In 1953 a telco executive predicts the rise of smartphones and video calls | Hacker News Reader

In 1953 a telco executive predicts the rise of smartphones and video calls

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Handheld phones and video calls were easy to predict by extrapolation. No-one predicted Twitter, social media, usenet, forums and the idea of things going 'viral' because that requires a complete paradigm shift to 'anyone can publish'. It's a fundamental of how the world works now but it wasn't on anyone's radar 50 years ago as anything possible, useful or interesting.

I disagree that Usenet and Forums would not have been easily predicted. Town Squares, Public Forums and Message Boards have been around for thousands years and I don't see why anyone would have thought they would not have existed in the electronic space. Societies have always had 1 to 1 and 1 to Many communication, so it would be natural that some form of those would exist in electronic communication.

Go and find me someone that predicted it then.

Edit: yes 1 to many communications existed but they either required expensive publishing or they were tied to a physical location (eg a physical notice board). Internet forums are globally available for anyone who is interested to read or publish and that turns out to be phenomenally powerful but in a way that pre-internet people could not have conceived of

Maybe not back then, but I got distinctive usenet vibes back when I read Ender's Game (novel, 1985); nowadays I'd probably get reddit or facebook vibes. Not sure what parts of message boards concept existed in the 1977 version.

xkcd take on this that still cracks me up:

https://xkcd.com/635/

I sorta figured reddit was a more likely representation, especially with the rise of very good but amateur accounts like /u/poppinkream

The WELL was available in 1985. One of the motivations for designing the original Apple I was connecting to mainframe based bulletin boards, in the 70s. CompuServe started selling dial up access to their service in 79. GEnie was available in 85. Delphi was available in 1981. Quantum Link was available in 85 and became AOL in 88.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_villag...

Ok yep that's along the right lines

Wow.

“So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…”

Roll back one academic generation further to McLuhan's mentor, Harold Innis.

It was Innis who'd first drawn the connection between medium and tenor / characteristics of communication. See especially Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication.

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

"As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use, and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussible, too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." - From the London Times of 1904, Mark Twain

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...

That's pretty interesting, thanks

>...and Message Boards have been around for thousands years

This is naive of me -I had never considered that there were physical message boards with replies being tacked onto the original message.

It would be cumbersome though - if one thread grows too long, someone has to re-arrange the whole board to make it fit etc. I imagine long conversations would be very rare on that platform. Message boards would mostly be one off messages ' bike for sale' etc

Stuff was viral as soon as the printing press was invented and one could distribute printed material and have physical meetings. Instead of logging into some radical forum, you'd just drop everything and run off into the woods with Charlie Manson. The stuff coming out of Donald Trump's mouth has been the same rhetoric that's been all over AM airwaves for 50 years. Plenty of people figured this stuff out, earned doctorates in it, taught lectures in it, were hired on as consultants for it. This is why this stuff is so successful today, because propaganda is a long established science with a mountain of literature explaining just about everything you see play out today.

By viral I mean accidentally viral - random things that somehow capture the zeitgeist - Jackie Weaver, Bean Dad, Bilal Göregen, Num Num Cat TikTok Chain, podcasts that suddenly blow up, etc

Read "The Machine Stops" (1909).[1]

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”."

Sound familiar?

[1] http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

I love that story but the passage you quote is akin to answering a phone call and broadcasting a lecture. The Machine Stops is prescient in many ways but it does not explore the ramifications of a world where anyone can publish

"She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously."

That's the key line there. A more highly connected world, intermediated electrically.

OK thats something. But thats still not much like what we have today. Its like Forster extrapolated from his era and imagined people in the future having more aquaintances. But I don't 'know' any of the people I interact with online, or at least very few of them. Nonetheless meaningfull (and sometimes silly but entertaining) interactions occur.

It's difficult to capture in a single quote, but as the story progresses it is shown that society is basically structured around the creation and exchange of "ideas". It's not simply that people had more acquaintances - it's that the entirety of human existence has been reduced to swapping memes online, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

It sounds like whoever wrote the script for Wall-E read that same passage.

Another good example of a prophetic short story is "A Logic Named Joe" from 1946:

> the story is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks, written at a time when computing was in its infancy.

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

Btw it's resurfaces on Hacker News every now and then:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=logic+named+joe

Stand on Zanzibar had the Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere televisions that inserted viewers into the action, though that's less content creation and more immersion, perhaps.

The pamphleteers would like a word with you - starting about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press and continuing to hold sway until the widespread acceptance of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars (of which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(177... is one of the most striking older examples).

I think there’s a reasonably amount of science fiction that predicted that ideas might go viral and spread, but what is lacking is the idea of things like Wikipedia where there is an overall level of trust, but that certain subject areas will be much less reliable. The closest I can think of is Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand where some subject areas of General Information (a system run by the Web) are notoriously out of date, but were probably accurate when written. I have often wondered if Tim Berbers-Lee read that book.

OSC's Ender's Game pretty much nailed blogging, in 1977.

Though the OG is probably E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909).

(Animats beat me to that by 3 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546)

I remember my dad telling me one day we could see each other over the phone and finding this insanely cool. We imagined it as a sort of mini tv on top of the landline phone.

No one predicted me writing to you from an elevator in Hong Kong and having the speed of interaction under a few milliseconds. And now that I Skype my dad across the ocean, it seems like a very secondary and minor feature of the internet.

Whatsapp alone changed how we interact with far away family as if we never left.

There's a fascinating French video (1947) that presages smartphones and even hints at the accompanying distraction they bring about:

https://youtu.be/ZKfOcR7Qbu4?t=30

That is wild! thanks for sharing. I lost it at Tesla like LCD in center console.

I worked for AT&T (Consumer) at HQ in then Basking Ridge NJ in the mid+late 80s. There was a third level manager who often spoke about the future. One of the things I recall was him saying something along the lines of "some day your number will follow you everywhere." Which wasn't even a reference to mobile phones.

The marketing people laughed at him.

There was a period about that time (1980s early 1990s) where a number-forwarding service existed (uncertain of the name), advertised as being able to forward your phone to a restaurant or barbershop. The basic idea was that your calls could follow you around town.

(Or be diverted by someone else, one supposes... WCPGW?)

Dick Tracy made this prediction in 1946:

https://historydaily.org/was-dick-tracey-the-character-who-i...

TV version:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/its-about-time-the-computer...

(I haven't been able to find when exactly they transitioned from radio to TV, but the rough idea of a "smart watch" was there.)

"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today."

Let's not forget that at that time in the early 1950s almost everyone who read the daily comic strip would have been very familiar with Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, which when drawn in cartoons appeared on his wrist at about the size of a normal watch. Later, this was upgraded to a video version.

It's only a small stretch to add the other niceties that Sullivan mentions.

I reckon the real surprise was how quickly that transformation happened when the smartphone actually arrived. It's unlikely that, say, several years earlier anyone would have actually predicted the enormous speed of the uptake.

I have a self imposed rule about inventions, that probably applies to predictions as well. It's based on the idea that a patentable invention consists of more than just an idea blurted out by some manager (I was the manager when I arrived at this), but needs to be novel, non-obvious, useful, and reductible to practice.

These ideas are usefully applied as a self discipline, completely aside of the idiosyncrasies of the existing patent system.

Non-obvious means that a generally smart person could not have come up with the same idea by combining existing knowledge. Reductible to practice means you have to provide a recipe for actually making it. For all practical purposes, you don't know if it can be reduced to practice unless you've actually made the effort and discovered all of the gotchas.

In addition, a prediction needs a timeline. "An asteroid will strike the earth" is an empty prediction without quantifying the time scale in terms of something like a probability per year or an expected duration.

This is why I dismiss most futuristic predictions as not qualifying as predictions or inventions.

I think my rule also works for disposing with giving managers credit for "ideas" just for showing up at brainstorming sessions, at the expense of the people who are actually doing the work.

I don’t think that applies here! Bell Labs was working on this tech and had a device that would send pictures every few minutes as early as 1956/7. My dad was able to use a demo videophone in 1964 at the NY World’s Fair.

It was a real thing that AT&T was serious about. But for all of the amazing tech they couldn’t make it a product that people wanted.

I’d imagine that with the close relationship that phone companies had with the military, they understood how “addictive” and important mobile tech was. Think about the Soviet statues of generals holding telephones!

Dick Tracy launched in 1931, and the dude had a video watch. Admittedly, I don't know at what point he got the watch though, so it may have been a later addition.

I recall the watch had two-way voice. Did it also have video?

You're right, originally it was just a 2-way wrist radio. Later on they made it a 2-way wrist TV.

After radio became ubiquitous, the comic switched to 'two-way wrist TV'

The first scene in the first episode of Get Smart is of Maxwell receiving a shoephone call in the middle of a theater. Today, that scene is not funny, because it just makes Max look like an ordinary asshole who neglected to silence his phone.

It's probably worth noting that proposing some behaviour or function is relatively easy, whilst attaining it is the hard part.

Functions that are largely independent, autonomous, and unconnected are easier than those which require major infrastructure, common standards, and numerous interactions. A bow and arrow, or a magnetic compass, or horse stirrups, a dugout canoe or small skiff, can all be created with reasonable ease by a single person or small group.

A petroleum-based economic system, the automobile transportation on which it depends (highways, mining, manufacturing, fuel production and distribution, repair and maintenance, parking infrastructure, etc.), a wired telecoms network (switching centres, local and trunk lines, billing infrastructure), or a wireless one (all of the above plus radio masts and broadcast standards) are all complex and require a vastly greater degree of organisation.

Yes, it's possible to idly speculate on the existence of handheld voice/video comms, but building that out requires hardware, batteries, the wireless network providing final connectivity, etc. And it was about fifty years after the comments mentioned in TFA that this level of development reached to point that mobile communications were truly available to virtually anyone within an advanced country. What's interesting is that developing countries benefitted by the standards and infrastructure development to the extent that their first general telephony buildout occured as wireless rather than wired landline systems.

And then of course, there are all the societal, economic, cultural, and political implications of ubiquitous 24/7 voice-and-data comms capabilities, though that also depends on a vast back-end infrastructure in numerous ways.

As many have commented, predicting a handheld mobile phone was pretty common; Dick Tracy did it almost a century ago.

What is harder is predicting behavior that new technology causes. From Robert Heinlein's Lost Legacy (<http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=595>) (1941):

>"How come," he asked as he came abreast, "they had to search for you?"

>"Left my pocketphone in my other suit," Coburn returned briefly. "Did it on purpose - I wanted a little peace and quiet. No luck."

There is an almost identical conversation in his Space Cadet (1948), in which a prospective student traveling to enroll at the Space Academy tells another student that he packed his pocket phone in his luggage, to avoid calls from his overprotective parents.

The Wizard of Oz uses a mobile phone in Tik-tok of Oz. (No relation, as far as I know, to TikTok.)

https://measuredcircle.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/the-wizard-o...

I think that we have to ack the not so small role of ham radio operators. I was one as a kid, and that was all my Homer and my club buddies talked about. They took the impossible and made it happen much like the folks who population this ecosystem. That includes computers as well. I switched from a iambic paddle to send morse code to a ZX 81 kit that sent and received Morse ASCII etc, flawlessly and at higher speeds than I could send even with the paddle. In everyone of these technologies, you will see the hand of ham radio operators in the background, doing the experiments, making the rigs, etc.

Forgive me if this is well known but there was a thing called slow scan television - purely analog first introduced in 1957 - 1958 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television. This is related to Videotelephony "The concept of videotelephony was first conceived in the late 1870s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotelephony

It's still around. The ISS broadcasts SSTV images regularly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HamRadio/comments/rsy1di/the_christ...

We have billions of people in the humankind. With a high probability, billion guesses every day will yield at least one or more correct guesses even if they are completely random. This person was in a position to guess not randomly but based on some advance understanding of the world and the humankind, so we cannot consider this to be surprising.

What matters is not who predicts which future, but rather who creates which future.

I agree with the bias you highlight, but I'm not sure it is that exaggerated in this example.

Today 2 Billion people have a platform (social media).

The sample size of "telco executives making futuristic predictions interviewed in a print newspapers" was probably in the tens or hundreds of instances during this period.

In the Idea Factory https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio... the AT&T execs all have video calling to their homes. There's a lot of great stuff in there as well about how Bell labs helped build the first mobile phone networks.

Ironically, it's easier to make a Zoom call from a PC than a real phone call (from PC).

Given enough people and enough years, every possible, invention will be predicted long before it is invented.

That's what good science fiction is all about: stuff that is possible but not yet reality.

Xerox, man.

Meh, a lot of people predicted this. Two-way communication via radiowaves had been a thing for decades by this point and the first commercial transistor radio was already in development and would be released shortly. It was not a stretch to think that personal, cordless phone service could be provided by a two-way transistor radio.

Edit: according to wikipedia, AT&T had developed and deployed car-based mobile phones in the late 1940s. So yeah, definitely not much of a "prediction" seeing as a phone executive would have been well aware of these developments.

“Phone as watch” has been in popular culture since at least the 40s: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/dick-tracy-watch

As I learned from a smart trader: the right guess at the wrong time is just as wrong as a wrong guess.

Exactly. I predict people will solve climate change problems and space travel will be affordable. A visionary!

Of course people in 1968 thought that space travel would be affordable by 2001, and people in 1985 thought flying cars and coffee machine-sized fusion reactors would be commonplace in 2015, so some predictions take longer than others...

Your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning.

Tokenization of `/s` missing

Well if you're wrong we'll be dead so win-win.

Everything is wrong unless it's the right time I guess.

Aka timing is everything.

Url changed from https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/in-1953-a-telephone-comp..., which points to this.

Yes correct, I was reading Open Culture at your link, then I posted via bookmarklet, I'm a bit confused, don't know what happened, sorry. Anyway the url point to one of the article's sources, still curious to understand what happened.

I don't know what happened either but it was a great submission and that's by far the most important thing!

Damn, it just blew my mind that video calls are now commonplace, keyword: Zoom...

(Yes it was a thing even before Zoom or the pandemic, but I wonder what percentage of the population did their first video call in Q2 2020...)

What is also interesting is that in my workplace that already subscribes to microsoft and google business solutions, that the video technology of choice was this company no one heard of before that instantly became the market leader in this space. Talk about dropping the ball big time from FAANMG (or however many letters its up to now) who just let their cows be walked out of the pasture.

It was odd how it just went (sunglasses on[1]) viral. But I guess Zoom didn't ask you to register with your email and make an account, and click the link on the email we just sent you, etc, so that's why someone who needed a quick solution just used that, and it spread that way.

Maybe they can find user zero (there must've been that one person who wrote that first "Let's have a call on Zoom" with many outside their company, which introduced the app to many other people in other companies) and give him a big fat check...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uW47jWLMiY (loud)

I mean we bought enterprise zoom before I even heard of it, not just bummed the free version. Someone sold it to us immediately and we adopted it without trying out any of the tools already on the shelf that we also bought.

One word: frictionless. Zoom is by far the easiest thing to onboard for a random person. My mom struggled to understand Skype account creation wall.

I work in a megacorp that forbade Zoom to the profit of our already well established Skype and MS Team.

Fast forward to last week, a team of "digital innovation onboarding" claimed huge victory against our rotting process by finally getting Zoom approved... finally lol.

And the worst is I want Zoom too: easier to interview candidates, meet client and trainers, contact universities etc.

Video for work, for meetings. Otherwise not so much.

Back in the 1990s when when "eyeball cams" were new and black and white nobody wanted to make a video call/chat. Even now if I help someone with an app with a video capability I warn them their camera may come on and I may see them. People hate video calls.

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