What happened to the laptop computer? (1985)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The thing about predictions that gets ignored in retrospect is that there are always implicit qualifiers, because it's not very interesting to hypothesize about the totally unconstrained future.
It's impressive to think that it took 20 years from that article for notebooks to outsell pc. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sa... also fun to see how net books are a focus of attention for that article. I wonder what level of accordance will be needed for a wearable to seriously compete with the current mode of computing.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
It had XIP (Execute-in-Place) applications built into the ROM which ran instantly, including Lotus 1-2-3.
I kept all my finances on the (built-in) Pocket Quicken and organised my Calendar, Address Books, Writing, you name it. Even printing was a doddle - I just pointed its Infra-Red port at the Office Laser Printer and it printed quite happily.
I used it as an e-reader, turning it on its side like a book, before e-readers even existed.
It was so fabulously useful I find it hard to believe that they weren't more widely used!
People won't do anything with computers when you have to fight absurd screen-glare every second of use.
The article starts off describing laptops on airplanes, the tag about fishing just seems like an exaggeration by the author. I would say that the author was wrong and this is a good example of a bad prediction. I mean, did you read the line about floppy disks? The authors points were that laptops are #1 to heavy #2 their software doesn't stack up and #3 their price is far to high.
All of the predictions are wrong, so I see this author as betting on the wrong horse.
For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.
that really miss.
And then their is the conclusion, which comes after the author acknowledges the possibility of improvements in laptops.
But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.
What?! To me that just shows the author downplaying the idea of the technology. He just couldn't imagine any laptop ever being more than a "niche".
I would say that 30 years ago, this was an objective statement of fact.
> He just couldn't imagine any laptop ever being more than a "niche".
And you'll see he was and is correct if you consider, as the author was, the usage model. People largely use modern laptops the same way they use desktop PCs. They simply transport them between their regular workspaces. Multiple devices have been collapsed to one, but the way people use them remains the same.
You are focusing very narrowly on the physical devices that the (then and now) inaccurate label "laptop" has been applied to. The article makes much more sense if you abstract to the concept of a laptop, particularly as pushed by marketers 30 years ago.
This is what separates us from guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who have the vision to see in the future.
The false prediction indeed comes largely from the author's inability to believe that such technological advances could come, within only about 10-15 years, that would completely erase all the downsides he correctly identified (size, cost, etc).
I think we're less likely to make such false predictions today, because we've seen such rapid technological advances. This sunk in for me about 10 years ago, before the iphone, talking about digital book readers with a professor, who said to many students who didn't believe digital book readers were in our future: Imagine what you _would_ need in a digital book reader. Smaller and lighter than a paperback? Cheap? Can be read in sunlight? Because all of those things are coming, only in the next few years. Then do you think digital book readers will take off? Lightbulb moment.
Even though the author of this OP continues with "Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software...", I think if he really believed inexpensive, cheap, small, light, sophisticated computers were coming, and soon, he would have had a different prediction.
I'm not ignoring it, see my other comment[0]. Consider lessening your adherence to excessive literalism, and then reviewing the author's points free of the bias instilled by the unfortunate label of "laptop" that has been slapped on devices that are rarely used on people's laps.
See if you can't bring yourself to understand that the author was right a lot more than he was "wrong".
"Sales representatives, service managers, field auditors of all varieties have not been adequately served by the computer industry in pushing laptop computers. As the technology of these machines, particularly of their displays, improves, and as their price declines, a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold. And as the software that is capable of turning them into true satellite offices becomes refined, they will probably even be used - in fact, profitably so."
I'm hearing another prediction, that "a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold." if things like displays and software improve.
Not sure who is calling this a wrong prediction, but the article leaves us with more than a gist of laptops weren't working out for the common business in 1985, but they did not explicitly state that they were never going to work out.
Also, they took some weird turns. Manufacturers didn't want to try to cram standard 5.25" floppy drives (3.5" were not yet standard at that time) into laptops, so they came out with all kinds of weird proprietary drives. And then you had to shell out tons of money for those proprietary disks.
- the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years)
- the price always comes down
- "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.
Maybe if you are using your laptop/tablet just for casual games and checking Facebook/Email. As a person working on my laptop 6-8 hours a day I cant imagine how long it would take me to do the same on tablet.
Tablet/Phone can be a support to Laptop, that's it.
The "computer" is the screen. People buy tablets and laptops because it's a portable screen (that incidentally has a computer inside). They want to be able to take their screen to a hotel room, airport, cafe, etc.
Before there was Paul Krugman writing "the internet is a fad" in the NYT, there was Erik Sandberg-Diment.
It's true, that windows really started to take off around 1993/1994, with windows for workgroups - coincident with higher resolution monitors. It's also true (to this day), that there are challenges with dealing with documents on a tablet/display screen, that don't exist when you have a sheaf of papers in front of you.
I personally haven't printed anything in 2+ years, but I know there are a lot of people who just can't handle not having everything at their fingertip.
All in all, no as bad a series of predictions as one might think.
http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html
From the mid-70s to mid-80s the only option available to reporters out in the field was the Teleram P-1800, about which surprisingly little information is available.
http://mccworkshop.com/computers/comphistory10.htm
It was essentially a CPU-less serial terminal with modem, CRT screen, and 2 kB of RAM. It included a rudimentary word processor (with text search-and-replace) implemented entirely in TTL logic. 2 kB pages of text were saved to cassette before being transferred to the home office via 300 baud acoustic coupler modem.
These rare and very expensive machines were eventually replaced by the small, simple, and inexpensive TRS-80 Model 100 portable.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
Instant power up, no disk or fans, MS-DOS and word processor in ROM, 32K of non-volatile RAM, 40x8 character LCD screen, serial I/O, and a full-sized, full stroke keyboard.
It's interesting that it took us 25+ years to get back to that ideal portable form factor.
Amusingly self-serving from the NYT.
"The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Makes me think they knew something about work life balance that we don't.. or maybe it's just not work anymore but a way to live.
Back then there was no connectivity outside of modems, color screens were a luxury much less something with the power to run a GUI.
The laptop industry went through so many changes and fads, even to the point of Canon building one with a built-in inkjet printer. It's amazing how far technology has come.
You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop.
It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN.
I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work.
The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks".
But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.
As far as I can tell, he was right, and still is. I see no evidence that more than a few percent of such people do so to this day.
> it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.
I don't see how that "disconfirms" anything at all. Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche? Because I don't believe that at all.
> Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche?
I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work, still less by people who were only going to use it at home. The Macintosh Portable was excoriated for its poor battery life, heavy weight and lack of a backlight because so many of the potential users wanted something to use on the road.
No, I wouldn't. Hotel room is more likely, but is just substituting for home/office.
Huge numbers of heavy office PC users exist. Only a tiny fraction use a laptop anywhere but home or the office, and a tinier fraction of those do so routinely. It is a niche market.
> the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop
There aren't that many business travelers in the first place. You're already looking at a niche market.
> I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work
My argument: On-the-go laptop use is niche.
Your apparent reply: Early laptop users used them on-the-go.
It's a non sequitur. That the ideal market for a product adopts the product does not mean that the market is not niche. The two have no relationship.
I'd rather have a desktop at work and a desktop at home than lug around my laptop with me.
It's also more cost effective: I just regrettably got a new laptop (dell m3800) which is far over $2000, when an equivalently powered desktop would be under $1000.
I regret having a laptop at all (rather than the particular model I got)
It might be helpful for prediction-makers to list all the assumptions we make when we're making predictions. I suppose the problem is that we always make more assumptions than we even realize.
He was right about salespeople being the first big corporate market -- that was behind the rise of Siebel Systems.
He was right about widespread business use depending on people being happy (or happy enough) with the screens.
He was right about widespread use depending on the price gap vs. desktops being not too high.
His two mistakes were not foreseeing favorable answers to all those challenges, and not foreseeing the technology that made even handheld devices usable.
Early LCD screens were also pretty bad. Darker grey or grey. Or Plasma screens that cost more and had to run off AC.
It's easy to make fun of predictions like these. More interesting to consider the reasons they were wrong.
They did to some extent have that $5 option in in the form Of a few floppies in a brief case as the article points out.
I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.
I don't take my Air fishing, but I regularly take it out to the park and sit out among birdsong and trees to get work done. We've come a long way.
I could really be a super hipster if I could figure out a way to hook WiFi to it. Maybe a raspberry pi strapped to the side and hooked through the 232 port...
Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)
It's tempting to think, "Ah, people! So terrible at predicting things." I think it's interesting to think about why that is.
The main problem, I think, isn't that people make wrong predictions altogether. It's that it's very hard to see how things will change and evolve over time, and how the ecosystem will change with it. The "One Laptop Per Child" idea [4] sounds a little dated and silly now.
I suppose if we just remember that progress is continuous rather than discrete, and that a lot of seeming limitations can be overcome with currently-unlikely innovations, then a lot of predictions will be forced to be a lot more precise.
Perhaps the Newsweek prediction might've been amended to, "In its present form, the Internet is unlikely to change the world."
The problem with predictions is– things rarely stay in their present forms, and the world around them rarely stays the same, either.
I think pg addresses this in his most recent essay, "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" [5] In his words– "they practically all seemed lame at first."
So we have to learn to live in a world where our initially valid assessments of a thing might become rapidly invalid because of change. And this is where Nassim Taleb's work about the problem of prediction [6] comes into play. Rather than trying to predict a particular outcome, it makes much more sense to focus on evaluating robustness and antifragility– "How will this thing respond to change? What are the potential upsides, what are the potential downsides? What will kill it? What will give it more utility?"
Even if the odds are really low that something might come around, if the payoff is high enough, it might be worth betting on. I think that's the whole point of things like YC.
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[1] http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadg...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child
[5] http://paulgraham.com/altair.html
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...
"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Obviously it wasn't then, but we've certainly grafter ourselves to our smartphone keyboards now. So, it turned out the "microcomputer" industry was right. Just took 20 years longer.
Example A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
I always wonder at what point it was that Balmer realized their strategy was a failure.
He also couldn't imagine the average user spending hours of their day on a laptop simulating farming.