Found Footage: Project 2000 from 1988 on the direction of computing

The WWW wasn't invented until Al Gore came on the scene...........

Sorry to be pedantic regarding the history of the World Wide Web, but the first web browser was originally created on a NeXT in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee.

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb

I worked for Apple when this video was created. WonderBear just saved me the time by correcting the point that the WWW was not released into the wild until about five years later. Hypercard was the tool that they were talking about then and we (Apple) were pioneers in producing hypertext linking tools for a mass audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercard

The limitation to Hypercard was that internet protocol stacks (TCP/IP) were not standard in computing devices yet although Apple produced a UNIX (A/UX) version of the operating system in 1988 that had native TCP/IP at the time and we where linking to email, news readers and gopher servers (see wikipedia for more on gopher protocol) in the early 90s, again before CERN released a browser for internet servers to unify hypertext coding on servers rather than on client computers as saved local files.

On the voice-only navigation perception. We (Apple) had touch interface prototypes at the time and much of the knowledge navigator video shows the idea of a number of input tools including voice, touch and contextual agents to navigate data.

The handheld devices shown in this video were designed to be a more powerful mouse like touch device that was linking to shared computing screens like the "black board" shown in the video. The idea was that there would be a virtual network of interface tools that connected to other computing devices, that there would shared data on the network and that data interchange like XML standards would make it possible to exchange data across heterogeneous databases.

We also had developed shared and streaming video technologies using QuickTime by this point so that we were already suggesting many of the tools that you now find in a $500 iPad would be the computing note book of the future. Alan was a leader at XEROX before Apple and envisioned these types of devices in the 70s (see Dynabook).

To paraphrase our (Apple's) IBM PC ad, http://thegreatgeekmanual.com/images/geekhistory/august/welcome-ibm-seriously.jpg - Welcome iPad. Seriously.

I was very proud to buy the iPad. We spent most of the 80's and early 90's imagining that this is what the future would look like.

I went on to work for Knight Ridder in the early 90's where we were showing the following video as the prototype of the iPad. Check out the video link below - this is in 1994 and yes we used a pointing stylus because the multitouch technology was not yet precise enough to make fingers work and touch screens had problems with finger prints - both now solved.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5258750250643711329#

I think we got most of the things we were working about right.

The future is never what we imagine it to be, it's always cooler and lamer all at the same time.

The whole speaking to your computer thing never really took off. The tech is pretty accurate for a defined set of instructions but it just isn't quite there yet, and I think people just prefer not to talk.

The giant whiteboard things have been installed in my old school which is to show that there is huge potential for tech in the classroom. Although the adoption isn't as large as I would like. We still have to pay for, and haul around textbooks that we will only be using for the year instead of a single digital device.

Note the early remnants of the iPhone/iPad cropping up in this video with the screen and a single basic input. Also, in before anyone mentions that device has a front facing camera ;)

The World Wide Web did not exist in 1988. WWW was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1993 or thereabouts. The internet certainly existed in 1988.

We got many "whiteboards" in german classrooms now. Those are digital blackboards with internet access and digital pens. Reminds me of that volcano presentation!

Wow voice control? I am at work going on TUAW, I couldn't do that with voice control. Besides, every cubicle-based workspace would be as loud as a restaurant.

The little book thingy is a little like an iPad, but only a little. Also, it reads the newspaper! How come they didn't imagine wireless data transfer to the little thing?

And finally: Wow, dude, 1988 was a really hopeful year. "A machine like this in the hands of a kid hungry for knowledge!!" Yeah right, hungry for some more SpongeBob Squarepants or Call of Duty II, perhaps.

Er, this is from 1988, not 1998. The WWW wasn't proposed until 1989.