AT&T predicts the rise of Ebooks in 1993!

[Steven Lake]

http://epicwinftw.com/2009/10/08/win...l-commercials/

Found this while browsing the Epic Win site. It's kinda cool. If you start the video, it's the very first item that comes up. Yes, that's not how ebooks turned out, but it does foreshadow ebooks. What I find even more amazing is how well they predicted so many other technologies that we now take for granted, such as GPS, automated toll booths, online ticket purchases, video conferencing, biometric security, digitalized records, fully interactive touch screen interfaces, Video on Demand (ie, Netflix) entertainment right on your TV, remote learning via live TV, and much more.

[markuskane]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

http://epicwinftw.com/2009/10/08/win...l-commercials/

Found this while browsing the Epic Win site. It's kinda cool. If you start the video, it's the very first item that comes up. Yes, that's not how ebooks turned out, but it does foreshadow ebooks. What I find even more amazing is how well they predicted so many other technologies that we now take for granted, such as GPS, automated toll booths, online ticket purchases, video conferencing, biometric security, digitalized records, fully interactive touch screen interfaces, Video on Demand (ie, Netflix) entertainment right on your TV, remote learning via live TV, and much more.

Of course, you realize all of that is just hype, don't you? None of it will ever happen.

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/t...ernet-bah.html

[MV64]

Originally Posted by markuskane

Of course, you realize all of that is just hype, don't you? None of it will ever happen.

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/t...ernet-bah.html

Wow, that article is hilarious. He virtually predicted everything that DID happen and said there's no way it could ever happen. Classic! I especially loved the whole "the Internet will never replace a good old newspaper" and about how CD-ROMs will never replace other information. He may have been right about CD-ROMs, but only because they were replaced so quickly with flashdrives and harddrives, haha.

[Jack Tingle]

I remember those ads, and I also remember being pissed off that sheer blithering incompetence and lack of standards kept those thing from happening for at least ten years longer than they needed to.

- MassPort finally realized if they gave away the toll transponders they could collect more tolls with fewer workers--last year! (And no, I wasn't willing to pay them an up-front fee so they could lay off workers.)
- NH DoT finally figured out high speed toll lanes on I-95 might be a moneymaker--last year!
- My company finally followed up on a sucessful video theater we had in the early 1990's, but which was allowed to die--this year!
- Let's not even talk about ebooks. I was reading them in the early zeros, but switched from a PDA to the eventually superior readers two years ago. The K3 is really the first fully acceptable screen, IMO.

It's also ironic that AT&T isn't a big player in most of those.

Curmudgeionly, (or reverse-curmudgeonly?)
Jack Tingle

[SensualPoet]

Thanks. That Internet rant at Newsweek is astounding.

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

That's opening paragraph. The next word in the article was unfortunate: baloney.

Ooops. Fifteen years later ever single thing he "predicted" as outlandish is, in fact, commonplace ... no baloney, wichever way you slice it. Wikipedia; Amazon; the inevitability of democracy spread through online connections; politics, governing and elections absolutely impacted by the power of the Internet.

And the irony of ironies? Newsweek is about to merge with an Internet news publication The Daily Beast.

Update: Clifford Stoll, btw, wrote the book "Silicon Snake Oil" -- the Newsweek piece was an attempt to stir up interest in his ideas -- but as I recall it was not fondly regarded even in its day. However, it can still be purchased at Amazon.

[Ravensknight]

Conspiracies abound that public tech is around 10-15 years behind what actually exists. It actually wouldn't surprise me if that was true...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Personally, the funniest thing to me about the Newsweek article is the 3 typos that have been left uncorrected since 1995. Yeah, that's a bunch who have no idea about the strengths of modern technology.

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Ravensknight

Conspiracies abound that public tech is around 10-15 years behind what actually exists. It actually wouldn't surprise me if that was true...

Pfft. It's not just possibly true. It is *very* true. I remember growing up there was a friend of mine who ran a company (several actually) that produced some pretty awesome technology for the day. Well, come to find out if you went in the back room, they had some stuff on the shelves back there that's was so advanced, we still haven't reached a level in modern society yet where they could be used, either due to lack of supporting infrastructure, or associated technologies. Some of them required a variety of associate technologies (which we haven't even seen yet in general public use) in order to function that still don't exist to this day.

Heck, we were using Matrix and Minority Report (and to some degree Avatar) type technology way back in the late 70's, early 80's! And I'm not joking one single bit on that. In fact, his company wasn't the only one that had that issue. AT&T's Bell Labs was another one that was well known for having super advanced technologies they couldn't release for various reasons. But mismanagement and other issues have killed that so that what's left of Bell Labs is a joke today. So yeah, there's a lot of REALLY advanced technology out there, but none of it can be released yet because either A) we're not ready for it due to how advanced it is, or B) the supporting infrastructure isn't there yet, or if it is, it's not large enough to support these new technologies. Once it is, you had better hold onto your butts because we're gonna get slammed with some pretty incredible stuff.

[Nexutix]

The sweetness of Ad lies in "borrowed a book from thousands of mile away."
We now have to "buy" a book always to read it.

[Worldwalker]

I liked this one:

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

I ordered a pair of LeakFrogs from Woot! a couple of days back (water heater worries). I've been shopping for a new graphics tablet. I just bought a stack of ebooks, now snugly tucked away on my Sony Reader, in a matter of minutes. I remember the last time I bought airline tickets offline; it was 1998. I've never physically met a lot of my customers (and hadn't in 1998, when I was in a different business, for that matter). What's interesting is not that I bought this stuff -- there's a reason Amazon.com is highly profitable -- but what I was thinking as I bought it: Thank heavens I don't have to endure some idiot trying to read the box to me. I get frustrated in physical stores because I can't look up the specs of an item, and I'm reduced to what's on the box or the sign. No reviews, no discussions, just the box, and the minimum-wage "salesperson" who never got the Radio Shack memo about "be a salesmaker, not an order-taker."

What's funny isn't so much that he got things wrong, but why he got things wrong. He looked at the world of 1995 and assumed, for no historically valid reason, that that world would continue forever. That's what you get when people don't read enough history. They assume what they see around them has always existed and will always exist. It is what it is. Except, of course, it isn't.

There have always been people who didn't get it. There were people who said cars would never replace horses. There were people who said nobody would want to hear a movie actor talk. There were people who said heavier-than-air flight would never get off the ground. There were people who said TV was a pathetic imitation of radio. There were people who said no private individual could possibly have a use for a computer. There were people who said ... well, just about anything that could be proved wrong a decade later (or a matter of months, in the case of Ken Olsen).

"Of what use is a baby?" -- Michael Faraday

[K-Thom]

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Harhar, now this is funny! Hope he didn't quit his daytime job to become a fortune-teller ...

[ardeegee]

The Cliff Stoll article came up at Boingboing a while back, and he showed up to eat some crow. See post #34

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/cur...-essay-on.html