Accurate predictions from the past

[andrewducker]

From 16 years ago.  Nice.

Courtesy of singularity hub.

Comments

[astartesyriaca.livejournal.com]

All except for the AT&T part.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Not bad at all. The only major error was the idea that phone booths would be used instead of mobiles, but other than that, spot on. It's interesting to note that I'm fairly certain that an ad made 20 years ago would have been vastly less accurate (the lack of laptops or anything remotely like a commercial internet would be sufficient to screw up predictions). I wonder if the valid prediction time now is still 16 years or if it is sooner - that would definitely be a useful measure of technological acceleration.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure there was a commercial internet in 1993 - I tend to date that from 1996.

But yes, any further back and those predictions would have been much less likely.

I suspect the window of prediction is getting smaller, as we accelerate towards the rapture of the nerds :->

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Depends on what you mean by "internet" of course ... some of us were using IM (equivalent), exchanging files, and participating in forums in the mid to late 1980s on CompuServe, Prodigy and GENie (I never had a Prodigy account, I still have my CompuServe one though it's a total waste of money!). The internet itself may be dated back to the 1960s though the commercialisation for individuals really took off from the late 70s and early 80s. International diallup, X25 packet switching ... you couldn't run a webserver, but then there were no webservers until 1991 ...

20 years ago was 1989:
The Cambridge Computer Z88 was an A4-size, lightweight, portable Z80-based computer with a built-in combined word processing/spreadsheet/database application called PipeDream, along with several other applications and utilities, such as a Z80-version of the BBC BASIC programming language.

The Z88 evolved from Sir Clive Sinclair's Pandora portable computer project which had been under development at Sinclair Research during the mid-1980s.[1] After Sinclair Research's existing computer business and the Sinclair brand were sold to Amstrad in 1986, a new company, Cambridge Computer Ltd., was formed to continue development. The Z88 was launched at the Which Computer? Show on February 17, 1987.
There were certainly laptop computers in 1989 (ah, the innocence of youth!)

And having centralised document storage and apps (GoogleDoc equivalents), file download, chat sessions etc. were all there 20 years ago.

I know as I was using them on my Toshiba T3100e laptop at home in 1988 (and it was a two year old PC by then!)
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1284/Toshiba-T3100e/

Neuromancer, one of the most famous of the cyberpunk novels, was published in 1984, 25 years ago.

[andrewducker]

I meant one that was being used successfully commercially, and was mainstream - hence my later poll :->

I was using the mono BBS out of city.ac.uk in 92, as well as usenet, etc. So I knew about it. But it wasn't mainstream/commercial. D

emon Internet, for instance, was the first commercial ISP that I know of, and that wasn't running until 1992, and that was very much hobbyists and the like. Eternal September didn't start until 1993 :->

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Please define what you mean by "commercial" and "internet" and I'll see if I can find some counter examples ...

CompuServe was successful, commercial and mainstream, as was Prodigy ... so it depends on your definition of "internet".

Just because *you* weren't using it until 92 doesn't mean it didn't exist ...

... and, er, what later poll? I'm sure there is one, but I hadn't seen it when I replied here :-)

[andrewducker]

The internet: Prodigy and Compuserve both certainly started off as proprietary islands. They connected to the internet later, but initially they were entirely distinct. They were networked, certainly, but they were entirely centralised.

And I know the internet _existed_, but it wasn't being generally used for commercial ends. Certainly not before 1989, when the first commercial companies were hooked up to it, starting with MCI Mail.

The poll is here:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1649761.html
with followup here:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1650033.html

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

That's why I'm asking what you mean about "the internet" ... because if you mean the applications and culture and not the transport mechanism, then that all predates the web ... I didn' (and still don't) care what technology is used to get my email from a to b, but RFC822 (email) dates back to 1982 and I was using worldwide email and chat with friends in the UK and the US in the mid 1980s.

So I was replying to the "anything remotely like a commercial internet", which CompuServe, Prodity et al. were.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

No commercial WEB for sure: and I remember reading the occasional "This week's new web pages" on the Mosaic home page - and being surprised when they went to "Today's new pages" and then lost the feature.

But there was most definitely commercial email and pay-for services we could log into, in 1986....

(At work, so haven't watched the clip)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

In the US at least, both AOL (& Netcom, the company that I used) both existed (I got online in mid 1993).

[0olong.livejournal.com]

That and the fact that almost all the devices are about four times too big...

[andrewducker]

From more recent conversations upjournal comes this link:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/03/blindsided_by_the_future.html

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

Wow. I remmeber those ads.

Ekatarina

[darkoshi]

That voice sounds familiar. Probably some actor. I wonder who.