Longform links to this “early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software … to a mass audience.” I’m a sucker for retrofuturism, and especially the present as seen from the past, while it was still the future. It’s hard not to smirk at the wide-eyed optimism, the fear of threats that never materialized and the glowing anticipation of innovations that fell through. Everything, even the language, seems dated: similes like “much as housewives swap favorite recipes” and “like a car without gasoline, a camera without film, a stereo without records”, and a whole menagerie of different ways to say “said”, always quaintly prefixed to the speaker’s name, like “cautions Software Publishing’s Fred Gibbons” and “says she” and “concurs Gibbons of Software Publishing”.
But more than that, it’s the predictions that date the piece, and they aren’t always the most stereotypically space-tourism-and-flying-cars-esque failures. This was written shortly after the introduction of the original Macintosh, and the graphical user interface as we know it was on the verge of breaking out to the masses, but our informed writers couldn’t know that. Thus they suggest quite seriously:
To reach a truly mass audience, however, software producers will have to achieve a major technological breakthrough. Instead of typing often incomprehensible combinations of symbols, letters, numbers and code words, users should be able to give commands to their computers in plain English.
The writers imagine that artificial intelligence is both a requirement of ubiquitous computer technology and right in the pipeline, probably ready in a few years. Instead, the future decided to sidestep the problem entirely by giving users point-and-click GUIs. (As they correctly predict, “[window managers] are expected to become increasingly popular in the next year.” You have no idea.) But not every prediction tries to solve a problem that would be completely sidestepped. Others simply describe a solution that parallels the alternative that eventually won out. One such example is Microsoft’s MSX architecture:
Kazuhiko (“Kay”) Nishi, 28, president of Microsoft Far East, the U.S. company’s sales agent for Japan, has developed MSX, a standardized hardware and software system for small personal computers. The norms have been generally adopted by 35 companies, which include such big-name Japanese brands as Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo and Toshiba; Philips of The Netherlands has also joined up. The MSX system is designed to permit programs written for one computer to run on all of them. The machines built to the MSX specifications will be unveiled in the U.S. later this year. Some computers will come equipped with high-quality printers and sell for less than $1,000, making them highly competitive with American products. If these machines are successful, they could create a market for Japanese software.
I’d never heard of it, which might have something to do with the fact that the problem of interoperativity and software compatibility was solved by the IBM/Microsoft and later Intel/Microsoft near monopolies. Other things discussed in the article: Babbage’s analytic engine, software piracy, computer nerds, the “single factor that could kill off the computer boom” (spoiler: it didn’t) and anticipated software “allowing data to be freely exchanged among” groups of computers (again, they’ve no idea what they’re in for!).
Oct 30, 2010