The Telephone of the Future (1988) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Telephone of the Future (1988) [video]

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48 pointsColinWright34 comments

What's interesting is how much eventually migrated to text. The synchronous nature of phone calls is a big inconvenience. Especially with cell phones and unlimited plans, they became an incredibly low-friction way to interrupt someone's day in a way that a pre-telephone era would consider rude.

>interrupt someone's day in a way that a pre-telephone era would consider rude

Telephones have been around for a very long time. Do you mean pre-cell phone era? If so, I mostly disagree. Especially before email and then all manner of messaging services became popular it was incredibly normal to call people out of the blue both for both personal and business reasons.

When I was a product manager, field people would often call me with questions rather than email. My personal observation is that it's really within the last ten years (and maybe less) when people outside your immediate circle really stopped calling unless they connected asynchronously/scheduled first--and increasingly did away with phone calls entirely in many cases.

I am definitely in that in between generation where I see both - people a bit older than me still often call and the friends a bit younger pretty much always text. I see benefits to both but am usually lazy and do the latter

There was etiquette though. I was taught as a child that it was rude to call people at meal times, or late at night. Because answering machines were rare, people would usually answer a ringing phone in case it was an emergency. I think even young people today know this if they've seen a lot of movies/tv set in the 20th century. Its the stereotypical scene of a phone ringing in someone's bedroom and they turn on the light an answer even though its nighttime.

That's true enough. But, at home, that meant that anytime between 7 and 10 the phone would ring and you'd "have to" pick it up. Same thing if you sitting in your office, whatever you were doing.

Pre-CallerID especially, a lot of people were conditioned to a phone call being something important that took a long time to break.

Of course, calling was relatively expensive so while you could have wrong numbers you mostly didn't have junk callers.

I thought that was pretty reasonable from a 1988 perspective. They couldn't predict that a generic protocol (the mobile web) would replace all those special purpose functions but everything they showed was possible less than 10 years later in an even smaller form factor.

As for turning on the oven remotely. I'm old enough to remember when oven timers were actually used, for the simple reason that not every household had a microwave. Our particular use case: We four kids came home on the school bus to our rural house, and parents were gone to work at the other place. Dinner was in the oven, timed to be heated up and ready to eat when we got home. With a good half hour to budget to go from cold (or room temperature) to piping hot, the timer made sense. Now it's just 3 or 4 minutes in the microwave and done.

The dial pad has a rotary mode.

We almost got an iPhone with a click-wheel based on the iPod OS, so they weren't totally off the mark...

[For anyone interested](https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/6/14188624/apple-prototype-i...)

Thats actually sort of a cool idea

Thanks also for the nostalgia trip watching the adverts near the end! I forgot that alcohol and tobacco advertising was on TV back then.

Vocal recognition software was good enough to pick up numbers and lightweight enough to fit on a phone of that size in 1988?

No, it is a design demo. Probably why actually using the phone is shown thru animation. The reporter conveys the story that the technology exists already, but I think they are way too optimistic about size/power. Compare to the "old fashioned" mobile brick it is compared to.

I remember my dad purchasing a speech recognition package in the early 90s, but it ran on an expensive 486 desktop machine and was reasonably but not accurate enough for his uses.

I found some contemporary examples of the state of speech recognition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Portable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewu_NBUHePU

There was early voice recognition. I remember having something on my PC in 1989. Here is a 1987 device for the C64:

https://youtu.be/CiSUfmSEXAA?t=937

How have I never heard of the Piper Alpha tragedy? Its mention follows the smartphone segment in this posted video. Truly horrific.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha

Funny that the newscaster called the (large brick) cellphone a "trademark of the yuppies." While do recall one self-employed white-collar friend having one, they were much more common among building contractors and tradespeople.

I was more interested in the piece about the stealth bomber in this: https://youtu.be/PFWT2oPhf1w?t=1570

Amazing that they could imagine touchscreens and voice recognition, but not a built-in address book. They imagine you speaking the full telephone number into the phone, and you have to remember it! They allow that it could store "the last 200 numbers you dialed", but the concept of permanently attaching it to a name seems to elude them.

The resolution of the video is horrible but if you look closely while they talk about storing "last 200 numbers", it shows names written before all the numbers.

That was not an LCD but an LED backlit paper printout. A true MVP (Minimum Vaporware).

Turn on the oven when you're away from home.

That sounds like a safe feature!

There are quite a few ovens you can enable turning on remotely these days. Personally I would not use such a feature.

My oven requires that you manually hold two buttons, simultaneously, to temporarily enable the "remote start" feature. It requires real intent. I don't really understand the use case though.

How many dishes should you leave at room temperature all day which then take such a long time to cook that you can't just turn the oven on when you get home?

Two come immediately to my mind. One is a baked potato ... I'd've loved to have been able to have the oven turn on at 16:30 so that the potato was properly baked when I got in at 18:00. I used to do that with the oven I had when I was a teen, but not when I was early in my working career.

The other is the family casserole that we used to have on a Friday night. My parents would prepare it in the morning and program the oven to come on at a low temperature at 15:00. Then when we got home it would be done perfectly.

There are others, those are just the two of which I have direct personal experience.

With electric ovens the built in timer can usually turn themselves on (and off) automatically with a delayed start function already. Adding a remote access isn't that far fetched.

Unattended start for a gas oven does feel dodgy though.

Except the iPhone was inspired on Space Odyssey's monolith, so now we have rectangular black mirrors.

Relevant part of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFWT2oPhf1w&start=1928&end=2... (&end doesn’t seem to work)

I did have the start time stamp, but the HN s/w strips off what it thinks is an irrelevant parameter.

Yes, actual video with start index:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFWT2oPhf1w&start=1928

Thank you.

Fixed now. Thanks!

Super ... thanks to you for your work on this site. Much appreciated.

I tried talking a phone number to my android but hmph nope

From memory, "Hey Google, call 867-5309" worked fine for me.

I know "Hey Siri, call my wife" works. If you've got your contacts set up with relationships and nicknames, it works really well. I use it regularly while driving, both with voice calls and text messages.

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