, is it just me or was anyone else secretly hopping that ridder was a typo and that we were going to see something from Knight Rider?

Ill admit when I first read the title I thought oh yeah that car probably did have some iPad like thing in it haha!

Very interesting combination of concepts and total prediction failures. To anyone debating, it's worth watching.

My personal favorite was "People don't buy generic news, they buy a specific newspaper, with a branded identity". I wonder what caused the change. Poor digital adoption by newspapers, paywalls, and aggregators that do a better job matching your interests get my votes.

edit: I wonder if newspapers wouldn't be in such bad shape today if they had embraced tech like the video suggests. I still boggle at how much resistance they seem to have to change - you'd think a news agency would have noticed the struggling/death of others with similar behavior that they had been reporting on, and realized it applies to them as well.

Let's assume that the tablet isn't the end-all of consumer computing interfaces. If people were prototyping tablets 15 years ago, what are people prototyping today that will overtake tablets in another 15 years?

I'd guess more seamless integration between mobile devices and stationary components (displays, keyboards). I'd also like to see more portable, hands-free displays, e.g. in glasses or contact lenses.

Kinect?

probably first we see something like in Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within. A holographic device on your wrist, then we get into cyberpunk with glasses, then contact lenses and then implants ..

Actually, I think the holographic wrist device could be done with a pair of augmented reality glasses and a wristband with a little AR marker on it for orientation. Of course, you'd be the only one able to see it (unless you're linked up with other people with the same glasses). Actually, that brings up an interesting idea. If a lot of people have AR glasses, they can all experience a shared reality with all kinds of crazy "holographic" stuff flying around. Of course, it's going to be weird for the people who don't have the glasses.

Just think if this had been pushed harder by the company or sold to Apple, IBM or Microsoft. That could have changed our current landscape of tech giants. It was an amazing prototype at the time but it seemed there was no execution and it was too far ahead to make it a reality.

I also thought this was a typo and Knight Rider the show had some "IPad" type device on it.

It wasn't a working prototype though. It was a very interesting conceptual demonstration put together using video editing.

In 1994, tablets weren't exactly science fiction, they were real shipping products. (Apple Newton, AT&T Go Tablet, various PCs with Pen Windows, etc.)

What's shown in the video is simply a smaller/lighter/colorful version of what already existed -- perhaps predicting it would take iPad-like proportions to make a tablet successful.

I love how his wife at around 5minutes is already annoyed by him using this device while they are eating in a cafe.

"around the turn of the century" - we are 10 years late people!

hmmmm, I'm guessing they didn't take any patents at that time then ... but Apple sure as hell did ...

Prior art ...

Let us not forget the Acorn NewsPAD:

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Acorn/ART/ART_DS003_NewsPAD...

watch the movie Demolition man. It's from 1993 and you see the first appearance of a tablet like an iPad ..

Star Trek: TNG started in 1987 and they were carrying around iPad-esque devices in some episodes. I seem to remember Geordi Laforge often having one when interacting with the ship's engineering computer or whatever.

I'm mostly surprised by the fact that people are surprised by this video -- Fujitsu and others have been making tablets commercially for 15+ years. Alan Kay was talking about them in the 70s. The iPad was the right device at the right time (which is hugely important), but hardly a new idea in any way.

You're referring to the PADD:

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD

neither was the car invented by Ford or the phone invented by Bell, contrary to common belief. But they made them for mass production.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eponym

And in 1988 Tom Hanks, in the movie Big, described a interactive, digital comic book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com