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Comment by pluies | Hacker News Reader

There's probably some selection bias working here. I'm sure plenty of people predicted things going to happen in the future, and we only hear of either the surprisingly correct ones or the ones completely off the mark.

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Atari Labs in particular brainstormed a lot of things, some more on-target than others, so there are quite a few wrong predictions as well. It's interesting that it even existed, though. The idea, today, that a videogame company could host a basic-research lab like Bell Labs, MSR, etc., headed by a prominent researcher (Alan Kay was near the top of his fame at the time) seems almost absurd. Google hired Peter Norvig to head up a corporate research lab, but it's hard to imagine Ubisoft or EA doing something like that.

My favorite not-implemented Atari Labs memo, fwiw, was Brenda Laurel's suggestion that they design games for dolphins and humans to play together: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/laurel82_dolphinvideogame.html

Some video game companies still are: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-secr...

By-and-large though, VALVe as a corporation is an outlier in virtually every sense from the rest of the gaming industry. They own 100% of their distribution, they're a developer that distributes for other developers, they're immensely in-tune with their customers, their consistently open support of the modding community, user-vs-profit focused DRM...

Despite the fact that VALVe makes games, they're unlike any other gaming company out there right now. The Minecraft team is a few iterations and portfolio additions away from that same tier.

Atari was far more than a video game company then. They had personal computers out since 1979 and were looking at seriously entering the education and telecommunications space. I saw a talk from an Atari veteran a few years ago about how they were working on FM subcarrier systems to allow transmitting programs via the sidebands of commercial radio stations.

I'm no stranger to selection bias (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852186 for example). I'm just surprised that anyone back then managed to make such predictions.

Also, a lot of what's in there were not out of the blue predictions, but extrapolations from existing work: LCD screens existed, and many companies were considering it for computers (Commodore bought an LCD manufacturer for example), so extrapolating large flat screens was natural. Portable computers were on the market (the Osborne 1, inspired by Alan Kay's own prototype from Xerox in the mid 70's), so assuming they'd get lighter was a natural extrapolation. Hypertext as a concept dated back to Project Xanadu in the 60's at least, so assuming encyclopedic knowledge on your computers wasn't that strange etc.

>and we only hear of either the surprisingly correct ones or the ones completely off the mark.

But this one is neither surprisingly correct

(laptops for all, wireless communication and an online encyclopedia? You don't say!)

nor completely off the mark

(mostly ok, missed a few things like the public internet, thin laptops and tablets).

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