[HN Gopher] Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
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Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
Author : farmerbb
Score : 229 points
Date : 2021-06-07 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huebnerob.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (huebnerob.com)
| [deleted]
| guessbest wrote:
| Sometimes it is a bad implementation that scares engineers from a
| pioneering piece of technology. The windows 3.1 and 95 machines
| with pen computing for windows were quite impressive and had a
| long career in the medical field.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Boot 'er up and log into AOL.
| misterbwong wrote:
| For those that read this article, I _highly_ recommend you watch
| the 1998 COMDEX video it references. [1]
|
| It's both sad and amazing that much of what we use today was
| "coming soon" 23 years ago.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/CC1634COMDEX
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| It's really just a laptop without a keyboard, not really that
| groundbreaking. The inflation calculator puts the advertised
| price at almost $1000 today. So, probably the only reason it
| was "coming soon" was there wasn't much of a market. It's a bit
| disingenuous to pretend that "what we use today" is the same
| thing. Today you can get the same functionality for about $100,
| only with modern specs. Something of equivalent specs could
| likely be gotten for free in a landfill.
| prideout wrote:
| Interesting how the device in the video looks slightly
| different from the prototype. I love how the 3 LEDs in the top-
| right animate like the front of the car in Knight Rider.
|
| Brings back memories to see Stewart Cheifet giving an
| interview!
| vidarh wrote:
| In '98-'99 I was working on this one:
|
| https://metalab.at/wiki/Freepad
|
| While it's sad, one of my biggest lessons from it was that the
| greatest genius with the iPhone and iPad was understanding the
| market.
|
| Showing our tablet to techies worked great. People were excited
| about the hardware, about the fact it ran Linux, about it
| running Opera, and in general geeked out over it.
|
| But it was tethered to your house - few places had more than
| 9600 bps GSM data, so it used a DECT extension (wifi was not
| well established) to provide an internet connection tied to
| your house.
|
| And it had a crappy resistive touch screen. Low resolution. Too
| slow CPU. Too little RAM. Too little flash.
|
| Imagine a slow, heavy tablet with low resolution and janky
| touch that you could take no further than your garden (if you
| were lucky).
|
| So what we use today superficially looks like more modern
| versions (that bezel size...) of things on offer back then. But
| really a lot of the time while they worked well as prototypes,
| we just didn't have the sense (or opportunity) to say "the time
| isn't right for this product _yet_ , let's pick it up again
| when x,y,z has happened."
| buescher wrote:
| I remember the guys from ViA Inc (not the same Via as the
| processors) with their tablets tethered to their wearable
| belt computer. They'd carry the tablet in a thigh holster.
| ska wrote:
| > greatest genius [...] was understanding the market.
|
| So many people doing product development work fail to
| understand this to their detriment.
|
| You have to really screw up the engineering for it to kill a
| product; a mediocre implementation is often times just fine,
| especially if you are early.
|
| But if you are building the wrong thing, no amount of
| implementation talent can save you.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Newspad, envisioned in 1968:
| http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529
| jpfr wrote:
| There were only 9 years between the 1998 Comdex and the iPhone
| release in 2007. Of the 23 years we have had iPhones for 14
| years... Time perception is sometimes strange.
| sjcoles wrote:
| The 10 year span between 2000 and 2010 also had one of the
| largest relative uplifts in transistor density. Going from
| 130nm to 28nm was HUGE.
|
| I think people forget how quickly computers (especially in
| efficiency!) improved from just 2000-2005 and again from
| 2005-2010.
|
| Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. I think
| we'll see another 5 year growth spurt once stacked designs
| become common end of 2022ish. Though TSV vs EMIB is a whole
| other argument/ball of wax.
| Nition wrote:
| The 1990s felt similarly insane. In 1991 we we had
| Hovertank 3D, in 1993 we had Doom, in 1998 we had Half-
| Life, and in 2000 we had Deus Ex.
|
| Go back nine years today and things don't feel that
| different from now. People still buy Skyrim.
| gamacodre wrote:
| AR is probably in its "hovertank" era right now, after
| years of interesting but largely useless demos.
|
| Someday we're going to wonder how anyone managed to
| navigate or buy things in shops without realtime vision
| markup.
| fernly wrote:
| > 28nm was HUGE
|
| ... so to speak.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > Everything has leveled out a bit until recently.
|
| You can say that again. I'm typing this on a desktop PC
| powered by a Xeon that is approaching 10 years old and I
| don't have any complaints. The cost of upgrading it over
| the years has been modest.
|
| In comparison I have a Nexus 5 that is about the same age
| and getting modern Android on it is a pain, the processor
| really struggles and the physical device itself has seen
| much better days.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's funny how much Apple dominates our memory.
|
| It was only a couple years between the 1998 Comdex and when I
| got my first wifi PalmOS device with a color screen. At some
| point my handheld devices acquired the ability to connect
| directly to a cellular network, which was nice, and then
| became _really_ nice with the iPhone. But I don 't think that
| was ever a planned feature for the WebPad in the first place.
|
| The form factor is perhaps more interesting. We did have to
| wait 12 years until Apple legitimized the idea of a device
| along these lines that doesn't fit in a pocket.
| tcse_12 wrote:
| Isn't that the truth. I recently came across a meme that I
| suspect will drive this point home for many in this
| community. https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/mj9mim/loz
| _ww_decide...
| WalterBright wrote:
| I fired up one of my old laptops from 1995 or so. It was a
| cutting edge machine at the time, very nice. It seemed
| completely unusable today. The tiny disk drive, for instance.
| rootbear wrote:
| For me it's the displays. Old laptops had terrible TN
| panels and are painful to look at today. It makes them near
| useless even for basic web browsing.
| mschaef wrote:
| The one that gets me is that ENIAC was (mostly) live in 1946
| and the IBM PC first shipped in 1981.
|
| The upshot of this is that there's more time between now and
| the IBM PC than there is between the IBM PC and ENIAC. (18K
| vacuum tunes, filled a room, and and was programmed via
| physical rewiring, at least initlally.)
|
| > Time perception is sometimes strange.
|
| Agreed.
| whizzwr wrote:
| >there is even a .com button, so you don't have to type it out.
| 1998? Magnificent.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Taking that into consideration, and the many ideas that failed
| but are now succeeding, I wonder what businesses of today will
| fail yet be fully implemented in 20 years?
| grilledcheez wrote:
| It seems web pages loaded at least as quickly in 1998 as in
| 2021
| darknavi wrote:
| I was about to say it looked like they loaded much faster. I
| can't believe the bloat some websites have now.
| hathawsh wrote:
| From my perspective, screen technology was still being
| developed. As shown in that archive.org video, CRTs were still
| dominant at that time because they were much cheaper than large
| full color LCDs. Those who could afford a large color LCD
| generally preferred a laptop. Only after the price of color
| LCDs came down did it make sense for people to buy tablets.
| Precision multi-touch sensitivity also turned out to be a
| turning point in adoption.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I imagine software was a big deal too. It's important not to
| forget the magnitude of the advantage that iTunes delivered
| for Apple. I think there's a sound argument to be made that,
| without iTunes, that iOS devices would have never achieved
| the same success.
|
| iTunes provided a platform to get a critical mass of users
| accustom to buying $0.89-$20 digital downloads. Which made
| the transition of iTunes into an "app store" a minor one for
| users. They are there to buy music, but maybe in the future,
| they might find some apps for their iPhone useful.
|
| Once Apple had a critical mass of developers building non-
| trivial apps for the iPhone. It was a (kind of) baby step to
| supporting tablets.
|
| Lots of people tried to invent the tablet. I think they
| failed because of a lack of software, rather than poor
| hardware.
| rasz wrote:
| In a similar vein A Rudimentary Analysis of 1992 HP Omnishare
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27426134
|
| Windows 3 pen computing tablet for sharing documents over a phone
| line.
| nati0n wrote:
| Not the first time such prototypes have shown up in thrift
| stores. Notably this has happened with both Texas Instruments [1]
| and Xbox [2] prototypes before.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jrbnnh/i_found_...
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/t0d98/proto...
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Every time this happens I'm curious how it ended up there.
| Someone just bringing a box of junk to goodwill and actually
| not caring, or is someone having an "oh shit" moment when they
| read this because they didn't actually check the box that
| thoroughly? The sadder story, and the older the tech the more
| likely, is that the person who owned it isn't with us anymore,
| and this is just someone cleaning up their house.
| monocasa wrote:
| If I had to guess that Xbox was a take home unit for testing
| Xbox Live. The production date was about a year after retail
| release, and a home unit for testing an early version of live
| is the kind of thing that could end up in an ex's garage and
| goodwilled.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| Maybe they know it's a prototype and purposefully
| "accidentally sell it" just to see who ends up buying it.
| Especially if it's a prototype for an old tech product, the
| company that made it either doesn't exist anymore, or the
| device is so old they just don't care.
| flakiness wrote:
| I live in Bay Area and like visiting Goodwill.
|
| Although I haven't seen anything as cool as the one in this
| article, sometimes there are coffee mugs or T-shirts of failed
| startups and large companies that are gone long time ago, or
| lovely T-shirts that used to be sold in Cupertino Apple store.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Goodwill in the PNW is great too with lots of Microsoft "not
| for sale" items.
| HoppyHaus wrote:
| I was able to get a MS t-shirt with the Windows Defender logo
| on the front with "XP SP2" below it and "SECURITY" on the
| back.
|
| It's absurd and I love it
| incanus77 wrote:
| Not as much prototype stuff (at least not yet for me) but
| good stuff in Portland, too. I'm looking forward to getting
| back post-COVID.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Early last year they had a handful of what appeared to be
| pre-production Microsoft wireless display adapters at the
| Baseline location. None of the info printed on it matched
| retail units as far as I could tell.
|
| Prices have been crazy since they've re-opened. They have a
| bunch of Apple devices in right now, some company dropped
| off a ton.
| flakiness wrote:
| PNW?
| CrazedGeek wrote:
| Pacific Northwest:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest
| geocrasher wrote:
| The Pacific NorthWet. Er, West. Seattle, etc.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Pistachio Nut Waffles
| quwert95 wrote:
| "Pacific NorthWest". Basically, near Microsoft's main
| Redmond campus.
| bgoldste wrote:
| Pacific Northwest, in the Northwestern US. Where
| Microsoft/Amazon/others are
| based...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest
| [deleted]
| Far_Pig wrote:
| Pacific northwest (USA)
| fortran77 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNW
| squidbot wrote:
| I miss Mike Quinn and Weird Stuff. I haunted them in my youth
| and made all kinds of crazy projects.
| smoyer wrote:
| @gibberish - I've got a working PCMCIA Wi-Fi adapter in my junk
| bin if you're interested.
| deusum wrote:
| Here's hoping the kernel supports it.
|
| Linux wifi was extra iffy back then iirc. Might need a
| proprietary blob.
| floren wrote:
| An Orinoco card should be a safe bet (I've got a bunch
| stashed in the closet, if OP needed one...) but you'll also
| want to set up a separate wifi network so you can run 802.11b
| without exposing your whole home.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Cisco cards also worked pretty well back then too.
| satya71 wrote:
| I was at National Semiconductor at the time. National used to own
| quite a bit of the non-processor silicon on computers of the
| time. When National bought Cyrix, Intel made sure National lost
| all those sockets.
| leeter wrote:
| Seems like an LGR oddware candidate, along with other eyeopener
| devices like this.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Wow, forgot all about Cyrix (and Nexgen): Circa 1996 they were a
| legit threat to Intel, in fact, that's part of the reason why
| Celeron was born.
|
| What a find!
| nereye wrote:
| And IDT/Centaur's WinChip, (later acquired by VIA, which then
| shipped the C3, Nano, etc,).
|
| There is a good documentary on the Centaur, unfortunately no
| comments when it came up in HN 3 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17471685.
| evo wrote:
| I always find these orphaned technological branches compelling,
| in part, because it's so easy to point to the success story and
| treat it like it was a singular invention. We hold up the iPhone
| as a miracle but forget the Newton and PalmPilot.
|
| It's a good antidote to the narrative that either an idea is
| sufficient for success, or that success is a function of the
| idea. It's important, sure, but a fair bit of it is having the
| timing, resources, and luck to throw ideas against the wall until
| the world is ready for it, either due to cultural factors,
| missing infrastructure now built out, or other underlying
| technological evolutions meeting up together.
| pram wrote:
| Despite the hyperbole in the article characterizing it as the
| first iPad, this thing is literally a low-budget x86 laptop
| without a keyboard. I wouldn't exactly call it an orphaned
| technological branch.
| scarby2 wrote:
| Not just the Newton and palmpilot but the the PocketPC phones
| that came immediately before it.
|
| When the iPhone came out i had an HTC TyTN 2 which unlike the
| iPhone could do turn by turn navigation, send SMS/MMS to
| multiple recipients, and act as a 3g modem for my computer
| while i was traveling. I also adored the pull out keyboard,
| which until the advent of swype was by far the fastest input
| method for a mobile device.
| mywittyname wrote:
| And Blackberry 7200s.
|
| RIM proved that there was demand for smartphones long before
| the iPhone hit the market.
| gandalfian wrote:
| I had a remaindered tytn 2 as well. Even with a walk through
| configuring the mobile internet was a bizzare tricky maze. On
| an iPhone you just inserted a SIM, put in the APN and
| everything worked? I can see why the iPhone won.
|
| Not to mention the irony that Microsoft quickly abandoned its
| own platform so the only people keeping it a useable device
| were Opera, Gmail and Google maps. The Microsoft browser
| couldn't even cope with the Microsoft website.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I'd even go so far as to say the idea is the easy part. Tablet
| computers are an old idea, they had them on Star Trek TNG.
| Engineers have been trying to make the PADD a reality pretty
| much since the first episode. iPad wasn't the first attempt, it
| was the last.
|
| It wasn't even Apple's first. And unlike the ones that came
| before it actually did reasonably well at matching the
| depiction. It got the relative size, weight and pick up and
| just use experience.
|
| But nobody at Apple would have known the tech was ready if
| people hadn't been trying over and over to do it for the
| previous 20 years.
|
| New tech is almost never an original invention that came from
| nowhere. The internet was built on decades of research
| specifically into networking computers together but also built
| on almost a century's worth of development into the phone
| network. The experiments that lead to radar date to not long
| after radio became practical. The Wright bro's weren't the
| first to try an airplane, they were the first to make it work.
| and so on.
|
| Its the implementation that matters.
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(page generated 2021-06-07 23:00 UTC)