
What happened to the laptop computer? (1985) - denzil_correa
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/business/the-executive-computer.html
======
rayiner
Not a great example of a wrong prediction, IMHO. People did never end up
taking laptops fishing. Tablets, ebooks, and cell phones are fundamentally
different things that address the key problems noted in the article (screens
and keyboards).

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.

~~~
stevebot
"People never did end up taking laptops fishing"

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.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
All of those points were true, though. (Also #4, the displays suck.) The
author correctly called out all the reasons that laptops weren't popular at
the time. Maybe he didn't explicitly say "and once these problems are fixed,
laptop sales will rise," but you can read between the lines.

~~~
stevebot
If you read the last paragraph the author doesn't believe in the _idea_ of the
laptop and says they will remain a niche market. I honestly believe he
couldn't imagine a light, affordable laptop with features being desired other
than in niche settings like the military.

------
AshleysBrain
Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts:

\- 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.

~~~
_delirium
I would've even said ~15 years. I don't think I saw a laptop computer IRL
until 2001-02 or so, despite living in an upper-middle-class part of the USA.
When I entered undergrad in 2000 I'm pretty sure I had never seen one in
person. They started getting common a few years later though.

~~~
rgbrenner
They were already quite popular by 2000. In 2000 laptops were 25% of computer
sales (went to 54% in 2003). [http://www.geek.com/chips/laptop-sales-exceeded-
desktop-sale...](http://www.geek.com/chips/laptop-sales-exceeded-desktop-
sales-in-may-552696/)

~~~
_delirium
Interesting! Unless my memory fails me, I don't remember having seen one until
college (which I started in 2000), except on TV or in movies. And even then it
was rare; not many college students prior to ~2002-03 had laptops. Wonder why
not. I wonder what the figures would look like if you separated business and
private sales?

~~~
shouldbdan
I got my first laptop in 2003, when I went to college. I went to a lame state
school, nothing fancy smancy, and it wasn't an uncommon thing at all to have a
laptop. I didn't feel specially privileged, and I remember a number of people
that had them. One of the wealthier kids in my high school even had a
laptop/tablet hybrid thing a couple years before that -- one of those early
ones that had a full version of Windows and a stylus.

------
mblevin
Don't forget the author (Erik Sandberg-Diment) of that piece's FIRST comically
wrong prediction about the imminent failure of Microsoft Windows (and general
non-command line interfaces):
[http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-
windowing...](http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing-is-
questioned.html)

Before there was Paul Krugman writing "the internet is a fad" in the NYT,
there was Erik Sandberg-Diment.

~~~
p1mrx
Well he's not completely wrong. Displaying multiple windows is still possible
today, but most people would prefer to interact with their computer using a
tab-like model.

~~~
woah
With multiple desktops I almost never use windows. The only time I do is when
I am forced to use drag and drop for something.

------
thought_alarm
Somewhat related, here's a facinating look back at the portable computers used
by field reporters in the 70s and 80s:

[http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/291145401.html](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](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](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.

------
rwc
"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."

Amusingly self-serving from the NYT.

~~~
nl
I don't think it really occurred to most writers that a laptop was competition
for newspapers back then.

~~~
lotharbot
I don't think it occurred to writers that a portable computing device would be
able to access news article in real time from multiple competing sources. It's
not paper-vs-laptop that's the relevant competition, but NYT-vs-WaPo-vs-blogs-
vs-... that's the relevant competition.

------
daedecai
Favorite part:

"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.

~~~
ramidarigaz
The "sports or business section of the newspaper" is the internet these
days...

~~~
platz
"Its not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We werent
driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the
moon....They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t
do enough for us." [http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-
remark...](http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-
bruce-sterling/)

------
bluedino
30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop
computer. And it can be a $300 machine or a $900 machine the size of a piece
of paper with 10+ hours of battery life. Who could fathom a $4,000 laptop in
this day and age, much less whatever that is in today's dollars.

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.

~~~
nknighthb
> _30 years later you can 't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop
> computer._

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.

~~~
leoc
Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass
popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an
article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is
still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went
further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular
users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on
them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible
or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so.
It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just
largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic
prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the
Compaq LTE
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE)
began the modern notebook era.

~~~
nknighthb
> _But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who
> were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have
> little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not
> that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just
> weren 't interested in doing so._

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](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.

~~~
leoc
You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were
already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in
hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices? In fact the author
was even more specific than that, and suggested that the kind of people who
read the business section of the newspaper on the train, or the kind of people
who used to fly _to Comdex_ , would have no serious interest in using the time
to get some work done on a computer instead. If we need evidence on this,
here's a 2013 USA Today story
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2013/04/30/more-t...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2013/04/30/more-
travelers-are-leaving-laptops-at-home-when-checking-into-hotels-new-survey-
reveals/2119053/) reporting on a small decline in the "vast majority" of US
business travellers who travel with a laptop.

> 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.

~~~
nknighthb
> _You wouldn 't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who
> were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on
> aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices?_

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.

------
stevebot
This is an amusing bit of opinion. It is always a risk to show an opinion for
this very reason. At this moment, their are people siding one way or the other
about tech bubbles, smartwatches, drones and self driving cars. 30 years from
now it will be entertaining to see how it all ends up.

------
daurnimator
Interesting that this article reflects my current views.

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.

~~~
marvy
Um, why did you get it? If you already regret it, why not return it for a
refund?

~~~
daurnimator
Because starting this month I need to work from multiple locations; and one of
them isn't secure enough to leave a desktop.

I regret having a laptop at all (rather than the particular model I got)

~~~
marvy
Ah. That makes sense.

------
VJth
Not exactly wrong prediction though. It took so many years to get people carry
laptops to fishing. What is important is that the author couldn't predict the
advancement in Internet and Cloud computing which brought a whole new set of
capabilites for laptop.

~~~
visakanv
So the interesting problem/challenge is– there will always be advancements and
shocks and changes that we can't predict, that will completely invalidate the
assumptions that we build our predictions on.

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.

------
resoluteteeth
It's somewhat disorienting to read this, because it was increasingly wrong for
such a long time and then in a strange way has bizarrely become almost right
again in a limited sense. When connectivity and computers have become so
ubiquitous, most people hardly find it necessary to lug a laptop onto the
train to try to squeeze a few more minutes of keyboard-based work into their
commute, and smartphones and tablets fill people's needs for general
communication and entertainment so well. Even though travel is one situation
where many people might find it necessary to bring a computer, it seems like
laptop use on planes is way down, too.

~~~
jon-wood
It's by no means the majority, but in any carriage on the commuter trains I
ride there'll usually be two or three people on a laptop, generally with some
Office application open.

------
CurtMonash
His big miss was not to be more positive about the possibility that his
technical objections would be obviated.

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.

------
ghaff
This article popped up a few months ago too. The big problem at the time was
price. PCs, including luggable ones, were pretty pricey by today's standards.
The early laptops were even more do. You're probably talking $4K-$5K for a
configured system in 1985 dollars.

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.

~~~
jsprogrammer
The article directly addresses the issue of price. I think it's really that
most people weren't too interested in computers at the time. Even if you would
get a laptop for $5 and everyone could have one, most people probably still
wouldn't have regularly used one.

~~~
ghaff
It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were
by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email,
especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon
so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win.

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.

------
smoyer
It might be a good thing if we remembered how to leave our computing devices
behind on occasion ... I saw people texting during a wedding ceremony.
Apparently they just couldn't wait, or maybe the bride and groom were boring
them. Maybe they just came to instagram the food at the reception?

------
egypturnash
Summary: laptops have come a long way since 1983, when they were barely
functional. _1983!_ This is the year Commodore released what Wikipedia says
was "the first full-color portable computer", the SX-64[1] - a Commodore 64
stuffed into the same box as a 5.24" drive and a tiny, tiny CRT. 23 pounds. I
think my 15" Macbook Air probably weighs less than its _keyboard_.

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.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64)

~~~
nekopa
Hah! I hopefully still own one of those. (I left it with a friend when I moved
from the US to Europe 10 years ago, I really should look into how much it
would cost to have it shipped here.)

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...

------
paul
"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."

Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)

------
lvs
It is at least nice to see someone holding to account the "futurists" and
those who speak from armchairs and barstools and blogs (and newspapers) with
unlimited certitude in their predictions of the future, if that's the purpose
of the post. This was a somewhat pessimistic prediction, but the unbridled
optimistic ones should be held with equal skepticism. What will and will not
take hold in society is perhaps as much a matter of chance as of vision or
wisdom or foresight.

------
visakanv
It's always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek
article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1]
(amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative
comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston's "Show
HN: Dropbox" thread has a famous "Why would anybody need this, I can do the
same with <complicated procedure>" [3].

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.

___

[1] [http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirva...](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirvana-185306)

[2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-
apple-iphone/#comments)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

[4]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child)

[5] [http://paulgraham.com/altair.html](http://paulgraham.com/altair.html)

[6] [http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-
Incer...](http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-
Incerto/dp/0812979680)

------
chrisau
Love this line:

"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.

------
kenrikm
Even those whose job it is to get these things right routinely don't.

Example A:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U](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.

~~~
sumedh
Using Ballmer to make your point is like cheating. He was not a tech guy, I
guess that is one of the reason why MS went back to a techie like Satya.

------
copperx
I believe that if the Internet had never become popular, the predictions would
have been true.

------
edward
Previous discussion when this was posted 48 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056767)

------
DonHopkins
"I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing."

He also couldn't imagine the average user spending hours of their day on a
laptop simulating farming.

------
frade33
>Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such
lightweight computers had not yet materialized?

------
drKarl
Epic wrong predictions... like "640Kb of RAM will be enough for everyone"

~~~
stormbrew
Except not so apocryphal.

