
Fax on the beach: The audacious, visionary, calamitous iPad of the 90s - anarbadalov
https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of-atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop
======
AndrewKemendo
My takeaway here is that this just further proves the excruciating reality,
that bringing new innovative technology to the market is inextricably
incentivized to involve litigation, politics, infighting, backstabbing etc...
in other words normal business practices in a highly competitive market.
Competition for dollars just fundamentally makes this a reality.

I certainly wouldn't offer that there is any better system/process for this,
but it remains disheartening for idealistic (some could say naiive)
technologists that this is the case.

I think it's worth keeping that in mind when thinking through how to create
the "next big thing", or even some next small things.

~~~
npunt
That's not my takeaway - I think they just critically mistimed the idea and
didn't have much business sense to realize it. Even if their experience was
bs-free and they were extremely well capitalized, they wouldn't have succeeded
because the tech wasn't anywhere near ready.

90s tech (batteries, cpus, screens, etc) could only reasonably produce single
function hand-held devices like phones and CDs. Even late 90s tech like in
Palm Pilots could only make pretty crummy experiences that had limited mass
market appeal.

Longer take on it: [https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-
products/](https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/)

~~~
beamatronic
I had a Handspring Visor. They were pretty trendy in 1999-2000. My friend had
the Ricochet cellular modem and we were jealous he could get email on it. But
there were apps similar to Yelp with databases of restaurant reviews. It would
sync in the cradle, attached to your PC, to get the latest data over the
Internet. Imagine an iPod touch with no radios.

~~~
npunt
Yeah these devices did check some boxes for various features and capabilities,
and as a late 90s tech geek I wanted one badly because they were clearly 'the
future', but the fit & finish in the UX just wasn't there for breakout
success. That was largely a function of the state of hardware.

I also had a pseudo-iPhone experience with my Treo in 2005-07, with an add-on
bluetooth GPS and various apps for MP3s etc. It did the job in a way, but it
was clunky, and the web experience was subpar to say the least. But it was a
sign of things to come.

------
DonHopkins
I posted earlier about the Momenta Pen Computer, which debuted in 1991, when
"pen computing" was all the rage.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492195)

>In 1991 when "pen computing" was all the rage, a start-up company called
"Momenta" came out with a "pentop" MS-DOS based pen computer with a pie-menu-
like "command compass", whose user interface was done in Smalltalk.

>Remember that this was in 1991, the same year Go Corporation finally released
PenPoint, and a year before the 1992 founding of Palm Computing (which took
over the Pen market for many years) and the release of Microsoft Windows 3.1
in 1992 (the first version of Windows that wasn't intolerably irritating), and
the release of Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992 (which was a big
flop). So there was a huge amount of excitement around pen computing.

[...and more about how their founder confused Smalltalk with Lisp, plus links
to photos, reference manual excerpts, and more info about the Momenta pen
computer...]

~~~
smoyer
I had (and used) an Amstrad PenPad for a number of years (until I replaced it
with a Sharp Zaurus 5000D which ran Qt on Linux). The down-side to both was a
lack of connectivity!

~~~
cobbzilla
The Zaurus could do wifi with a Compact Flash wifi card, it was pretty cool. I
miss my Zaurus, it was a fun little Linux box.

~~~
organsnyder
Somewhat newer, but I think the Nokia N-series was similar. My N810 could do
wifi and ran a Linux variant (also QT, IIRC). It was a fun little device.

------
rootbear
I saw a presentation about Go and PenPoint in the early 90s, probably at a
Usenix conference, and I was very impressed. I was sorry it never went
anywhere.

My other PenPoint story comes from a business trip I took to Japan in 1994.
One weekend, I went to a gay bar in Tokyo (GB, in Shinjuku) and met an
American who was working for Go and was in Japan to work on Asian language
input (which was an interesting problem). I mentioned that I had a friend who
was working on Hobbit software and it turned out my friend and this guy had
exchanged email the week before! Two American gay nerds meet in a bar in Tokyo
and find they know another gay nerd in common. Crazy.

~~~
DonHopkins
Love your user name. So your prompt is a pound sign? ;)

~~~
rootbear
Yes, frequently it is. We were at UMCP at the same time, by the way.

~~~
DonHopkins
OMG! Do you know the dude in the Terrapin Tacos interview who said he is there
five or six times a day, and sits up all night thinking about how good the
food is? They pick the rocks out of your beans.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz8xy61nBjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz8xy61nBjY)

~~~
rootbear
That's hilarious. They had the best beef and bean burritos...

------
s1mon
I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention General Magic for context.
It's really crazy how much of this was invented and reinvented but the
infrastructure and performance just wasn't there during the 90's in a way to
support mass adoption. It was close enough to build something, but all of
those somethings failed until WiFi, cell technology and Moore's law supported
small enough gadgets. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend the
documentary on General Magic.
[https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/](https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/)

------
GlenTheMachine
My roommate and I went to that COMDEX in 1992 specifically to see this device.
When we got to the booth they wouldn’t let us in, so my roommate, thinking
much more quickly than me, told the dude at the booth entrance that we were
developers (in fact we were juniors in the BYU CS department). Our status
immediately switched to “VIP” and we were escorted inside, handed a device,
and left on our own to play with it for half an hour.

I thought I was seeing the future of computing.

Unfortunately, Microsoft was also at COMDEX, in force, with its “Pen Windows”
product. Which was clunky and stupid and very clearly only meant to crush GO.
And it was clear even then to me as a 20 year old that that strategy was going
to work.

------
Taniwha
I was working for a chip startup in the early 90s - we moved into office space
in Sunnyvale that had recently been vacated by the GO corp (I think) ....
above my desk were dozens of pencils embedded in the ceiling tiles ... some
poor soul sitting there as the company company was dying has sat there
throwing them up until they stuck ... hopefully he or she retired with both
eyes .... I removed them before they came down on their own

------
lostgame
>> “They started with the iPhone, and went to the iPad,” Kaplan says,
referring to Apple. “But we were starting with the iPad and moving to the
iPhone.”

That’s not true, from a development side.

Jobs stated that the development of the iPad started before the iPhone.

([http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576854,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576854,00.html))

------
dcreemer
I worked there until very close to the end, and the collapse of GO/Eo provided
me with a priceless instant network of friends at dozens of companies around
the SF Bay Area.

I met my spouse and some of my best friends through GO/Eo, and to this day
still greatly value the connections made there for my personal and
professional networks. Silver linings.

------
thewebcount
> AT&T eventually took control of EO, which it bought in mid-1993, and GO,
> which it purchased outright in early 1994. These acquisitions created a
> confusing corporate structure.

Yeah, AT&T was on a buying binge at that time. I got hired there in late '93
and started in '94\. In addition to GO, they also bought NCR and a few other
things, I think. All of it fell apart within about 2-4 years when they spun
off Lucent and NCR into separate companies. It was pretty much a mess!

------
webwielder2
Wouldn't the "iPad of the 90s" be, you know, the Newton MessagePad by Apple?

~~~
rodw
Was the Newton network capable?

~~~
jjkaczor
Well... No wifi... I do recall using my 120 with a data cable, connected to my
Motorola Flip and that as a modem to send/receive email.

It was a great demonstration in a coffee shop - although, you would be able to
watch the battery drain in real-time.

~~~
zippergz
The later version of this was using IrDA on my Nokia phone to connect my Palm
Pilot to the Internet. SO SLOW, but always fun to show off to people.

------
cosmotic
The article says nothing else used the Hobbit processor, but that is not true;
the BeBox used the Hobbit processor.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox)

------
jcl
Similar to that AT&T campaign, I was struck by the prescience of Qwest's "Ride
the Light" commercials: "All rooms have every movie ever made, in any
language, anytime, day or night." This was in 1999, when Netflix had barely
started mailing DVDs.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRX4s8C9518&t=38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRX4s8C9518&t=38)

------
npunt
> "We could have had the iPhone 10 years earlier, at least."

The fate of prototype techs is almost always to be remembered with these kind
of wistful statements about how they could have been [market leader] except
for [reasons].

These statements betray an ignorance about just how category-defining products
come into being. Making even a moderately successful, let alone category-
defining product is _super hard_ and it's nowhere near enough to just have an
idea, whether represented on a napkin, or in a demo video, or even in a
tangible prototype. Ideas are cheap, even ideas that are rather prescient.

Making successful products also requires TIMING, LEVERAGE, and EXECUTION.

TIMING - build something too early and you waste capital fighting uphill
against a market not ready for the idea. Product-market fit is not always
possible for any given idea at the current moment in time. For tech, things
like battery density, speed, screen tech, internet bandwidth, cost etc are
critical to time correctly.

Example: Youtube and Netflix appropriately timed the cost of storage and
internet bandwidth so they were ready to go when streaming was just becoming
cost-effective, versus earlier efforts like Broadcast.com. It wasn't a leap to
conclude video streaming was a good idea even in the 80s or 90s, but it needed
to be timed.

Additionally, timing things _culturally_ matters a ton. People need to be
ready for an idea, to incorporate a new product into their life. The window of
what's cool or acceptable is a moving target, what's uncool now may be cool in
5 years. It's often other interim products that shift this window.

Example: Google's launch of consumer-focused Google Glass and the immediate
blowback that resulted.

Finally, pioneers get arrows in their backs. You reveal your grand ideas too
early and you've just paid for a ton of concept development R&D that others
can just pick off for free.

LEVERAGE - Ideas require business leverage to succeed in market. Things like
brand leverage where you're already trusted in the market and have a history
of delivering quality, the ability to scale manufacturing to meet demand,
business relationships and scale to get access to special components or lower
component costs, a well-oiled organization with deep talent bench, etc.

Example: The iPhone would not have been what it is without the iPod. Apple
leveraged its talent, its history of manufacturing iPods, its suppliers, and
its huge consumer appeal. It also used that to negotiate with AT&T to have
complete control of the UX and to get unlimited data plans.

EXECUTION - Lots of high-concept ideas are lousy at the exact details and
execution of the idea. Cool, you can send a fax from the beach, but under what
conditions? Is fax even the right modality? Is the UX cumbersome, or require a
laborious setup process? Its often the little things that separate market
defining products from abject failures, even when they check the same boxes.

Example: Galaxy Fold is great high concept product that doesn't execute on its
promise because its too fragile and creates a screen crease.

It's also possible to do a great job on details, but within the wrong
constraints. You can be efficient (doing things right) but still not be
effective (doing the right things). Specifically in the case of this 'iPad of
the 90s', they didn't have the enabling technologies to make a great
experience - things like fast refresh rates, multi-touch, beautiful screen,
etc. They probably did a fantastic job with the pen, but the pen was the wrong
constraint.

Basically the creators are severely downplaying the timing, leverage, and
execution required to make products successful, and seem to think this cool
but barely-launched concept could have been the most successful product on
earth (iPhone). I doubt the team would have been able to produce anything more
than a PalmPilot or Treo, both of which were OK products for their time, but
ultimately are just mostly forgotten preludes to the product that DID define
the category.

------
csours
I wonder if the name is related to Captain EO[0]? Or the Greek Goddess of Dawn
for whom Captain EO is named?

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_EO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_EO)

~~~
Aenoire
From Wikipedia, it's based on the Latin for "I go".

------
Stratoscope
> _Technically, you can now send a fax from the beach — but who’s doing that
> in the year 2020?_

I would bet good money that quite a few people do that today, via services
like HelloFax.

~~~
dghughes
Hospitals and law firms. I'm not sure why exactly something about physical
copy, an actual signature with a pen.

------
DonHopkins
I love the skeuomorphic BVVVVVVV sounds it makes when you tap the screen with
the pen to send a fax.

------
Gravityloss
Navigation graphics is still so much worse than in that ad.

------
agumonkey
other prior but non mainstream commercial products are demonstrated in many
Alan Kay talks (sketchpad and the other diagram/pcb cad tool I forgot the name
of)

------
xenospn
Great read but oh man is the typography awful on that site.

~~~
camillovisini
I got 10 ads, and they were all the same...

~~~
dorkandstormy
Yeah, no frequency capping. I got all Apple Card ads, which tarnishes Apple
Card brand value. This feels like a dollar store theoutline.com. Brutalism
doesn't work for long-form content, imho.

~~~
talove
The Outline and Input are owned and operated by the same company.

------
mlrtime
What is the 2020 version of "fax on the beach"?

~~~
thedance
Not sure but there have been lots of idiotic use cases in tech demos of recent
years. Consider the demos of the impossibly stupid Microsoft Surface Table,
which you must use to order cocktails at a bar, or browse photographs in a
really inconvenient way.

That was 2008. More recently, a rational and critical look at 99.9% of
proposed use cases for blockchain are things that nobody wants.

Another thing that literally nobody wants but people keep trying to market:
folding displays.

~~~
DonHopkins
Have you ever fixed dinner on your iPad? You will.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aEVGkkgVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aEVGkkgVo)

~~~
thedance
The future is here, and it's not an iPhone, it's a big-ass table.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY)

------
JustSomeNobody
Pre Randal Stephenson AT&T when they were still a tech company that, you know,
actually liked tech.

