Not a great example of a wrong prediction, IMHO. People did never end up taking laptops fishing. Tablets, ebooks, and cell phones are fundamentally different things that address the key problems noted in the article (screens and keyboards).
The thing about predictions that gets ignored in retrospect is that there are always implicit qualifiers, because it's not very interesting to hypothesize about the totally unconstrained future.
"Whatever happened to the the laptop computer?" may be the HN headline here, and the 1st sentence of the article, but if you read to the end you'll see the following:
"Sales representatives, service managers, field auditors of all varieties have not been adequately served by the computer industry in pushing laptop computers. As the technology of these machines, particularly of their displays, improves, and as their price declines, a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold. And as the software that is capable of turning them into true satellite offices becomes refined, they will probably even be used - in fact, profitably so."
I'm hearing another prediction, that "a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold." if things like displays and software improve.
Not sure who is calling this a wrong prediction, but the article leaves us with more than a gist of laptops weren't working out for the common business in 1985, but they did not explicitly state that they were never going to work out.
Not really. The author's main idea was that even people who were already using word processors and spreadsheets would by and large not be interested in using them anywhere but at their office and at home, and that technical or price improvements to laptops would not change this. He returns to that thesis immediately after the excerpt you quoted. He really was just far wrong in this.
I suspect he would have been far less wrong were it not for the rise (much later than the article) of near-ubiquitous (in terms of places one might want to work) high-speed wireless networking. Not having to either to lug your data from desktop to laptop on physical media or to find a phone line to dial in to where the data lives via modem makes laptop use a _lot_ nicer than it would have been otherwise.
No doubt Wi-Fi helped to push laptops to a new level of popularity. But the laptop became a big mainstream success—as a fraction of the total size of the business PC market, which is roughly the yardstick the author held up—even before dial-up Internet and the WWW became popular. The Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE came out in 1989, and by the end of 1992 the ThinkPad and PowerBook were both with us.
You're right. For me, it does point to the fact that most predictions are wrong at some point, right at some point, and irrelevant before and after. The things that was a laptop then (5kg beasts like this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000) were nothing like today's machines. The T1100 seems to have been the first close thing.
It's impressive to think that it took 20 years from that article for notebooks to outsell pc. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sa... also fun to see how net books are a focus of attention for that article.
I wonder what level of accordance will be needed for a wearable to seriously compete with the current mode of computing.
The TRS-80 model 100 had a bit of a following of the 1983 crop as I recall. Journalists could write a story and file it by modem. The luggable Compaq had some use cases but I think was sort of a novelty. The others of that generation didn't really take off. The Toshiba T1100, might have been announced in 1985 but I think came out later. I remember them as a new thing after I started my first job in late '86. So I could see laptops as something that had been hyped in '83 and by '85 still not ready for mainstream adoption. Those later Toshibas were usable for Lotus 1-2-3 and text-mode MS-Word. First Mac portable around '90 was still not ready for prime time.
Yes, I used that TRS-80 model while haunting the stacks at the Library of Congress in the 80s. A lot of people would ask me about it. It was great for basic text entry, and made life so much easier. It was a fantastic tool for the time.
I always wondered how useful things like the Poqet PC and HP 95LX actually were. I remember seeing them in electronics stores and trade magazines, but they were really compromised in terms of resolution and memory.
I had an HP200LX (still have actually) and it was fabulously useful - a full CGA DOS computer that ran on 2 AA batteries for 40 hours and fitted in your pocket.
It had XIP (Execute-in-Place) applications built into the ROM which ran instantly, including Lotus 1-2-3.
I kept all my finances on the (built-in) Pocket Quicken and organised my Calendar, Address Books, Writing, you name it. Even printing was a doddle - I just pointed its Infra-Red port at the Office Laser Printer and it printed quite happily.
I used it as an e-reader, turning it on its side like a book, before e-readers even existed.
It was so fabulously useful I find it hard to believe that they weren't more widely used!
I don't think it's accurate to say that those early laptops were nothing like today's machines. For starters, we've still got laptops that are every bit as heavy as that PC-5000. I think it's just been a clear gradual trend of reallocating the bulk and weight from the under-the-hood electronics to the display, and the minimum size necessary for a functional machine has been steadily dropping.
The article starts off describing laptops on airplanes, the tag about fishing just seems like an exaggeration by the author. I would say that the author was wrong and this is a good example of a bad prediction. I mean, did you read the line about floppy disks? The authors points were that laptops are #1 to heavy #2 their software doesn't stack up and #3 their price is far to high.
All of the predictions are wrong, so I see this author as betting on the wrong horse.
All of those points were true, though. (Also #4, the displays suck.) The author correctly called out all the reasons that laptops weren't popular at the time. Maybe he didn't explicitly say "and once these problems are fixed, laptop sales will rise," but you can read between the lines.
If you read the last paragraph the author doesn't believe in the idea of the laptop and says they will remain a niche market. I honestly believe he couldn't imagine a light, affordable laptop with features being desired other than in niche settings like the military.
The prediction is in the title, and it's that laptops are a drying (or dead) trend because they are #1 too heavy, #2 do not have good software, #3 are too expensive.
I feel like we read vastly different articles. I read an article where the author discussed the limitations of laptops as they existed thirty years ago (when, I'll remind you, this[0] 12-pound beast was state-of-the-art), discussed some advancements that would need to be made for them to have more widespread appeal, and discussed some realities of how, when, and where people use computers that remain essentially accurate today.
If that was the case, I wouldn't have had a problem with the authors viewpoint but it statements like,
For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.
that really miss.
And then their is the conclusion, which comes after the author acknowledges the possibility of improvements in laptops.
But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.
What?! To me that just shows the author downplaying the idea of the technology. He just couldn't imagine any laptop ever being more than a "niche".
> "For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few."
I would say that 30 years ago, this was an objective statement of fact.
> He just couldn't imagine any laptop ever being more than a "niche".
And you'll see he was and is correct if you consider, as the author was, the usage model. People largely use modern laptops the same way they use desktop PCs. They simply transport them between their regular workspaces. Multiple devices have been collapsed to one, but the way people use them remains the same.
You are focusing very narrowly on the physical devices that the (then and now) inaccurate label "laptop" has been applied to. The article makes much more sense if you abstract to the concept of a laptop, particularly as pushed by marketers 30 years ago.
You are ignoring the line "But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets..." That's the part that's a prediction, which informs the tone of the whole article, which turned out false.
The false prediction indeed comes largely from the author's inability to believe that such technological advances could come, within only about 10-15 years, that would completely erase all the downsides he correctly identified (size, cost, etc).
I think we're less likely to make such false predictions today, because we've seen such rapid technological advances. This sunk in for me about 10 years ago, before the iphone, talking about digital book readers with a professor, who said to many students who didn't believe digital book readers were in our future: Imagine what you _would_ need in a digital book reader. Smaller and lighter than a paperback? Cheap? Can be read in sunlight? Because all of those things are coming, only in the next few years. Then do you think digital book readers will take off? Lightbulb moment.
Even though the author of this OP continues with "Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software...", I think if he really believed inexpensive, cheap, small, light, sophisticated computers were coming, and soon, he would have had a different prediction.
> You are ignoring the line "But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets..." That's the part that's a prediction, which informs the tone of the whole article, which turned out false.
I'm not ignoring it, see my other comment[0]. Consider lessening your adherence to excessive literalism, and then reviewing the author's points free of the bias instilled by the unfortunate label of "laptop" that has been slapped on devices that are rarely used on people's laps.
See if you can't bring yourself to understand that the author was right a lot more than he was "wrong".
Even false prediction have truth behind them. Just because the author mentions some truths doesn't mean that his conclusion is right. This is his case, and though he mentions some truths, his conclusion is "laptops will remain in niche markets".
I think the article is interesting irrespective of the "wrong prediction" aspect. I think it was asking a legitimate question at the time. I was only a kid, but my dad had a computer company and I remember those early laptops he sold. They were interesting, but they were limited in a number of ways.
Also, they took some weird turns. Manufacturers didn't want to try to cram standard 5.25" floppy drives (3.5" were not yet standard at that time) into laptops, so they came out with all kinds of weird proprietary drives. And then you had to shell out tons of money for those proprietary disks.
Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts:
- the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years)
- the price always comes down
- "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.
Maybe if you are using your laptop/tablet just for casual games and checking Facebook/Email.
As a person working on my laptop 6-8 hours a day I cant imagine how long it would take me to do the same on tablet.
Tablet/Phone can be a support to Laptop, that's it.
Tablets and phones won't usurp the laptop until they become self-hosting. All classes between mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers and ultimately PCs underwent this vitally important cycle.
At that point you might as well just carry around a USB flash drive.
The "computer" is the screen. People buy tablets and laptops because it's a portable screen (that incidentally has a computer inside). They want to be able to take their screen to a hotel room, airport, cafe, etc.
I would've even said ~15 years. I don't think I saw a laptop computer IRL until 2001-02 or so, despite living in an upper-middle-class part of the USA. When I entered undergrad in 2000 I'm pretty sure I had never seen one in person. They started getting common a few years later though.
Interesting! Unless my memory fails me, I don't remember having seen one until college (which I started in 2000), except on TV or in movies. And even then it was rare; not many college students prior to ~2002-03 had laptops. Wonder why not. I wonder what the figures would look like if you separated business and private sales?
I got my first laptop in 2003, when I went to college. I went to a lame state school, nothing fancy smancy, and it wasn't an uncommon thing at all to have a laptop. I didn't feel specially privileged, and I remember a number of people that had them. One of the wealthier kids in my high school even had a laptop/tablet hybrid thing a couple years before that -- one of those early ones that had a full version of Windows and a stylus.
I had a PowerBook 2300c with a dock in 1995 (10 year mark) that was very sweet. I used to stuff it in my bike pannier and take it back and forth between work and home. Color screen, MacOS 9.1. Not completely different from my current setup, with a laptop plus docking station.
Actually, the author makes some really good points in the conclusion, "The windows could be individually expanded, of course, or the text in them scrolled, in order to see more. But that took considerably more time and effort than simply thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Windows were a great idea until you compared them with the old-fashioned, uncomputerized desk, at which point it became obvious that they were simply too complicated to be dealt with efficiently. They made life more difficult, not easier, and they will continue to do so until a video display the size of a desktop can make visible a number of complete documents, each in its own window. That is something unlikely to occur, if for no other reason than cost, for at least a decade."
It's true, that windows really started to take off around 1993/1994, with windows for workgroups - coincident with higher resolution monitors. It's also true (to this day), that there are challenges with dealing with documents on a tablet/display screen, that don't exist when you have a sheaf of papers in front of you.
I personally haven't printed anything in 2+ years, but I know there are a lot of people who just can't handle not having everything at their fingertip.
All in all, no as bad a series of predictions as one might think.
Well he's not completely wrong. Displaying multiple windows is still possible today, but most people would prefer to interact with their computer using a tab-like model.
From the mid-70s to mid-80s the only option available to reporters out in the field was the Teleram P-1800, about which surprisingly little information is available.
It was essentially a CPU-less serial terminal with modem, CRT screen, and 2 kB of RAM. It included a rudimentary word processor (with text search-and-replace) implemented entirely in TTL logic. 2 kB pages of text were saved to cassette before being transferred to the home office via 300 baud acoustic coupler modem.
These rare and very expensive machines were eventually replaced by the small, simple, and inexpensive TRS-80 Model 100 portable.
Instant power up, no disk or fans, MS-DOS and word processor in ROM, 32K of non-volatile RAM, 40x8 character LCD screen, serial I/O, and a full-sized, full stroke keyboard.
It's interesting that it took us 25+ years to get back to that ideal portable form factor.
"On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper."
I don't think it occurred to writers that a portable computing device would be able to access news article in real time from multiple competing sources. It's not paper-vs-laptop that's the relevant competition, but NYT-vs-WaPo-vs-blogs-vs-... that's the relevant competition.
"The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Makes me think they knew something about work life balance that we don't.. or maybe it's just not work anymore but a way to live.
"Its not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We werent driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon....They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us." http://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remark...
30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer. And it can be a $300 machine or a $900 machine the size of a piece of paper with 10+ hours of battery life. Who could fathom a $4,000 laptop in this day and age, much less whatever that is in today's dollars.
Back then there was no connectivity outside of modems, color screens were a luxury much less something with the power to run a GUI.
The laptop industry went through so many changes and fads, even to the point of Canon building one with a built-in inkjet printer. It's amazing how far technology has come.
> 30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer.
You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop.
It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN.
I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work.
The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks".
But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.
Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.
> But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so.
As far as I can tell, he was right, and still is. I see no evidence that more than a few percent of such people do so to this day.
I don't see how that "disconfirms" anything at all. Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche? Because I don't believe that at all.
You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices? In fact the author was even more specific than that, and suggested that the kind of people who read the business section of the newspaper on the train, or the kind of people who used to fly to Comdex, would have no serious interest in using the time to get some work done on a computer instead. If we need evidence on this, here's a 2013 USA Today story http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2013/04/30/more-t... reporting on a small decline in the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop.
> Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche?
I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work, still less by people who were only going to use it at home. The Macintosh Portable was excoriated for its poor battery life, heavy weight and lack of a backlight because so many of the potential users wanted something to use on the road.
> You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices?
No, I wouldn't. Hotel room is more likely, but is just substituting for home/office.
Huge numbers of heavy office PC users exist. Only a tiny fraction use a laptop anywhere but home or the office, and a tinier fraction of those do so routinely. It is a niche market.
> the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop
There aren't that many business travelers in the first place. You're already looking at a niche market.
> I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work
My argument: On-the-go laptop use is niche.
Your apparent reply: Early laptop users used them on-the-go.
It's a non sequitur. That the ideal market for a product adopts the product does not mean that the market is not niche. The two have no relationship.
This is an amusing bit of opinion. It is always a risk to show an opinion for this very reason. At this moment, their are people siding one way or the other about tech bubbles, smartwatches, drones and self driving cars. 30 years from now it will be entertaining to see how it all ends up.
Interesting that this article reflects my current views.
I'd rather have a desktop at work and a desktop at home than lug around my laptop with me.
It's also more cost effective: I just regrettably got a new laptop (dell m3800) which is far over $2000, when an equivalently powered desktop would be under $1000.
Not exactly wrong prediction though. It took so many years to get people carry laptops to fishing. What is important is that the author couldn't predict the advancement in Internet and Cloud computing which brought a whole new set of capabilites for laptop.
So the interesting problem/challenge is– there will always be advancements and shocks and changes that we can't predict, that will completely invalidate the assumptions that we build our predictions on.
It might be helpful for prediction-makers to list all the assumptions we make when we're making predictions. I suppose the problem is that we always make more assumptions than we even realize.
It's somewhat disorienting to read this, because it was increasingly wrong for such a long time and then in a strange way has bizarrely become almost right again in a limited sense. When connectivity and computers have become so ubiquitous, most people hardly find it necessary to lug a laptop onto the train to try to squeeze a few more minutes of keyboard-based work into their commute, and smartphones and tablets fill people's needs for general communication and entertainment so well. Even though travel is one situation where many people might find it necessary to bring a computer, it seems like laptop use on planes is way down, too.
It's by no means the majority, but in any carriage on the commuter trains I ride there'll usually be two or three people on a laptop, generally with some Office application open.
His big miss was not to be more positive about the possibility that his technical objections would be obviated.
He was right about salespeople being the first big corporate market -- that was behind the rise of Siebel Systems.
He was right about widespread business use depending on people being happy (or happy enough) with the screens.
He was right about widespread use depending on the price gap vs. desktops being not too high.
His two mistakes were not foreseeing favorable answers to all those challenges, and not foreseeing the technology that made even handheld devices usable.
This article popped up a few months ago too. The big problem at the time was price. PCs, including luggable ones, were pretty pricey by today's standards. The early laptops were even more do. You're probably talking $4K-$5K for a configured system in 1985 dollars.
Early LCD screens were also pretty bad. Darker grey or grey. Or Plasma screens that cost more and had to run off AC.
It's easy to make fun of predictions like these. More interesting to consider the reasons they were wrong.
The article directly addresses the issue of price. I think it's really that most people weren't too interested in computers at the time. Even if you would get a laptop for $5 and everyone could have one, most people probably still wouldn't have regularly used one.
It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email, especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win.
I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.
It might be a good thing if we remembered how to leave our computing devices behind on occasion ... I saw people texting during a wedding ceremony. Apparently they just couldn't wait, or maybe the bride and groom were boring them. Maybe they just came to instagram the food at the reception?
Summary: laptops have come a long way since 1983, when they were barely functional. 1983! This is the year Commodore released what Wikipedia says was "the first full-color portable computer", the SX-64[1] - a Commodore 64 stuffed into the same box as a 5.24" drive and a tiny, tiny CRT. 23 pounds. I think my 15" Macbook Air probably weighs less than its keyboard.
I don't take my Air fishing, but I regularly take it out to the park and sit out among birdsong and trees to get work done. We've come a long way.
Hah! I hopefully still own one of those. (I left it with a friend when I moved from the US to Europe 10 years ago, I really should look into how much it would cost to have it shipped here.)
I could really be a super hipster if I could figure out a way to hook WiFi to it. Maybe a raspberry pi strapped to the side and hooked through the 232 port...
"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)
It is at least nice to see someone holding to account the "futurists" and those who speak from armchairs and barstools and blogs (and newspapers) with unlimited certitude in their predictions of the future, if that's the purpose of the post. This was a somewhat pessimistic prediction, but the unbridled optimistic ones should be held with equal skepticism. What will and will not take hold in society is perhaps as much a matter of chance as of vision or wisdom or foresight.
It's always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston's "Show HN: Dropbox" thread has a famous "Why would anybody need this, I can do the same with <complicated procedure>" [3].
It's tempting to think, "Ah, people! So terrible at predicting things." I think it's interesting to think about why that is.
The main problem, I think, isn't that people make wrong predictions altogether. It's that it's very hard to see how things will change and evolve over time, and how the ecosystem will change with it. The "One Laptop Per Child" idea [4] sounds a little dated and silly now.
I suppose if we just remember that progress is continuous rather than discrete, and that a lot of seeming limitations can be overcome with currently-unlikely innovations, then a lot of predictions will be forced to be a lot more precise.
Perhaps the Newsweek prediction might've been amended to, "In its present form, the Internet is unlikely to change the world."
The problem with predictions is– things rarely stay in their present forms, and the world around them rarely stays the same, either.
I think pg addresses this in his most recent essay, "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" [5] In his words– "they practically all seemed lame at first."
So we have to learn to live in a world where our initially valid assessments of a thing might become rapidly invalid because of change. And this is where Nassim Taleb's work about the problem of prediction [6] comes into play. Rather than trying to predict a particular outcome, it makes much more sense to focus on evaluating robustness and antifragility– "How will this thing respond to change? What are the potential upsides, what are the potential downsides? What will kill it? What will give it more utility?"
Even if the odds are really low that something might come around, if the payoff is high enough, it might be worth betting on. I think that's the whole point of things like YC.
"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Obviously it wasn't then, but we've certainly grafter ourselves to our smartphone keyboards now. So, it turned out the "microcomputer" industry was right. Just took 20 years longer.
The thing about predictions that gets ignored in retrospect is that there are always implicit qualifiers, because it's not very interesting to hypothesize about the totally unconstrained future.