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Friday, January 30, 2009

Welcome to the America of the Future!!!!!
Posted by Jill | 4:54 AM
In the mid-1980's, I got my first exposure to the PC. It started with a Wang word processing terminal, which for someone like me, who had once made extra money typing manuscripts for my then-employer on the IBM Selectric in the office, represented a quantum leap in convenience and typing speed. I was typing when you had to backspace, put a piece of chalk-backed tape behind the carriage, and retype the letter, to make a correction. So for me, the mere fact of the correcting Selectric was such a leap, let alone a word processing terminal. This behemoth took up half my cubicle, and files were saved in 8" floppy disks, back when a floppy disk really was floppy. This beast was replaced after a couple of years with an IBM AT, which boasted a huge 256K of memory and a 20MB hard drive. And that was how I become interested in IT.

My boss at the time loved to talk tech, and I loved to catalog shop. One day in around 1985 we were talking about technology and the Home Shopping Channel, and I mentioned how I could envision a day when instead of the nattering nimrods of Home Shopping on TV, a catalog would come into your house on a VHS tape, and you'd be able to order from that tape via a remote -- right through your cable TV. No telephone, no mail, no having to deal with a salesperson.

I do this sometimes. One day in the summer of 2007 I was talking with a co-worker who was complaining about how her son was shlepping around about 50 pounds of books every day in school. This segued about the high cost of college textbooks, and found myself describing an electronic device that would address the resistance people have to books. It would be about the size of a book, and be hinged like a notebook PC. It would have a screen on both sides, and a hard drive or flash memory. You would download books via a USB cable for a set fee, which would include updates. The device would have a thumb-button on each side which would "turn pages" forward and back. These pages would display on the two screens, so that the user interface would be exactly like a book. A student would then just carry this device around.

Three months later, Amazon.com introduced the Kindle.

I really have to learn how to act on these brainstorms I get.

But I'm not the only one who does this. The San Francisco Examiner envisioned today's internet newspapers even earlier than I envisioned clunky ordering of crap from a VHS tape through your cable system:




It's easy to laugh at the acoustic coupler that was required for a modem then, just as it's easy to laugh when I describe how in the early 1980's you had to wrap a piece of special paper around a cylinder, dial a number, put the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler and then wait 20 minutes while the cylinder spun and a needle-like thing etched an image onto it -- the Exxon Qwip early fax machine. But the people at the Examiner knew they were on to something as far back as 1981.

(h/t)

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Blogger Jill said...
John, that "Phone thing" is called an acoustic coupler, and you used to have to use one of those to use any kind of a modem. All there was was dial-up at the time. Most transmissions were at the sizzling speed of 300 baud.
1/31/09, 7:38 PM  
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