I Invented the iPhone in 1977 | Hacker News Reader

I Invented the iPhone in 1977

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Clarke "invented" it in his 1975 book "Imperial Earth", calling it the "minisec":

"The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what can fit comfortably in the human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use at the end of the twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine what life would be like without it. Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. ... The device also had a dictionary function and could hold large amounts of data. It could also communicte with desktop console computers."

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267

    I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it.

[...]

    But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons – like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo and modulation.

Stanisław Lem, "A Return from the Stars", 1961

More: https://culture.pl/en/article/13-things-lem-predicted-about-...

I don't worry so much that we're living in The Futurological Congress once I observe that people don't seem to be in particularly good shape.

To quote the iconic line from The Social Network: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook." [0]

[0]: https://youtu.be/QqP38kZC1QA

In the 1960s, I read a book written for kids. I don't recall the title of it. In it, the boy receives a toy with a keyboard and a screen. He types in questions, and gets answers. One question he asked the toy was "what is the main export of Bolivia?" The toy writes to the screen "tin".

I type it into Google 45 years later, and it replies "natural gas, silver, zinc, lead, tin, gold, quinoa, soybeans and soy products".

I wish I remembered the title of that book!

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, (1958)?

  He snapped the POWER ON switch and, while he was waiting for the machine to warm up, quickly jotted down exactly what he wanted and found the code number for its place in the memory banks. Turning to the microphone, he said, “Address 21690. A report on the products and industry of Peru. Prepare and type information, pages 93, 94, and 95.”
  ...
  Irene pretended to clear her throat. She could remember feeding the information about Peru into the computer. Frowning with the effort to recall the details, she brought to mind the exact pages of the textbook: pages 93, 94, and 95. She pretended to read from the report but really began to recite from memory: “The products of Peru. Within the boundaries of Peru many minerals are to be found, among them silver and copper…“

That is amazing but I remember it being Bolivia! I did a google search-inside-the-book but "Bolivia" is not found. Neither is "tin".

But it does sound awfully close. Maybe the book I read is a knock-off of Danny Dunn.

Maybe. 60 years is a long opportunity for memories to shift their details while retaining the main thrust. Try skimming the book, perhaps other scenes and characters will feel familiar; skimming my own copy certainly did for me.

You may very well be right.

As I was a kid the last thing I could have wanted to learn was “what is the main export of Bolivia.”

However whatever the question is, the answer “tin” is nicely minimalistic so the drawing was surely clear.

As I recall it was a homework question the boy was faced with.

The reason I remember this bit of trivia at all, and nothing else about the book, was because the idea of such a machine that could answer questions was fascinating.

To this day, the only fact I know about Bolivia is they export tin :-)

Alan Kay might disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

I suppose this goes without saying, usually:

A sketch is not an invention.

Correspondingly, Star Trek didn’t invent the iPad.

You have to actually build a functioning prototype to claim to have invented something.

> You have to actually build a functioning prototype to claim to have invented something.

No. But that's besides the point. (See https://www.neustel.com/invention-process/prototypes/#:~:tex.... for example)

This guy wrote an interesting article when he was 15 that got a lot of predictions right. Enjoy it for what it is! He's not claiming he owns the rights to the iPhone.

Lighten up people.

I assume "invented" is tongue in cheek. A more accurate word might be "predicted".

Watching The Next Generation now one thing I note is that nobody ever does more than check a box for input (maybe) on the PADDs. The big question of data input was glossed over for the show. We also never see someone on their PADD digging at the screen to scroll it where it needs to be. Or since this was Star Trek, saying out loud "PADD, next page" every 30 seconds.

The author of the article laments the loss of the stylus, but I think he doesn't realizes just how much removing the stylus changed the interface. You can't do pinch or multi-finger swipe with a stylus. It also killed the scrollbar dead, which is something the stylus based interfaces were still clinging to.

That is precisely why I lament the loss of a precise pointing device.

Pinching to zoom is infuriating, and I'm glad that at least Android provides an alternative (double-tap and swipe up and down).

I also don't see how anyone can say that the loss of the scrollbar is a good thing.

> You have to actually build a functioning prototype to claim to have invented something.

Sadly our patent system do not require a prototype.

No, but it requires a detailed enough explanation that someone could build a prototype. And if your explanation wouldn’t actually teach someone how to build a prototype, then there’s a patentable difference between your patent and a working version, and the person who actually figures it out can patent that.

I feel like the 'idea' of the iPhone was in the global zeitgeist for a long while before it was actually made.

As I child, I can remember watching a program called "Beyond 2000". In one particular segment, it showed a newspaper being replaced with a digital screen that you could hold in your hand. That idea -- a screen that you could carry around with you -- seemed to be something we were always working towards.

I also use to watch that! was my favorite part of the week when I was like 10... wonder where one could find the episodes, would be cool to watch them now and reflect on how things turned out.

My father always had several small computers laying around when I was a young child. I really enjoyed the Tandy pocket computer. Even as a 4 or 5 year old, I could get it to do the "What is your name", "hello <>" program. It was a source of hours of enjoyment.

So what. I invented half of the patents being submitted by Apple, all in one short story I wrote in 1994.

I just hand drew a rocket to Uranus. I hereby decree I am now the inventor.

My son beat you by several years.

I sketched the XBOX in 1998. I even named it the “X-BOX” on the paper.

> No, really. I did.

> So I lied. I didn’t invent the iPhone; I invented the iPAQ (cca. 2000)

To save you the time.

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