Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000 (1988) | Hacker News Reader

Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000 (1988)

stephenwolfram.com

43 pointskerneis18 comments

>This rectangular slab will weigh but a few pounds, and have no buttons or knobs to play with. The front surface will be a touch-sensitive display screen...

Uh oh. Call the lawyers.

Text version: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/general/...

This is the winner of a competition organized by Apple in 1987 to design the personal computer of the year 2000. The section "The Machine" in particular is a surprisingly accurate description of current tablets.

I remember that competition! I started working on an entry with a few other people in school, and remember that my contribution was the idea that there would be separate processors for video and for audio.

Cool! Can I ask you for your predictions for 2038, and what you're investing in today? ;)

Alan Kay and the DynaBook was 1968 or 69.

Alan Kay was a member of the jury for this contest (as well as Ray Bradbury and Stephen Wozniak, among others).

Great, but when I read their PDF, I didn't see any context at all. I'm guessing this was an undergrad submission or something.

You probably skipped the abstract. (I agree that it looks weird to put extra-information in the abstract, but in that case it is done for a reason: the text of the paper is exactly the text submitted for the contest.)

Interestingly, Wolfram credits Steve Jobs with giving him the name for Mathematica.

He described their friendship in a blog post after Jobs passed away. I wouldn't be surprised if they had had a conversation about tablets during the iPad's development.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-a-few-memo...

The original article was published in CACM. The similarity to the iPad is uncanny. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.127....

While reading the article I personally found it being closer to the Newton for some reason.

An uncannily accurate prediction of the tablet computer as we know it now. These didn't appear in 2000, although by that time there were PDAs with touch screens.

They're not too far off on some things (SMP, the tablet being a synthesis of other devices like camera, audio recorder, &c), but other things never took hold, like using IR as a communication system.

The article contains pretty interesting predictions. Most of them have come true today. But, we should consider the fact that tablet cannot replace a personal computer for now.

“… PC has undeniable processing power that won't be available in mobile devices at least for the next few decades. This will stay true until we start to use another type of computing philosophy such as quantum computing.”

[http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=will-pc-and-consequently-softw...]

I'm not so sure. What's the difference for most people?

A keyboard? They make keyboards for iPads, Android, and Windows tablets.

The OS? That's not a terribly hard thing to change.

I would venture to say that a tablet could replace a laptop for 80+% of people. I type, browse the web, email, and program on my laptop. I tablet is more than capable of that. I'm not often doing heavy processing or graphic-intensive gaming, nor are many/most people.

They were 5-6 years ahead of IRDA, which was pretty much the wireless transfer/printing standard before Bluetooth came along.

I've used IRDA, I just couldn't think of it's name. It was a nice protocol. A friend and I would often use it on our Palm Pilots.

I think it shouldn't be surprising, or it shouldn't be called a prediction because these are the people who influenced enough to have Apple create the successful tablet.

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