
“The Home Information Terminal – A 1970 View” by John McCarthy [pdf] - unimpressive
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hoter2.pdf
======
mindcrime
Two things never cease to amaze me:

A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960's and 1970's (or
perhaps, further back than that) were. John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart,
Vannevar Bush, etc... all of these folks saw so much of today's technology
landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or,
before it was practical / cheap / readily available).

B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960's / 1970's
visions. For all we've accomplished, there are _still_ things that Engelbart,
McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don't have yet.
Of course, some of that is down to political / economic issues, and not just
technological ones. For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in
this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still
isn't fully realized for a combination of reasons: technological, economic,
political, etc.

The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older
papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on. Heck, there's
probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of
McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other
luminaries of that era.

------
unimpressive
Paper written by John Mccarthy that shows the projected future in the 70's of
users remotely logging into large computers to use the Internet and
applications.

It's in the small handful of papers in this genre that make you laugh because
of how _true_ the predictions turned out to be rather than how far off the
mark.

From the abstract:

"This article was published in Man and Computer. Proc. int. Conf., Bordeaux
1970, pp. 48-57 (Karger, Basel 1972). It is interesting to compare its 1970
proposals with the current situation, 30 years later. I have decorated it with
footnotes commenting on the 1970 situation and making comparisons. Some of the
improvements advocated in the paper are still yet to come. I claim quite a few
prophet points for it."

Some notable mentions in this paper:

\+ Worries about ways that the Internet as we know it might not have happened.
(eg. Getting stuck in the compuserve trap.)

\+ Paid for publishing model that we still don't have because micropayments
are broken.

\+ Self publishing for authors in the vein that Amazon now allows

\+ The possibility of the system allowing for Orwellian editing because of
centralization.

\+ 3D printing/computer controlled manufacturing as a service.

\+ In-depth discussion of the realities of resource usage and costs of
computer hardware at the time of writing. (Eye opening if nothing else as to
how indebted we are to Moore's law.)

------
PaulHoule
It is forgotten that futurists around 1970 assumed that something like the WWW
was going to come in the early 1980s; for instance there was a lot of
excitement about two-way communication over CATV system that would not be
commercialized until the mid 90's. The real story is "why was it so slow?"
rather than the "it happened so fast" that people who lived through it
perceived.

~~~
astn
> assumed that something like the WWW was going to come in the early 1980s

It actually did:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)

------
RiversHaveWings
Witty as hell, to boot:

"...perhaps we may have to compromise with sin and provide a hard copy
terminal after all."

 _giggles_

"In the second place, you will see that the new information system will make
the public more responsive to the careful reasoning of you good guys and more
immune to the blatant propaganda of those bad guys."

Up with Good! Down with Bad!

(But seriously, futurism generally isn't this uncannily accurate. I know
hindsight lets me select the best predictions _a posteriori_ \- anyone know
any way of improving this? - but it's still interesting.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Up with Good! Down with Bad!_

Or, in 2015, Upvote the Good! Downvote the Bad!

------
Johnny555
What is the "laser file" mentioned in the article?

"Fortunately, much larger files are becoming available. The laser file made by
Precision Instruments Inc. is claimed to store a trillion bits and costs $
1,000,000."

~~~
unimpressive
I think it's this:
[http://www.google.com/patents/US3657707](http://www.google.com/patents/US3657707)

