[HN Gopher] In 1953 a telco executive predicts the rise of smart...
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In 1953 a telco executive predicts the rise of smartphones and
video calls
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-01-03 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kqed.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kqed.org)
| [deleted]
| swills wrote:
| Ironically, it's easier to make a Zoom call from a PC than a real
| phone call (from PC).
| productceo wrote:
| We have billions of people in the humankind. With a high
| probability, billion guesses every day will yield at least one or
| more correct guesses even if they are completely random. This
| person was in a position to guess not randomly but based on some
| advance understanding of the world and the humankind, so we
| cannot consider this to be surprising.
|
| What matters is not who predicts which future, but rather who
| creates which future.
| ozten wrote:
| I agree with the bias you highlight, but I'm not sure it is
| that exaggerated in this example.
|
| Today 2 Billion people have a platform (social media).
|
| The sample size of "telco executives making futuristic
| predictions interviewed in a print newspapers" was probably in
| the tens or hundreds of instances during this period.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Dick Tracy made this prediction in 1946:
|
| https://historydaily.org/was-dick-tracey-the-character-who-i...
|
| TV version:
|
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/its-about-time-the-computer...
|
| (I haven't been able to find when exactly they transitioned from
| radio to TV, but the rough idea of a "smart watch" was there.)
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Given enough people and enough years, every possible, invention
| will be predicted long before it is invented.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's what good science fiction is all about: stuff that is
| possible but not yet reality.
| dmd wrote:
| The Wizard of Oz uses a mobile phone in Tik-tok of Oz. (No
| relation, as far as I know, to TikTok.)
|
| https://measuredcircle.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/the-wizard-o...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course,
| pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development,
| the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as
| we carry a watch today."_
|
| Let's not forget that at that time in the early 1950s almost
| everyone who read the daily comic strip would have been very
| familiar with Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, which when drawn
| in cartoons appeared on his wrist at about the size of a normal
| watch. Later, this was upgraded to a video version.
|
| It's only a small stretch to add the other niceties that Sullivan
| mentions.
|
| I reckon the real surprise was how quickly that transformation
| happened when the smartphone actually arrived. It's unlikely
| that, say, several years earlier anyone would have actually
| predicted the enormous speed of the uptake.
| pseudolus wrote:
| There's a fascinating French video (1947) that presages
| smartphones and even hints at the accompanying distraction they
| bring about:
|
| https://youtu.be/ZKfOcR7Qbu4?t=30
| codeulike wrote:
| Handheld phones and video calls were easy to predict by
| extrapolation. No-one predicted Twitter, social media, usenet,
| forums and the idea of things going 'viral' because that requires
| a complete paradigm shift to 'anyone can publish'. It's a
| fundamental of how the world works now but it wasn't on anyone's
| radar 50 years ago as anything possible, useful or interesting.
| mullen wrote:
| I disagree that Usenet and Forums would not have been easily
| predicted. Town Squares, Public Forums and Message Boards have
| been around for thousands years and I don't see why anyone
| would have thought they would not have existed in the
| electronic space. Societies have always had 1 to 1 and 1 to
| Many communication, so it would be natural that some form of
| those would exist in electronic communication.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| >...and Message Boards have been around for thousands years
|
| This is naive of me -I had never considered that there were
| physical message boards with replies being tacked onto the
| original message.
| codeulike wrote:
| It would be cumbersome though - if one thread grows too
| long, someone has to re-arrange the whole board to make it
| fit etc. I imagine long conversations would be very rare on
| that platform. Message boards would mostly be one off
| messages ' bike for sale' etc
| codeulike wrote:
| Go and find me someone that predicted it then.
|
| Edit: yes 1 to many communications existed but they either
| required expensive publishing or they were tied to a physical
| location (eg a physical notice board). Internet forums are
| globally available for anyone who is interested to read or
| publish and that turns out to be phenomenally powerful but in
| a way that pre-internet people could not have conceived of
| fzzzy wrote:
| The WELL was available in 1985. One of the motivations for
| designing the original Apple I was connecting to mainframe
| based bulletin boards, in the 70s. CompuServe started
| selling dial up access to their service in 79. GEnie was
| available in 85. Delphi was available in 1981. Quantum Link
| was available in 85 and became AOL in 88.
| codeulike wrote:
| So those are proto-internet things so they would be
| similar. But still, they would have been niche
| technologies, so very different to what we have now when
| about 60% of the planet is online. I saw the early
| internet in 1993 and mostly it was just people talking
| about monty python.
| lostphilosopher wrote:
| "As soon as the Paris contract released the
| telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use, and was
| soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole
| world. The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was
| presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe
| made visible to everybody, and audibly discussible, too, by
| witnesses separated by any number of leagues." - From the
| London Times of 1904, Mark Twain
|
| https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-
| story...
| codeulike wrote:
| That's pretty interesting, thanks
| asdff wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_villa
| g...
| phs318u wrote:
| Wow.
|
| "So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move
| into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small
| world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and
| superimposed co-existence.... Terror is the normal state
| of any oral society, for in it everything affects
| everything all the time...."
| codeulike wrote:
| Ok yep that's along the right lines
| baq wrote:
| Maybe not back then, but I got distinctive usenet vibes
| back when I read Ender's Game (novel, 1985); nowadays I'd
| probably get reddit or facebook vibes. Not sure what parts
| of message boards concept existed in the 1977 version.
| watmough wrote:
| xkcd take on this that still cracks me up:
|
| https://xkcd.com/635/
| tomrod wrote:
| I sorta figured reddit was a more likely representation,
| especially with the rise of very good but amateur
| accounts like /u/poppinkream
| [deleted]
| aardvark179 wrote:
| I think there's a reasonably amount of science fiction that
| predicted that ideas might go viral and spread, but what is
| lacking is the idea of things like Wikipedia where there is an
| overall level of trust, but that certain subject areas will be
| much less reliable. The closest I can think of is Delany's
| Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand where some subject areas
| of General Information (a system run by the Web) are
| notoriously out of date, but were probably accurate when
| written. I have often wondered if Tim Berbers-Lee read that
| book.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| OSC's _Ender 's Game_ pretty much nailed blogging, in 1977.
|
| Though the OG is probably E.M. Forster's _The Machien Stops_
| (1909).
|
| (Animats beat me to that by 3 hours:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546)
| codeulike wrote:
| I argue elsewhere in this thread that The Machine Stops
| visits the idea very briefly but doesn't explore it in any
| depth.
|
| Enders Game sortof has blogging, but I'd say OSC failed to
| realise that in a world where everyone is blogging, simple
| tricks like sockpuppets were not really going to turn the
| world upside down.
|
| But I think I need to downgrade my assertion from "no-one
| predicted modern social media" to "a few people did imagine
| these things but the ideas weren't widely recognised as
| important, compared to flying cars and whatnot"
| svieira wrote:
| The pamphleteers would like a word with you - starting about a
| hundred years after the invention of the printing press and
| continuing to hold sway until the widespread acceptance of the
| Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars (of which
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(177...
| is one of the most striking older examples).
| asdff wrote:
| Stuff was viral as soon as the printing press was invented and
| one could distribute printed material and have physical
| meetings. Instead of logging into some radical forum, you'd
| just drop everything and run off into the woods with Charlie
| Manson. The stuff coming out of Donald Trump's mouth has been
| the same rhetoric that's been all over AM airwaves for 50
| years. Plenty of people figured this stuff out, earned
| doctorates in it, taught lectures in it, were hired on as
| consultants for it. This is why this stuff is so successful
| today, because propaganda is a long established science with a
| mountain of literature explaining just about everything you see
| play out today.
| codeulike wrote:
| By viral I mean accidentally viral - random things that
| somehow capture the zeitgeist - Jackie Weaver, Bean Dad,
| Bilal Goregen, Num Num Cat TikTok Chain, podcasts that
| suddenly blow up, etc
| Animats wrote:
| Read "The Machine Stops" (1909).[1]
|
| _Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like
| the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp,
| yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures
| for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical
| instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens,
| this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in
| the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the
| furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of
| flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a
| fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs._
|
| _An electric bell rang._
|
| _The woman touched a switch and the music was silent._
|
| _" I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her
| chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by
| machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where
| the bell still rang importunately._
|
| _" Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she
| had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew
| several thousand people, in certain directions human
| intercourse had advanced enormously._
|
| _But when she listened into the receiver, her white face
| wrinkled into smiles, and she said:_
|
| _" Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not
| expect anything important will happen for the next five
| minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I
| must deliver my lecture on "Music during the Australian
| Period"."_
|
| Sound familiar?
|
| [1] http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html
| Apocryphon wrote:
| _Stand on Zanzibar_ had the Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere
| televisions that inserted viewers into the action, though
| that's less content creation and more immersion, perhaps.
| codeulike wrote:
| I love that story but the passage you quote is akin to
| answering a phone call and broadcasting a lecture. The
| Machine Stops is prescient in many ways but it does not
| explore the ramifications of a world where anyone can publish
| Animats wrote:
| _" She knew several thousand people, in certain directions
| human intercourse had advanced enormously."_
|
| That's the key line there. A more highly connected world,
| intermediated electrically.
| codeulike wrote:
| OK thats something. But thats still not much like what we
| have today. Its like Forster extrapolated from his era
| and imagined people in the future having more
| aquaintances. But I don't 'know' any of the people I
| interact with online, or at least very few of them.
| Nonetheless meaningfull (and sometimes silly but
| entertaining) interactions occur.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It sounds like whoever wrote the script for Wall-E read that
| same passage.
| marbu wrote:
| Another good example of a prophetic short story is "A Logic
| Named Joe" from 1946:
|
| > the story is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of
| massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks,
| written at a time when computing was in its infancy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe
|
| Btw it's resurfaces on Hacker News every now and then:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=logic+named+joe
| mywittyname wrote:
| Meh, a lot of people predicted this. Two-way communication via
| radiowaves had been a thing for decades by this point and the
| first commercial transistor radio was already in development and
| would be released shortly. It was not a stretch to think that
| personal, cordless phone service could be provided by a two-way
| transistor radio.
|
| Edit: according to wikipedia, AT&T had developed and deployed
| car-based mobile phones in the late 1940s. So yeah, definitely
| not much of a "prediction" seeing as a phone executive would have
| been well aware of these developments.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| jrmg wrote:
| "Phone as watch" has been in popular culture since at least the
| 40s: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/dick-tracy-watch
| dwt204 wrote:
| I think that we have to ack the not so small role of ham radio
| operators. I was one as a kid, and that was all my Homer and my
| club buddies talked about. They took the impossible and made it
| happen much like the folks who population this ecosystem. That
| includes computers as well. I switched from a iambic paddle to
| send morse code to a ZX 81 kit that sent and received Morse ASCII
| etc, flawlessly and at higher speeds than I could send even with
| the paddle. In everyone of these technologies, you will see the
| hand of ham radio operators in the background, doing the
| experiments, making the rigs, etc.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Damn, it just blew my mind that video calls are now commonplace,
| keyword: Zoom...
|
| (Yes it was a thing even before Zoom or the pandemic, but I
| wonder what percentage of the population did their first video
| call in Q2 2020...)
| asdff wrote:
| What is also interesting is that in my workplace that already
| subscribes to microsoft and google business solutions, that the
| video technology of choice was this company no one heard of
| before that instantly became the market leader in this space.
| Talk about dropping the ball big time from FAANMG (or however
| many letters its up to now) who just let their cows be walked
| out of the pasture.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| It was odd how it just went (sunglasses on[1]) viral. But I
| guess Zoom didn't ask you to register with your email and
| make an account, and click the link on the email we just sent
| you, etc, so that's why someone who needed a quick solution
| just used that, and it spread that way.
|
| Maybe they can find user zero (there must've been that one
| person who wrote that first "Let's have a call on Zoom" with
| many outside their company, which introduced the app to many
| other people in other companies) and give him a big fat
| check...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uW47jWLMiY (loud)
| asdff wrote:
| I mean we bought enterprise zoom before I even heard of it,
| not just bummed the free version. Someone sold it to us
| immediately and we adopted it without trying out any of the
| tools already on the shelf that we also bought.
| dghughes wrote:
| Video for work, for meetings. Otherwise not so much.
|
| Back in the 1990s when when "eyeball cams" were new and black
| and white nobody wanted to make a video call/chat. Even now if
| I help someone with an app with a video capability I warn them
| their camera may come on and I may see them. People hate video
| calls.
| dekhn wrote:
| In the Idea Factory https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-
| American-Innovatio... the AT&T execs all have video calling to
| their homes. There's a lot of great stuff in there as well about
| how Bell labs helped build the first mobile phone networks.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Dick Tracy launched in 1931, and the dude had a video watch.
| Admittedly, I don't know at what point he got the watch though,
| so it may have been a later addition.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I recall the watch had two-way voice. Did it also have video?
| therealcamino wrote:
| You're right, originally it was just a 2-way wrist radio.
| Later on they made it a 2-way wrist TV.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| After radio became ubiquitous, the comic switched to 'two-way
| wrist TV'
| analog31 wrote:
| I have a self imposed rule about inventions, that probably
| applies to predictions as well. It's based on the idea that a
| patentable invention consists of more than just an idea blurted
| out by some manager (I was the manager when I arrived at this),
| but needs to be novel, non-obvious, useful, and reductible to
| practice.
|
| These ideas are usefully applied as a self discipline, completely
| aside of the idiosyncrasies of the existing patent system.
|
| Non-obvious means that a generally smart person could not have
| come up with the same idea by combining existing knowledge.
| Reductible to practice means you have to provide a recipe for
| actually making it. For all practical purposes, you don't know if
| it can be reduced to practice unless you've actually made the
| effort and discovered all of the gotchas.
|
| In addition, a prediction needs a timeline. "An asteroid will
| strike the earth" is an empty prediction without quantifying the
| time scale in terms of something like a probability per year or
| an expected duration.
|
| This is why I dismiss most futuristic predictions as not
| qualifying as predictions or inventions.
|
| I think my rule also works for disposing with giving managers
| credit for "ideas" just for showing up at brainstorming sessions,
| at the expense of the people who are actually doing the work.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I don't think that applies here! Bell Labs was working on this
| tech and had a device that would send pictures every few
| minutes as early as 1956/7. My dad was able to use a demo
| videophone in 1964 at the NY World's Fair.
|
| It was a real thing that AT&T was serious about. But for all of
| the amazing tech they couldn't make it a product that people
| wanted.
|
| I'd imagine that with the close relationship that phone
| companies had with the military, they understood how
| "addictive" and important mobile tech was. Think about the
| Soviet statues of generals holding telephones!
| kweinber wrote:
| As I learned from a smart trader: the right guess at the wrong
| time is just as wrong as a wrong guess.
| krab wrote:
| Exactly. I predict people will solve climate change problems
| and space travel will be affordable. A visionary!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well if you're wrong we'll be dead so win-win.
| rob74 wrote:
| Of course people in 1968 thought that space travel would be
| affordable by 2001, and people in 1985 thought flying cars
| and coffee machine-sized fusion reactors would be commonplace
| in 2015, so some predictions take longer than others...
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning.
| tomrod wrote:
| Tokenization of `/s` missing
| jacquesm wrote:
| Aka timing is everything.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Everything is wrong unless it's the right time I guess.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from
| https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/in-1953-a-telephone-comp...,
| which points to this.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Yes correct, I was reading Open Culture at your link, then I
| posted via bookmarklet, I'm a bit confused, don't know what
| happened, sorry. Anyway the url point to one of the article's
| sources, still curious to understand what happened.
| dang wrote:
| I don't know what happened either but it was a great
| submission and that's by far the most important thing!
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I worked for AT&T (Consumer) at HQ in then Basking Ridge NJ in
| the mid+late 80s. There was a third level manager who often spoke
| about the future. One of the things I recall was him saying
| something along the lines of "some day your number will follow
| you everywhere." Which wasn't even a reference to mobile phones.
|
| The marketing people laughed at him.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There was a period about that time (1980s early 1990s) where a
| number-forwarding service existed (uncertain of the name),
| advertised as being able to forward your phone to a restaurant
| or barbershop. The basic idea was that your calls could follow
| you around town.
|
| (Or be diverted by someone else, one supposes... WCPGW?)
| grouphugs wrote:
| smm11 wrote:
| Xerox, man.
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