At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early.
I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed).
FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power.
I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior.
I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do).
I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh.
VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid.
As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO.
I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about.
Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.
Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.
Yea it is a device that goes on your face, puts cameras in your room, and creates a pseudo-reality for you. Who in their right mind would trust Facebook with that?
While I completely agree with you. I think it’s important to point out that if it wasn’t sold by Facebook, it would be 2.5x the cost and then most people wouldn’t touch it as it would be too big of an investment.
I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.
But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).
You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.
It is probably helpful to define 'commercial failure'. In the sense that it sold a lot of units, it is a success; in the sense that it made any money for the company which produced it, it is a failure. So, it could be taken different ways depending on how the term is defined.
Between Oculus, Vive, and other various competitors, VR has been successful in many ways that it wasn't able to achieve 20 years ago. If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone, sure. But I wouldn't call Oculus or modern VR a failure. It's a niche success.
>I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time
You can argue about the Mac but certainly the Lisa was. Early laptops like the Data General/One as well (although in that case there business issues as well).
As for streaming music, to go mainstream it probably needed cheap enough and fast enough cellular service. Of course, ripped, purchased, and umm acquired local copies of music also had a place once cheap enough portable devices with sufficient storage were available.
The company I worked for, had a Xerox system. It looked like an 860, but may have actually been more modern.
Now that was ahead of its time.
We also had Osborne and Kaypro computers, but the 860 was arguably the inspiration for the Mac. The operating system presented a mouse (actually, I think it was a touchpad)-driven, icon-based GUI. I remember seeing the “trash can,” on the bottom right (I think). I also seem to remember folder icons.
But that was from a brief, 5-minute (or less) peek, 40 years ago.
They didn’t let us mensch engineers near the thing.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass.
>Development began in 1979, and the main buyer was the U.S. government. NASA used it on the Space Shuttle during the early 1980s, as it was powerful, lightweight, and compact. The military Special Forces also purchased the machine, as it could be used by paratroopers in combat.
>Along with the Gavilan SC and Sharp PC-5000 released the following year, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project developed at Xerox PARC from the late 1960s. The Compass company subsequently earned significant returns on its patent rights as its innovations became commonplace.
I asked Glenn Edens, who co-founded GRiD, about a story I heard about the GRiD a long time ago, and here's the discussion:
>Not a solution for people who are sensitive to social status.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass. [...] I can't find a citation and don't know if it's true, but decades ago I heard a rumor that a Mossad agent's magnesium alloy GRiD stopped a bullet! Try that with a MacBook Air.
>Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form
>Abstract
>Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time. Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the 'GRiD Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.
>[translated:] The Grid Compass was made of black lacquered magnesium alloy.
>Among its most remembered features, there is the fact that the paint went away after a while, due to the weight and dimensions that did not allow it to be too delicate with its transport. And so the dull black splintered, revealing the shiny metal beneath.
>Grid Compass - Bill Moggridge Design
>The Grid Compass was a status symbol, the flag of that tribe of people who wanted to show the world that they can never really disconnect from work.
>Owning it was cool.
>But even cooler was having chipped it, because it was the unmistakable sign that one not only possessed that thing, but actually used it.
The GRiD was so well built, and they were so popular with the military, that rumor was totally believable.
This has some stories about spooky GRiD users, like Admiral John Poindexter, who was a bit of a hacker:
>Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD compass
>Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines. With its rugged magnesium clamshell case (the screen folds flat over the keyboard), switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and built-in modem, the hardware design incorporated many features that we take for granted today. Software innovations included a graphical operating system, an integrated productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, graphics and e-mail. GRiD Systems Corporation, founded in 1979 by John Ellenby and his co-founders Glenn Edens and David Paulsen, pioneered many portable devices including the laptop, pen-based and tablet PC form factors.
>Key members of the original GRiD engineering team -- Glenn Edens, Carol Hankins, Craig Mathias and Dave Paulsen -- share engineering stories from the Wild West of the laptop computer. Moderated by New York Times journalist John Markoff.
(At 32:37 they mention an external 5 1/4" floppy disk peripheral that was returned for service with a bullet hole, and the "Scrubbing Bubbles" software they wrote for the government to erase the bubble memory in case of emergency.)
Glenn Edens sent the following messages at 11:16 PM
Hello Don, I know that rumor, I can neither confirm nor deny :)
We got a lot of returned gear with bullet holes or shrapnel damage of odd kinds.
I doubt GRiD's use had anything to do with social status though - it was more about it was the first laptop, it was rugged (we over-engineered the heck out of it), it had an amazing software development environment (you could actually write SW for it on it beyond BASIC), usually folks rag on the price, however if you fully configured any other computer of the day the price was not all that different - plus no one paid retail in those days, thats what everyone forgets :)
I love all the references you found!
I'll also add that it is a myth that the military and Government were our biggest customers, they were about 25%, our biggest early customers were banks, audit firms, engineering firms, oil exploration, etc.
The first machine went to Steve Jobs (he paid for it, it was a bet he and I made), the second machine went to William F. Buckley (he paid for it as well). The one thing I regret is that we didn't release the Smalltalk system we did for it (getting a mouse was not easy in 1982, the only producer at that time was Tat Lam and all his production went to Xerox (Star prototypes as I remember). A funny story that for Apple to get a mouse prototype for the Lisa I had to go "appropriate" one from Xerox PARC - with tacit permission, everyone forgets Xerox was an investor in Apple (Trip Hawkins kindly tells that story from time to time).
So how are you doing?
Larry Ellison was an early buyer as well to use for a sailing race computer - I was told it replaced a DEC minicomputer that was being used onboard, saving a lot of weight and power draw :)
I can add it wasn't Mossad that I know of, it was closer to home, although I think we may have discussed that long ago - it was a US Agency :).
Don wrote:
So I’m reading between the lines that it DID stop a bullet, but it was somebody in the US, not the Mossad. Is that why Reagan survived his assassination attempt??! ;)
I still believe the social status was more like the unintended effect, not the primary cause, of people owning a GRiD, because they certainly were bad-assed computers.
Maybe MythBusters cold do an experiment to find out if a GRiD will stop a bullet. Hopefully not a working one though, those should be treated with care and respect and not shot at.
Wow it would have been amazing to run Smalltalk on that thing. As it was so inspired by the Dynabook, did Alan Kay ever get to play with one?
Glenn replied:
That’s the story. I never heard it had anything to do with Reagan though. Over the years we did get multiple units with all sorts of crazy damage, much of it was repairable, some was not.
Well we certainly did nothing to counter the image, although I think that really came later. In that time (we started shipping in 1982) even having a computer was a big deal no matter if it were an Osbourne or a GRiD. Although the Compaq’s et. al. sewing machine sized computers shipped well into the late 80’s. We really didn’t any serious competition until 88’ or 89’, so nearly five years after we started shipping. For the first 3 years we were always catching up to the backlog.
Indeed :). We definitely found ‘debris' inside the machines that were returned to see if they could be repaired, obviously it would have to do with what size bullet and angle of incidence.
The Dynabook was the inspiration for sure. Yes, Alan Kay played with several GRiD models as did Dan Ingalls. The Smalltalk implementation was on the GRiD was pretty good for the day, the 8086 being a real 16-bit machine made a difference. The Alto II was still a bit faster, but not by much. If a mouse were readily commercially available we would have shipped it. It was a little hard to use on the small screen so you wound up moving windows often.
Were the GRiD laptops, which I remember reading about in Byte Magazine back in the day, waterproof? I believe decades of experience with portable computers suggest that might be a more important feature than being able to stop a bullet. Depending on what kind of company one is keeping.
I've been revisiting it lately, and Byte actually contains a vast collection of things that didn't make it largely because they were ahead of their time. Great stuff.
Expensive and hard to upgrade are both separate from being ahead of your time design-wise. (Apple had healthy margins on Macintosh from the start, and the 128k no-slots aspects were both argued against by people on the team. I guess there's a sense of "ahead of its time" that fits, where Jobs consistently aimed for more "upscale consumer" type products but wasn't yet able to make that work for a big market.)
I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!
Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
footnote:
The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically.
And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.
Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted
Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously
trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink.
Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time.
Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM.
Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time.
Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony.
Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.
>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.
Stadia is a great example. I am still using it today before the shut down, it's amazing how it's actually got me into playing games again and it's fantastic for casual games with friends since everyone can play no matter there hardware and the multiplayer features are fantastic for this.
It works and it is fantastic, but it's ahead of it's time and most people don't know what it is. That and Google's mismanagement of the service, but if it was an accepted thing, Google wouldn't have had to push it ahead so much, but since it wasn't they did and they failed.
I don't know if we really pin the blame on that for stadia. Maybe portions, but I also suspect that a big reason for stadia's "failure" wasn't necessarily Google's/Stadia's fault. Lots of homes still have really bad internet connections. I tried stadia, I think the concept is great and most everything is there except I can't get a decent enough internet connection from any ISP in my area to make it usable at home. But I know people is places with really good internet connections and have heard nothing but good things about it before I tried.
As someone that had stadia and a good enough connection for it, the technology was honestly really impressive.
The problem for me was that it was yet another platform. I already have many games I'd like to keep playing, I don't want to buy another copy that can only be used on stadia. I don't want to buy anything on stadia and then only be able to stream it while I still have a gaming pc.
For sure I definitely see that, but I think Stadia solves a different problem. If you are already heavily invested in something like Steam and have the hardware, Stadia doesn't really solve your problem. If you don't have the hardware, maybe the computer you can afford is a $200 netbook, or you can't travel with your gaming PC, but can pay the monthly fee and occasionally the cost of a game, then Stadia could solve the problem, barring a good enough internet connection. Which when I tried it was my case. I didn't have a gaming PC, I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, so didn't really wanna dish out more money for hardware, Stadia could have allowed me to game on my M1, but once again, bad internet connection. How I play locally and have games on Steam since my job provided me with a home gaming PC and they don't care what I do with it so long as I can work from home with it (no company spyware).
But yea, if you have the hardware already, the value add wasn't really there. But for the broke college student, or broke adult who can't justify dropping hundreds/thousands today but can eat a few bucks a month. Or someone who travels often for personal or work, then the value add is there.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.
Most people still don't care about having email on their phone: that's not what they use their phone for most of the time. They use it for text chats, taking photos, playing games, navigating, etc. I'd say email ranks pretty low in importance.
Those other companies failed because they had clunky UIs and thought that most people really cared about typing emails on their phones; they didn't. Apple finally proved that people want something easy to use that does things they want to do (which isn't email).
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Well I think we might have different ideas of what "ahead of its time" exactly is. I would include - and I think I hinted at that with "released too early" - things that simply weren't refined enough technically, as well as things that relied on other technology that simply wasn't capable, widespread or accepted enough at their time.
So regarding Rhapsody for example, it was released in 2001, a time where the majority of people was still on dial up iirc, and even if you were one of the lucky ones with a DSL connection, you might've had a metered connection, so music streaming was just... ahead of it's time.
I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed).
FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.