USENET Messages from the 1980s on computer tech of the next ~20 years

[bob bobato]

Prevelance of electronic messaging?

Barry brings up many interesting points as offspring from the recent (ahem)
US-USSR flamage. I will address only one with anecdotal information. He
wonders, as do I, whether electronic bulletin boards, messaging systems, et
al will become commonplace and pervasive in our society. I would say a
qualified "Fer shur" but believe that it will be of a quite different form
than the current computer-literate population understands and that the
content will generally not be of great intellectual import (as if to say this
is)...
My conclusion, obviously, is that the more primal desires of participants in
the future electronic conference call may outnumber the merely
social/intellectual/etc...

Hypertext Usenet
Random PC musings...

Conversely, I will make the bold prediction that the Mac has peaked,
the novelty is wearing off and its non-standard environment and lack
of things like networking (regardless of all the attempts to make it
seem otherwise) will start to push people towards these standard
systems. The Mac/OS will become Apple's VMS and they will start to
struggle internally (just like DEC has) about what to do with Unix.
I expect to see MicroSoft put most of their software products into the
Unix system in the next year, with others to inevitably follow.
Products like NeXT will probably make all this even more clear (if
NeXT is ever released, I don't know enough about it to really predict
whether it will be a success, it's not clear Steve Jobs does
either...)
Where does all this leave OS/2 (half an operating system)? It will
enjoy some popularity no doubt, but I hardly expect anything exciting
or interesting to come out of it. There will always be a market for
grey-flannel computing.

Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future

The information age will revolutionize agriculture and industry just as
industry revolutionized agriculture one hundred years ago. Industry gave to
the farmer the reaper, cotton gin, and a myriad of other products which
made his job easier. Food production went up an order of magnitude and by
the law of supply and demand, food became less valuable and farming became
less profitable.
The industrial age was characterized by machines that took a lot of
manual labor out of the hands of people. The information age will be
charcterized by machines that will take over mental tasks now accomplished
by people.

What to do with all those MIPS

I wanted to raise a question about how rapid increases in compute
power available to individual users will affect the way we use
computers...
A few years ago the compute resources available to a single user
may have been 1 or 2 MIPS and a few 10's of megabytes of virtual
address space. A few years from now a typical user will have 100
MIPS and a seamless virtual address space of gigabytes, not to
mention decent graphics, for a change. A transparent heterogeneous
CPU-environment will round out the improvements
I was wondering whether any of this will change the way we use com-
puters or the kinds of things we do with them. Most of what I've
seen so far is people doing the Same Old Things, just faster. Now
we can ray-trace an image in 5 minutes that used to take an hour; now
we can do a circuit simulation in an hour that used to run overnight;
now we can do a 75-compile 'build' in 5 minutes that used to take hours,
etc.

Spoiler :

Yeah, I kinda think you're on to something there. The decline in price
of computer hardware continues. Micros in the home are coming to have
more and more useful and usable computing power.
As an example, I am writing this on an IBM AT in my living room. As I
write, a uucp mailer is running in the background importing news from a
Vax at the university. But I still have enough memory and a spare modem
and com port so I can shell out of emacs here and fetch data from one of
thousands of computers around the world for which I have phone numbers
and log-on scripts.
This is a home computer. When the task in the background is not
exchanging mail and news with other computers it is open for the general
modem owning public to call up and read news, up or download files, or
whatever.
Again, this is a home computer. While it probably is slightly
heavier-duty than the average home computer, with 1Mb RAM and 60Mb hard
disk, it is by no means a remarkable or unusual machine. Perhaps the
software is remarkable. It is all experimental, beta-test and whatnot,
with a tendency toward instability and the odd bug -- but -- it has
completely displaced the TV since newsgroups are so much more
interesting. And, with access to the library card-catalogue by modem and
the IPS news service, it is getting to the point of replacing the
newspaper and it has replaced a lot of research hours in the library.
As mass storage devices continue to decline in price, and achieve orders
of magnitude leaps in cpacity, we are rapidly approaching the point
where the entire information economy could be conducted at a computer
terminal in the home. Newspapers, books, magazines, television -- all
can be delivered on data lines and stored on magentic media and
displayed on a graphics monitor.
This is the home entertainment centre of the future. But it is a very
different sort of home entertainment centre. More than just a recipient
of a stream of data, as a TV is, it can store, process sort, correlate
that data, and allow you to immediately respond, send and receive mail,
pass on interesting documents, or fire off a complaint to the Prime
Minister.
I suspect that the biggest impact computers will have on society as a
whole in the next 25 years will be in transforming the home and the
information industry by putting significant computing power in the hands
of everyone.
It was not very many years ago that Usenet meant a Vax, and hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Today, it is running on PCs. No
hardware revolution brought this about. Indeed, the software is all PD
or shareware. As it is perfected and moves beyond beta, the home usenet
site may not be all that much of an oddity.
Should be great fun!
Well, 2 hours of news at 2400 BAUD has arrived, and unbatching has
begun. In another 15 minutes it'll be done and I can play with all the
newest stuff -- and this message will be fired back out to the net.
It doesn't take many MIPs, it takes ingeneous software and a lot of disk
space.

The Ultimate Interface

Right now, all the current interfaces are loosely based on the Xerox
PARC model--windows, icons, pulldown/popup menus, etc. My question
is: what's next? Is this paradigm the best of all possible worlds,
or is there something even more flexible and easy to use? And if so,
what is it?

The Future of Networks

I can see two possibilities for bringing networks to the
average consumer: cable tv, and the phone system (perhaps
they will be merged in the future).

Happy New Decade!

Computers will become less and less interesting in and of themselves.
Computers will be seen as merely connection end-points (appliances, to
use Steve Jobs' term) in massive, world-wide networks. It will be the
networks which people will become obsessed with, how to get services,
new and amazing activities fostered by 50 million desktop computers
hooked up together in hierarchical nets, global nets. ...
Wide-area fiber-optic lines will be commonplace to all homes and
businesses. This will have been (surprisingly, to some) driven by
AT&T (and others, phone companies, BOCs, MCI etc) entering the Cable
TV business as operators, wiping out most current operators.
The programming, of course, will still be delivered by specialists
although small, specialty programming will be more commonplace.
Interactive TV will finally start to be introduced by the middle...end
of the decade. ...
Software will start to become obsolete in the coming decade, at least
in its current form.
Software will become a service commodity rather than a tangible
commodity.
When you call up a spreadsheet or word-processor or whatever it will
come whizzing in over the net from outside.
Your workstation will hold mostly (personal) data and very little
software. You will rely upon high-speed network connections to
software development houses for your software. ...
[...]
>Wide-area fiber-optic lines will be commonplace to all homes and
>businesses. This will have been (surprisingly, to some) driven by
>AT&T (and others, phone companies, BOCs, MCI etc) entering the Cable
>TV business as operators, wiping out most current operators.


How I wish!!! Think of all the work we could do at home in
our 'jammies! But its going to be 2010 until even 5% or 10%
of American homes have the ``last mile'' installed with fiber
optics. Or so I've read.
[...]
Back to computers, I agree with Barry that sometime in the 90's
the information available in electronic form will catch and exceed
that available on paper, but I intend to have a large personal library
of data and programs, made possible by constantly improving storage
technology. Already in the 80's electronic data storage surpassed
paper in compactness and economy.
The ability to access and manipulate our "social database" by computer
will further accelerate the rate of technological advancement, as will
CAD tools for an increasing number of areas and "computer aided X" for
an increasing range of X.
[...]I think keyboards are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable
future. Once learned (and even if badly learned) they are still
efficient communications devices.
Voice &c will augment them just like the mouse has, but voice has two
major drawbacks. First, it's just not accurate even if well
understood, ever play the game "telephone"? There really is a lot of
bit loss due to slurring etc no matter what you do, raw facts get
miscommunicated. Second, and perhaps more importantly, you don't want
offices full of people talking to their computers, it would be chaos
or demand everyone have private offices, not likely.
[...]
o Pocket computers will generally use handwriting recognition on their
touch-sensitive screens, rather than voice inputs.
I would expect both at once. When trying to get a technical idea
across to a person, I talk and draw figures (on blackboard or napkin).
Entering text will almost surely be voice; editing may well be by
drawing standard proofreaders marks on the screen.
...
o The standard lap/desk-top computer will be 8.5x11x.5 inches. The
display will go all the way to the edge, so larger displays can be
built up by tiling.
This isn't a technological question, obviously, but I would also
expect pocket-sized (3.5"x5+") and computers built into a briefcase
(complete with screen-image projector for making sales presentations).
o Pocket computers + _partially_transparent_ eyephones + locators +
cellular networks will permit cyberspace to be overlaid on the real
world. This will permit virtual nametags (title bars for people),
virtual costumes, virtual street signs, and the like.
One of my fondest hopes, but it won't happen before 2000. There's
still too big a technological gap in front of a wearable (eyeglasses
weight < 1 oz) display device, and a usable system would require
too much integration from too many people at once. By 2000, expect
game arcades, high-tech work areas, and so forth to offer local
indoor versions with helmet-weight (>1 lb) technology--but nothing on
the streets.
o High-quality multi-media or hypermedia documents will prove to be as
expensive to produce as movies or grand operas. Only a few will be
produced before interactive virtual realities make them obsolete.
Rather, expect them to be produced as commonly as movies, distributed
as widely, and be in the same price range.

A couple of links and quotes to/from Usenet Messages from the 1980s and early 1990s, mostly about how the posters expected computers to develop over the next few years. In sum these predictions tended to be correct, though their projected dates are usually bit off - their ideas for 2000 better describe 2006-07, I've noticed. There are also many predictions about nanotech, biological engineering and AI which are generally off the scale. Besides these quotes and other threads about the future, there are also some very interesting threads about 1980s PCs filled with references to the USSR, technological change, 1950s childhood memories, and many words with 'hyper' and 'net' in them.
Just putting this awesomeness out there.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Old Usenet messages are a blast to read. Theres actually a list of interesting posts http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html

 

[illram]

Interesting stuff. For the hilariously wrong predictions I suppose I could just pick up a copy of PC World circa 1988.