The future is never as impressive as it looked back then

[drwex]

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

It seemed appropriate to quote Alan Kay in the 20th anniversary year of the Knowledge Navigator video.

You've never seen it? Go ahead and watch it now. Try to imagine that it was made in a day when the most advanced screens were 640x480 and if you were lucky they had a whopping 256 colors. Some of the implied technologies (full-motion video, high-quality audio, ubiquitous high-bandwidth wireless connectivity) weren't available at any price. Even a computer that ran wholly on batteries, with a touch screen and voice recognition interface, was still pretty much in the realm of science fiction.

I remember seeing the video in 1987 and being unable to imagine how we'd achieve it.

Today it's all pretty mundane. Sadly, so are the topics of deforestation, carbon dioxide pollution, and so on. In fact we've outdone some of Kay's anticipations - we might even (finally) get flexible displays - while we've fallen short in other areas. Who wouldn't want an automated agent that responded appropriately when their mom called and that understood human conversation protocols well enough not to make idiotic interruptions? Maybe some day.

Still, when you open up your MacBook or imitator today I suggest a toast to Kay and the team that followed his vision into the future. Well thought!

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

My husband and I often talk about how much has changed since we were reading science fiction as kids. He's 45, and I'm 49, so we remember lots of old SF and pre-tech time. I remember in Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, the characters talk about "flashing a pack." We say "nuke" instead of "flash," but otherwise, microwaving frozen dinners is very close to that. An awful lot of stuff has been realized.

On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the Jetsons' flying cars. :-)

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Hm.

I dunno, I may be very well mistaken, but I *think* by then I was using commonly available workstations that had 1-million-pixel displays... I'll give you they were probably just 256 colors though, some even less.