A Trip in the Time Machine from 1990
Written by martyndavies on Feb 25, 2008 - 11:37 PM
I was recently clearing out some old books and magazines and came across a copy of Byte magazine from 1990. Byte was one my favourite magazines of the period, so finding old copies is always nostalgic and welcome. Looking back, computing in 1990 was an entirely different from the World today. We may have thought ourselves pretty smart at the time with most business users sat in front of their own PC, and we were often networked together with LANs, sometimes also connected to the outside world by (9600bps) modems that allowed us to connect to a series of remote bulletin boards, if not “the Internet” per se.
As a footnote, I remember the Internet “proper” arriving much later in my workplace, first via email, but then later gopher, ftp and finally web browsers. In 1990, I was working mainly with networking in the form of X.25, IBM SNA, LANs and the occasional dialup modem connection. Although TCP/IP existed at that point, it hadn’t really reached the “tipping point” to turn it into the World’s network foundations. Inconceivably, the first version of Microsoft Windows didn’t even have TCP/IP built-in, although various 3rd party IP stacks could be added on; the LAN world was dominated by Novell’s IPX, and IBM’s NetBIOS. Novell dragged their feet over making all features work with IP transport, preferring to enjoy their dominance with their proprietary IPX protocol.
One of the important networking customers of my firm back then was the National Bingo Game, who networked all the UK Bingo halls using a PC that “phoned home” to HQ using a dialup modem. With this slow connection (it might have been 300bps) it uploaded the evening’s results and also communicated the result of the night’s big game involving all the UK Bingo halls. Of course today such an application could easily be rigged up in a few hours using the Internet and any of today’s easy-to-use development systems: Java, Python, C# etc. So which ever way you look, networking did not yet permeate every part of our lives (or even commercial business) in the way that it does today.
One thing that drew my eye in this blast-from-the-past was actually a reader’s letter from a T Christiansen from Copenhagen, Denmark. 1990 was Byte’s 15th anniversary as a magazine, having started in 1975, back when flared trousers and sideburns were still fashionable for the first time. As part of Byte’s anniversary, the magazine had invited readers to send in their wish list for the next 15 years of computing, i.e. predictions as far as 2005. Mr/Ms Christiansen had responded with a list of 6 predictions, and the ideas are well worth looking at again in view of what happened.
“1. Greater portability of software across platforms”
You could argue that this has happened. In 1990 there was still a proliferation of operating systems including MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2, and various flavours of UNIX. The PC had already made its mark as a popular architecture, much cloned from its IBM beginning, and the 8086 chip family was already used widely used in PCs and beyond (such as the Sequent minicomputers). Convergence was already underway to the PC dominated (some euphemistically use the term “industry standard hardware”) world that we see today.
Software has increasingly become aligned with 8086 family processors, and on three operating systems: Linux, Windows and Solaris. This is represents greater portability and compatibility than existed in 1990. You might also say that the widespread adoption of C, C++ and Java has improved portability.
“2. Replacing the keyboard with a microphone”
Some software solutions exist, for example Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking, and these can work well for some dictation tasks. Speech recognition works at its best for a limited vocabulary (such as airline booking systems or banks), and training with a specific voice can help improve accuracy. However, replacing all keyboard input with spoken input is still a pipe-dream, because there are in fact two hard tasks here. The first is making software that can turn spoken language into text reliably, and the second is turning the text into appropriate action. Signal processing has come a long way, but computers can be confused by background noise and multiple speakers; they cannot process speech in the same way that humans do. Further, though, computers do not understand the context of human communication, and so they cannot use meaning to resolve unheard parts of the speech, the way you or I might do in a noisy pub. Not available today, or in 2020, I think.
“3. A high resolution (32bit), full-color, electroluminescent LCD touchscreen, with handwriting recognition abilities, to replace all pointing devices”
I’m sure that today’s large, flat, LCD colour screens would be far in excess of Christiansen’s 1990 expectations. In 1990, most screens at my workplace were still monochrome, and I don’t think it was until a couple of years later at least that regular users started getting colour screens.
In terms of touch screens, yes of course that technology exists today, but is largely still confined to specialised applications where a keyboard is not available (such as public kiosks) or with special apps where large on-screen buttons control a small number of operations and even the fattest of fingers can zone-in on them. Of course screen resolution has increased vastly from the 640x480 of VGA, or even 1024x768 of the IBM 8514, the pinnacle of 90’s achievement. More graphical density means that tapping the right thing with your finger is more of a problem.
We have seen stylus-touch systems, and I guess the state-of-the-art of touch control must now be the Apple iPhone, but somehow touch screens for mass-market PC users have never really hit the big time. Likewise handwriting recognition, tried on many systems, probably most successfully with Graffiti on the Palm platform. It works, but it’s a slow way of entering text, attractive on devices without a keyboard. Most two-fingered QWERTY typists find that they can do pretty well with keyboard input.
“4. Mass storage with gigabyte capacity and no moving parts”
Looking online today, the 8Gb SD card for £24 fits the bill. Very slow compared to hard disks, though, so those spinning parts still persist. The price-performance of hard disks is still compelling with 500Gb for £62 on sale today. At some point there probably will be a cut-over from hard disks to flash storage, but not quite yet.
“5. Integrated telephone and computer and a worldwide commitment to broadband ISDN”
Well, ISDN has more-or-less come and gone from a consumer point-of-view, with ADSL and cable technologies doing most of the heavy lifting during the ‘noughties’. ISDN fared quite well in some countries: Scandinavia, Germany, France, to some degree in the UK. Other places (e.g. USA), I’m afraid it never quite happened. The Worldwide commitment existed in terms of international standards, but commercial fulfilment was somewhat weaker.
However, the integration of PC and phone has arrived to an extraordinary degree with VoIP technologies . The growth of the broadband connection to the Internet has fired off all kinds of VoIP opportunities, most famously companies like Skype and Vonage. Essentially, telephony is now a software problem, and a whole raft of fantastic (and often free) software tools can be enrolled to help build solutions.
Of course what Christiansen could not know in 1990 is the scope and power of the Internet and what that would make possible 15 years on. It’s actually beyond the power of science fiction to guess the nature of change that can happen to a society, given radical new technology to play with.
“6. Computerized newspapers, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the like, which would reduce the cost of publishing and make it possible for hypertext-like cross-linking.”
The all-pervasive Internet has empowered (and perhaps disciplined?) the conventional media to publish their newspapers and TV and radio programmes online, where an additional or complementary audience can find it. Similarly dictionaries from all the biggest names in the business are online. Encyclopedias? Yes, they are there too, in fact isn’t the whole Internet an encyclopedia? Possibly more important is the user-generated approach of sites like Wikipedia, where the information is volunteered by many more skilled and specialised people than could be employed by the Encyclopedia Brittanica (and cynics would say that information is also volunteered by many unskilled fakers and the self-interested).
Publishing and cross-linking: again Christiansen is using that crystal ball really well, seeing the nature of the Internet even before it was born. Cross-linking is of course the heart of the successful Internet, dare I say Web 1.0, but isn’t it even more true for blogs? In the user-generated content world of blogs, there are many more hands to the pump, producing content, and leading the readers to a variety of sources, including other blogs as well as traditional sources like the BBC. Blogs have become a form of journalism in their own right: bloggers are often accredited and accepted as journalists; and in turn journalists for the traditional media often now reach out in their own blogs, in a complementary fashion.
So, well done T Christiansen, you make some interesting and pretty accurate guesses as to what the future would hold, despite a future landscape you couldn’t possibly have navigated from where you where. Thanks too for a short letter that gave us something to think about again after 17 years!
Actually, the changing nature of publishing in the Internet age has its own twist. It’s ironic that Byte itself, then a satisfyingly thick paper magazine, is now itself an online publication with no physical distribution at all. The Byte editor wouldn’t have liked that prediction.
As a footnote, I remember the Internet “proper” arriving much later in my workplace, first via email, but then later gopher, ftp and finally web browsers. In 1990, I was working mainly with networking in the form of X.25, IBM SNA, LANs and the occasional dialup modem connection. Although TCP/IP existed at that point, it hadn’t really reached the “tipping point” to turn it into the World’s network foundations. Inconceivably, the first version of Microsoft Windows didn’t even have TCP/IP built-in, although various 3rd party IP stacks could be added on; the LAN world was dominated by Novell’s IPX, and IBM’s NetBIOS. Novell dragged their feet over making all features work with IP transport, preferring to enjoy their dominance with their proprietary IPX protocol.
One of the important networking customers of my firm back then was the National Bingo Game, who networked all the UK Bingo halls using a PC that “phoned home” to HQ using a dialup modem. With this slow connection (it might have been 300bps) it uploaded the evening’s results and also communicated the result of the night’s big game involving all the UK Bingo halls. Of course today such an application could easily be rigged up in a few hours using the Internet and any of today’s easy-to-use development systems: Java, Python, C# etc. So which ever way you look, networking did not yet permeate every part of our lives (or even commercial business) in the way that it does today.
One thing that drew my eye in this blast-from-the-past was actually a reader’s letter from a T Christiansen from Copenhagen, Denmark. 1990 was Byte’s 15th anniversary as a magazine, having started in 1975, back when flared trousers and sideburns were still fashionable for the first time. As part of Byte’s anniversary, the magazine had invited readers to send in their wish list for the next 15 years of computing, i.e. predictions as far as 2005. Mr/Ms Christiansen had responded with a list of 6 predictions, and the ideas are well worth looking at again in view of what happened.
“1. Greater portability of software across platforms”
You could argue that this has happened. In 1990 there was still a proliferation of operating systems including MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2, and various flavours of UNIX. The PC had already made its mark as a popular architecture, much cloned from its IBM beginning, and the 8086 chip family was already used widely used in PCs and beyond (such as the Sequent minicomputers). Convergence was already underway to the PC dominated (some euphemistically use the term “industry standard hardware”) world that we see today.
Software has increasingly become aligned with 8086 family processors, and on three operating systems: Linux, Windows and Solaris. This is represents greater portability and compatibility than existed in 1990. You might also say that the widespread adoption of C, C++ and Java has improved portability.
“2. Replacing the keyboard with a microphone”
Some software solutions exist, for example Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking, and these can work well for some dictation tasks. Speech recognition works at its best for a limited vocabulary (such as airline booking systems or banks), and training with a specific voice can help improve accuracy. However, replacing all keyboard input with spoken input is still a pipe-dream, because there are in fact two hard tasks here. The first is making software that can turn spoken language into text reliably, and the second is turning the text into appropriate action. Signal processing has come a long way, but computers can be confused by background noise and multiple speakers; they cannot process speech in the same way that humans do. Further, though, computers do not understand the context of human communication, and so they cannot use meaning to resolve unheard parts of the speech, the way you or I might do in a noisy pub. Not available today, or in 2020, I think.
“3. A high resolution (32bit), full-color, electroluminescent LCD touchscreen, with handwriting recognition abilities, to replace all pointing devices”
I’m sure that today’s large, flat, LCD colour screens would be far in excess of Christiansen’s 1990 expectations. In 1990, most screens at my workplace were still monochrome, and I don’t think it was until a couple of years later at least that regular users started getting colour screens.
In terms of touch screens, yes of course that technology exists today, but is largely still confined to specialised applications where a keyboard is not available (such as public kiosks) or with special apps where large on-screen buttons control a small number of operations and even the fattest of fingers can zone-in on them. Of course screen resolution has increased vastly from the 640x480 of VGA, or even 1024x768 of the IBM 8514, the pinnacle of 90’s achievement. More graphical density means that tapping the right thing with your finger is more of a problem.
We have seen stylus-touch systems, and I guess the state-of-the-art of touch control must now be the Apple iPhone, but somehow touch screens for mass-market PC users have never really hit the big time. Likewise handwriting recognition, tried on many systems, probably most successfully with Graffiti on the Palm platform. It works, but it’s a slow way of entering text, attractive on devices without a keyboard. Most two-fingered QWERTY typists find that they can do pretty well with keyboard input.
“4. Mass storage with gigabyte capacity and no moving parts”
Looking online today, the 8Gb SD card for £24 fits the bill. Very slow compared to hard disks, though, so those spinning parts still persist. The price-performance of hard disks is still compelling with 500Gb for £62 on sale today. At some point there probably will be a cut-over from hard disks to flash storage, but not quite yet.
“5. Integrated telephone and computer and a worldwide commitment to broadband ISDN”
Well, ISDN has more-or-less come and gone from a consumer point-of-view, with ADSL and cable technologies doing most of the heavy lifting during the ‘noughties’. ISDN fared quite well in some countries: Scandinavia, Germany, France, to some degree in the UK. Other places (e.g. USA), I’m afraid it never quite happened. The Worldwide commitment existed in terms of international standards, but commercial fulfilment was somewhat weaker.
However, the integration of PC and phone has arrived to an extraordinary degree with VoIP technologies . The growth of the broadband connection to the Internet has fired off all kinds of VoIP opportunities, most famously companies like Skype and Vonage. Essentially, telephony is now a software problem, and a whole raft of fantastic (and often free) software tools can be enrolled to help build solutions.
Of course what Christiansen could not know in 1990 is the scope and power of the Internet and what that would make possible 15 years on. It’s actually beyond the power of science fiction to guess the nature of change that can happen to a society, given radical new technology to play with.
“6. Computerized newspapers, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the like, which would reduce the cost of publishing and make it possible for hypertext-like cross-linking.”
The all-pervasive Internet has empowered (and perhaps disciplined?) the conventional media to publish their newspapers and TV and radio programmes online, where an additional or complementary audience can find it. Similarly dictionaries from all the biggest names in the business are online. Encyclopedias? Yes, they are there too, in fact isn’t the whole Internet an encyclopedia? Possibly more important is the user-generated approach of sites like Wikipedia, where the information is volunteered by many more skilled and specialised people than could be employed by the Encyclopedia Brittanica (and cynics would say that information is also volunteered by many unskilled fakers and the self-interested).
Publishing and cross-linking: again Christiansen is using that crystal ball really well, seeing the nature of the Internet even before it was born. Cross-linking is of course the heart of the successful Internet, dare I say Web 1.0, but isn’t it even more true for blogs? In the user-generated content world of blogs, there are many more hands to the pump, producing content, and leading the readers to a variety of sources, including other blogs as well as traditional sources like the BBC. Blogs have become a form of journalism in their own right: bloggers are often accredited and accepted as journalists; and in turn journalists for the traditional media often now reach out in their own blogs, in a complementary fashion.
So, well done T Christiansen, you make some interesting and pretty accurate guesses as to what the future would hold, despite a future landscape you couldn’t possibly have navigated from where you where. Thanks too for a short letter that gave us something to think about again after 17 years!
Actually, the changing nature of publishing in the Internet age has its own twist. It’s ironic that Byte itself, then a satisfyingly thick paper magazine, is now itself an online publication with no physical distribution at all. The Byte editor wouldn’t have liked that prediction.
Reply from ianplain on Feb 25, 2008 - 11:47 PM
Ian
Reply from dean on Feb 26, 2008 - 10:14 PM
| Quote: |
| Computerized newspapers, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the like, which would reduce the cost of publishing and make it possible for hypertext-like cross-linking |
That was much less obvious 18 years ago. Interesting foresight.
| Quote: |
| Computerised newspapers |
http://www.thetimesonline.co.uk
| Quote: |
| Books |
http://books.google.com/
| Quote: |
| dictionaries |
http://www.dictionary.com
| Quote: |
| encyclopedias |
http://www.wikipedia.org
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