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.
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.