A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960's and 1970's (or perhaps, further back than that) were. John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc... all of these folks saw so much of today's technology landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or, before it was practical / cheap / readily available).
B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960's / 1970's visions. For all we've accomplished, there are still things that Engelbart, McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don't have yet. Of course, some of that is down to political / economic issues, and not just technological ones. For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still isn't fully realized for a combination of reasons: technological, economic, political, etc.
The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on. Heck, there's probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other luminaries of that era.
Paper written by John Mccarthy that shows the projected future in the 70's of users remotely logging into large computers to use the Internet and applications.
It's in the small handful of papers in this genre that make you laugh because of how true the predictions turned out to be rather than how far off the mark.
From the abstract:
"This article was published in Man and Computer. Proc. int. Conf., Bordeaux 1970, pp. 48-57 (Karger, Basel 1972). It is interesting to compare its 1970 proposals with the current situation, 30 years later. I have decorated it with footnotes commenting on the 1970 situation and making comparisons. Some of the improvements advocated in the paper are still yet to come. I claim quite a few prophet points for it."
Some notable mentions in this paper:
+ Worries about ways that the Internet as we know it might not have happened. (eg. Getting stuck in the compuserve trap.)
+ Paid for publishing model that we still don't have because micropayments are broken.
+ Self publishing for authors in the vein that Amazon now allows
+ The possibility of the system allowing for Orwellian editing because of centralization.
+ 3D printing/computer controlled manufacturing as a service.
+ In-depth discussion of the realities of resource usage and costs of computer hardware at the time of writing. (Eye opening if nothing else as to how indebted we are to Moore's law.)
It is forgotten that futurists around 1970 assumed that something like the WWW was going to come in the early 1980s; for instance there was a lot of excitement about two-way communication over CATV system that would not be commercialized until the mid 90's. The real story is "why was it so slow?" rather than the "it happened so fast" that people who lived through it perceived.
"...perhaps we may have to compromise with sin and provide a hard copy terminal after all."
giggles
"In the second place, you will see that the new information system will make the public more responsive to the careful reasoning of you good guys and more immune to the blatant propaganda of those bad guys."
Up with Good! Down with Bad!
(But seriously, futurism generally isn't this uncannily accurate. I know hindsight lets me select the best predictions a posteriori - anyone know any way of improving this? - but it's still interesting.)
What is the "laser file" mentioned in the article?
"Fortunately, much larger files are becoming available. The laser file made by Precision Instruments Inc. is claimed to store a trillion bits and costs $ 1,000,000."
A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960's and 1970's (or perhaps, further back than that) were. John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc... all of these folks saw so much of today's technology landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or, before it was practical / cheap / readily available).
B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960's / 1970's visions. For all we've accomplished, there are still things that Engelbart, McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don't have yet. Of course, some of that is down to political / economic issues, and not just technological ones. For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still isn't fully realized for a combination of reasons: technological, economic, political, etc.
The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on. Heck, there's probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other luminaries of that era.