That '70s Show: the Conference That Predicted the Future of Work (wired.com) 40
theodp writes: Over at Wired, Leslie Berlin writes about Futures Day at the 1977 Xerox World Conference, an invitation-only demonstration of the Alto personal computer system developed at Xerox PARC. It's an excerpt from Troublemakers: How a Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future. Both Berlin's book and Brian Dear's recent The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture are shedding light on groundbreaking systems of the '70s that were ultimately done in by the less-featured but low-cost Apple II (yes, $2,638 for a system with 48 kB of RAM was 'low cost'!) and other personal computers. Interestingly, Dear notes that the Xerox Parc and PLATO teams sent people out to see and learn and exchange ideas with each other over the years. Their interactions included 'tremendous battles' over the advantages and disadvantages of mouse interfaces [Xerox] vs. touch screens [PLATO], as well as plasma displays [PLATO] vs. other, cheaper display solutions [Xerox]. As is the case with many debates, both teams proved to be "right." Apple wouldn't introduce the masses to a mouse interface until 1984 [Macintosh] and a touch screen interface until 2007 [iPhone].
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Xerox were geared up to do R&D, not marketing, sales, advertising, customer feedback, technical support and all the other corporate divisions required by a whole systems manufacturer. The usual product development cycle is put something out to market, get customer feedback, look at what other competitors are doing, get one step ahead of them, add new features requested by customers and marketing, then repeat.
Just look at the size of the main chassis. How would you convince office departments that they n
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You convince them the same way you convince them to buy computers that filled a room.
And, those guys at Xerox, Bell Labs, Old IBM R&D are what I compare all the "innovators and disruptors" that Silly Valley likes to call every one and every startup to and why I'm a curmudgeon with today's entrepreneurs. Sorry, selling a hyped tent or rehashing ideas from the 19th century isn't innovative.
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Wasn't the Alto from 1973? Why did they wait four years to show it off? And I thought they only showed it off to Apple, privately? And basically sold the rights to the ideas to them because they couldn't figure out what to do with the expensive machine developed in their "dream labs"?
Also, "upstarts"? Is that the same as "startups"?
No, the Alto was kind of already in limited production by the time the Apple team got their tour of PARC.
Xerox did license/sell the rights to some of the GUI patents to them in exchange for $150 mil. (IIRC) in Apple Stock.
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Wow, congratulations! At last a first post that's relevant and has a good point.
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The economyâ(TM)s booming like never before
If you ignore anything before the 1970s, right?
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Casio wrist watch had touch in 1983 (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a Casio tc-50 calculator watch in 1983 that was touch screen. And not that pathetic bendy screen like cheap touch devices - this was a proper glass-faced capacitive touch.
I miss that watch.
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Casio technology is at least twenty years ahead of human technology. E.g. this watch that sets itself using radio all over the world and charges its batteries with solar power.
https://www.casio.co.uk/produc... [casio.co.uk]
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Casio technology is at least twenty years ahead of human technology.
Except for their pocket calculators, pretending to be able to work with complex numbers (but actually unable to do anything with them beyond the most basic arithmetics).
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Casio science has evolved far beyond the point where complex numbers are even useful.
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Justin Trudeau frequently reminds millennials of $(CURRENT_YEAR)
Rule of thumb (Score:2, Funny)
The computer you want always costs $2500.
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$2500 in 1977 dollars is like $10,500 in 2017 purchasing power. $2500 in today's money is $650 in 1977 dollars.
Other than buying name-brand server hardware and/or licensing, I'm not sure that I could spend $10,500 on a single computer system without going off the deep end on storage or going for 6 43" 4k displays or something.
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Surprised it took so many comments before someone finally stated the obvious.
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You mean this one [youtube.com]?
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I thought he meant this one [youtube.com].
I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are plenty of stories of technologies that were ahead of their time, but the market didn't exist at that time. On the other side, there are stories of technologies that arrived on the market late in the game and couldn't get past the incumbent who already had majority market share.
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And it's not like the Newton was the first device with a touch screen either.
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The future of work, eh? (Score:2)
So they predicted stack ranking, outsourcing, offshoring, open plan, and wage stagnation?
"right" spectrum disorder (Score:2)
Brain explosion time.
The right answer for the next three decades was a laser wheel mouse with two primary buttons.
The "right" answer for the next fifteen years was a 3-megapixel, 26" diagonal, 96 dpi, 4:3 aspect-ratio, monochrome screen with an 85-Hz refresh rate.