
Atari Sketches of Laptops and Wikipedia from 1982 - maxwell
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2012/04/these_drawings_date_from_1982.html
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joshaidan
"we completely missed the most important aspect of the network -- that it was
going to connect people to other people."

I find this to be far the most interesting part of this article. Why was it
that they missed this aspect? Was it just something they overlooked, or was it
that people could not envision connecting with each other through technology?

Interesting to think about.

~~~
jarin
I think it's because back in the day, the mainframe mentality was predominant.
Sit at a terminal, make the computer do something, and get the results back.
In 1982, nobody thought email would become a mainstream form of communication,
and CompuServe had recently introduced the first chat room.

~~~
glhaynes
Also, TV and radio broadcasts formed a huge part of the mental model for how
media was created and distributed.

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bch
Wikipedia specifically is a wiki -- for all the pros and cons. These slides
don't actually hint that it's user createable/editable per se, any more than
radio is. It's an online encyclopedia/news service. Aside from that, quite
amazing.

~~~
seanalltogether
The collective knowledge/social aspect always seems to be missing from these
"glimpses of the future". Hell even as recent as the birth of youtube there
was skepticism over whether average people would be contributing videos or if
it would just become a repository for traditional publishers.

------
DanBC
"A father reminisces with his son about '60's Rock and Roll, calling up
footage from the Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show from the
Intelligent Encyclopedia"

They didn't figure on copyright being locked for very many years?

Also, the future is all-white. (Unless you're in Japan.) That wouldn't happen
today.

~~~
Tichy
I must admit, if I were to draw pictures of the future I might forget putting
black people into it, too. Obviously if I were to think about the future
somewhere else, I might remember, but where I live (Germany) it just isn't so
common to bump into non-white people. So it seems naturally that drawing them
wouldn't be the first thing I would think of.

~~~
Lost_BiomedE
It is a relatively new trend* in the U.S. to be very mindful of diversity in
PR and stock media. The trend has been to show equal representation of skin
colors instead of an accurate representation of frequency. Now, this is
starting to move to showing a greater number of skin color minorities than the
color majority, due to market research showing additional positive response
with the minority and neutral response with the majority.

*not near as pervasive in '82

~~~
Tichy
Makes sense. I wish I had more diverse friends, but it just didn't turn out
that way (yet).

~~~
mhartl
_I wish I had more diverse friends_

[http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/21/14-having-
black-f...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/21/14-having-black-
friends/)

------
AngryParsley
To give a sense of perspective: 2042 is 30 years from now. I'm _really_
surprised by how much they got right. Even the earthquake warning system:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_\(Japan\))

It's interesting to note some of the subtle mis-predictions. The blog post
already mentions the incorrect uses, so I'll skip that. Most of the technology
depicted would be considered very bulky these days. Also, many of the non-
mobile displays are small by our standards.

I wonder what mistakes our 30-year predictions will make.

~~~
pluies
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.

~~~
mjn
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>

~~~
cwe
Some video game companies still are:
[http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-
secr...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-secret-
hardware-project-wearable-computing)

~~~
iamdave
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.

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personlurking
Reminds me a bit of Slate's Lexicon Valley in their episode about Webster's
Third (edition dictionary). It was to be the end of to end all as far as
knowledgable authority goes. Want to know anything? Consult your trusty
dictionary!

[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/03/lexicon_valley_webster_s_third_the_most_controversial_dictionary_ever_published_.html)

edit: I believe it was Webster's Second that was supposed to be the 'cream of
the crop'. This is discussed in the podcast.

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DanBC
Here's a page from "Whole Earth 'lectronic link" describing notable networks
from 1988.

(<http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg>)

One reason why people may have missed the "linking people to people" thing is
the cost. I have no idea how a 1988 $ compares to today, but $11 per hour is
incredibly expensive.

~~~
huxley
Worth reading a bit about France's Minitel, it was an amazing electronic
network introduced in 1982.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel>

"Millions of terminals were handed out free to telephone subscribers,
resulting in a high penetration rate among businesses and the public. In
exchange for the terminal, the possessors of Minitel would not be given free
"white page" printed directories (alphabetical list of residents and firms),
but only the yellow pages (classified commercial listings, with
advertisements); the white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they
could be searched by a reasonably intelligent search engine; much faster than
flipping through a paper directory."

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jdkilby
Anyone else notice the kid in the classroom who is supposed to be
participating in the Mars landing simulation but instead has his helmet off
and is drawing an unflattering picture of the teacher?

That's one prediction that was dead on and will probably still be accurate in
thirty years: kids will always be kids.

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davidw
> The couple on the left is taking an on-the-spot course in wine
> connoisseurship.

"Look darling, it says I'm right, the wine that comes in bottles is better
than that stuff you get in a box!"

------
defdac
That looks like Notch standning by the bar.

------
derleth
So any kind of online encyclopedia is specifically Wikipedia?

An online encyclopedia is easy to predict; a _user-editable_ one is a lot more
difficult, and there's no evidence this source got there.

It's easy to count hits when you ignore the fact they're misses.

~~~
huxley
Geez, I'd be more charitable. Back in 1982, storage and bandwidth were so
limited that even online encyclopedias were pie-in-the-sky so even thinking it
was possible put you in pretty visionary company.

As for user-editable I can find two predictions which might qualify.

First, Vannevar Bush's Memex:

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex
and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and
decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents,
with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician,
puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with
side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ...
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it
with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any
time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular
epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in
the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common
record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they
were erected."

\-- As We May Think (1945)

Douglas Adams managed to predict the user-editable encyclopedia in 1982's
"Life, The Universe and Everything": "most of the actual work [on the Hitch-
hiker's Guide] got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into
the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing."

But he didn't predict an online one, in the series at the time, HG2G was a
local e-book or database-type encyclopedia that was updated via the Sub-Etha
network.

Vannevar Bush had some amazing insights in 1945 about the future direction of
storage:

"The Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A
library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk".

~~~
Argorak
h2g2 was also a user-driven online network/local encyclopedia that predated
the wikipedia launch by 2 years (according to Wikipedia ;)). So, Douglas Adams
even built it before Wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2> <http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/dontpanic-tour>

~~~
ralfd
Isn't it crazy that Wikipedia launched not before 2001? (And wasn't relevant
till 2003.) It is so ingrained in my Web habits that I have the feeling it
existed already in the 90s.

~~~
JamesLeonis
You hit the nail on the head! I thought of some other things that would have
floored me 10-15 years ago.

* Ask yourself what you used to search before Google? In fact, remember Web Rings?

* How did you share pictures before Facebook, Myspace, or Flickr?

* How about the holy grail of watching videos online before Youtube (Otherwise known as the dark ages of Real Player)?

* Remember when you had to print out Mapquest directions to somebody's house? God forbid you missed a turn! When was the last time you consulted a paper map other than for fun?

* How did you deal with the mountains of spam before Gmail, or any other industrial strength spam filter?

* How about getting the internet on your cell phone?

* When was the last time you had to pay for WiFi? Granted there are some holdouts, like airports, but WiFi is practically everywhere. If you can get into a Starbucks you have access, for free, to the internet.

* How about downloading a 10mb file in less than an hour? God help you if the connection was interrupted...

The things we do today are astounding in both the scope of their capabilities
and how much we take them for granted.

------
aiscott
I think this is pretty neat in retrospect, but it seems to me it didn't do
Atari much good.

Makes me wonder if all these "Vision of the Future" videos that companies put
out now are equally as pointless.

~~~
andrewfelix
I often think the same thing. Microsoft predicted growth in tablet computing,
but borked the timing and technology.

It's not particularly useful anticipating a brilliant piece of technology if
you can't capitalise on it.

~~~
jarin
Well not useful to you monetarily, but you can still enjoy the product that
other people got right.

Augmented reality concepts have been around for a long time, and whoever gets
it right will become insanely rich. The rest of us will get to enjoy it :)

