According to Freeman Dyson, Von Neumann didn't envision home computing.
-- Jim B, February 14, 2008
Jim: I did not mean to imply that every old timer independently predicted every development in computing from 1950 through 2007, only that every significant development was predicted by at least one old timer.
-- Philip Greenspun, February 14, 2008
Awesome Phil. Wanna join the End Software Patents team?
-- Brad Feld, February 15, 2008
While the Old-timers accurately foresaw much of todayıs common technology, they missed the boat in two important areas: user interface, and implications of Mooreıs law. Even as late as the early 80ıs Ken Olsen and the brain trust at DEC didnıt think that there would be a computer in every home ı that was certainly fringe thought in the 60ıs. I used the Minitel system when I lived in France ı91-ı94 and while it was useful, the tiny text screen at low speed has no comparison to the utility of say, Google Maps. Minitel can be used a couple of hours a week to accomplish a practical need like ordering a train ticket, not hours per day to read, communicate, interact, and publish. The ability to interact visually makes such a dramatic in improvement in human productivity. Contrast the iPhone practicality to the green screen 3270 user interface. 60ıs computing was about processing large amounts of data, with the rare exception about making computers personal, portable, connected and interactive. Science fiction dreaming is different than engineering how to build todayıs common systems. Finally, one of Bill Gatesıs greatest insights was the economic implication of Mooreıs law ı all processing, memory (and disk and network bandwidth) would eventually be free, so the value is all in the software. In 1975, no one thought you could maintain a software-only company. Today, everyone takes for granted that software companies like Microsoft and Google have among the highest market capitalizations around. At its current size and weight, Microsoft clearly no longer attracts the best and brightest. Vista proves your aforementioned theory of human endeavor ı that the most exciting work is elsewhere than adding another 30 lines per day to a 50,000,000 line behemoth.
-- David Wihl, February 15, 2008
I am similarly underwhelmed by Vista. However, it doesn't seem fair to compare Vista to the work of Doug Engelbart. Engelbart was trying to change the world. Vista was only trying to be a compatibility environment for a particular application suite. Don't be fooled by Microsoft's need to market it as something more. It would be better to evaluate XO running on OLPC. I'm not sure it would completely vindicate modern achievements, but it at least has a few new ideas.
-- Pete Gontier, February 15, 2008
I'm reminded of Ted Hoff, who told my father that Intel never considered patenting the microprocessor because it seemed so obvious. "Computer on 200 chips" becomes "computer on 20 chips", then "computer on 2 chips" and finally "computer on a single chip". Nothing novel, really.I believe Dr. Hoff has been supporting himself for the last two decades as an expert witness in patent disputes.
-- Curt Hagenlocher, February 15, 2008
We have to remember that the patent system exists for the benefit of the public, not the inventor. The opportunity to profit from exclusive use of something (that can otherwise be duplicated at essentially zero cost) presumably motivates people to innovate. And society benefits. So the question we should be asking is: "Would Amazon (or Phil) have developed one-click ordering without the possibility of a patent?" With this and other obvious-in-20-minutes-to-the-first-capable-person-to-face-the-problem "innovations", the answer is clearly yes. How can we codify such a common-sense test into patent law? That's the real issue.
-- Steve Strickland, February 15, 2008
Patents can also work against the public good. The Wright Brothers patented the first airplane with a patent so broad that the entire technology moved to Europe until the patents expired. Marconi, of radio fame, was so appalled by this that he put together one of the first patent pools and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).If I remember, there was an aluminum patent that was so effective as to create a situation that was remedied by a "must license" decision under anti-trust law.
If you actually look at who makes the money from a new technology, it is usually the second round of folks who bring in the resources once all the innovation has been done for them. There were no textile millionaires in the industrial revolution. In fact, most of the innovators made modest livings, and a good number of them died broke. (Check out Farewell to Alms for some good numbers on this).
-- sas @mit-ml, February 15, 2008
"there were no textile millionaires in the industrial revolution"Actually there were - lots of them. It's just that in those days a few thousand pounds was the equivelant of millions in today's money. The north of England (Bradford, Manchester etc) and parts of Scotland (especially Dundee and Perthshire) were centres of textile production that saw massive exports across the globe. The industrial revolution, don't forget, lasted a long time. But even at the start, people were getting rich out of it.
The 'jute barons' of Dundee built massive factories and communities. I live in a tenement block once occupied by workers in the textile industry, and there are hundreds more nearby. Virtually all the people who lived here worked for very rich men who got their wealth as a result of the industrial revolution and its effect on textile production.
-- Jonathan Baldwin, February 16, 2008
Something that could help would be an "Open Source" inventors pool. It could be an area in a Wiki for great ideas and inventions that people want to share and get credit for, with the realization that they aren't going to patent them. They would be in the public domain in a place that would eventually be included in patent searchs, a repository of prior art. People could also contribute other prior art, with links to references.
-- Bryan Walls, February 16, 2008
Given recent developments... http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient-ff&rls=RNFA%2CRNFA%3A1970--2%2CRNFA%3Aen&um=1&tab=wn&hl=en&q=software+patents&btnG=Search+NewsAnyone want to edit the wikipedia pages on software patents? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent_debate
-- Tom Turner, February 22, 2008
"While the Old-timers accurately foresaw much of today's common technology, they missed the boat in two important areas: user interface, and implications of Moore's law"
Not so. Regarding UI: In As We May Think (1945), Vannevar Bush described an interface that is stunningly recognizable as web browsing. Doug Engelbart's work in the '60s (from which sprang the GUI, as Phil mentioned) was single-mindedly focused on providing the best user interface for what he called "knowledge workers". Some of his UI features, such as those for condensing text passages for quick skimming, are still unmatched. Direct manipulation showed up in Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963), whose constrained drawing features are also still unmatched. Windowed UI and WYSIWYG editing came with the Xerox Alto (1973). Even today, Photoshop and its clones still use the UI invented by Bill Atkinson for MacPaint (1983). And many believe that Atkinson's HyperCard (1987) is what the web should have been.
The two decades between Englebart's 1962 opus and the release of the Macintosh in 1984 were far and away the most fertile period of UI innovation. Most progress since then has been simply the wide-scale adoption of those ideas.
Regarding Moore's law: Look at the section "A Simple Vision of the Future" in Alan Kay's Early History Of Smalltalk. You will see a man who intimately understood Moore's Law, even in the late '70s.
-- Bret Victor, February 24, 2008
Most of the responders show their age in the focus of their quite accurate comments.However, on the origins of computer possibilities, one can go back to the late 1940s and all of 1950s and find most of the things being discussed in various science fiction stories from that era. The silly one that comes to mind is Dick Tracy's communicator watch. That was really the first mention, I can recall, outside of science fiction of the cell phone and related technologies. Not so silly any more?
Much of what the latter day "innovators" have discovered were found in that era, especially in the more hard core science magazines such as "Analog". Those stories range from the silly to the sublime. It is a shame that so much of that literature has been lost or worse cooped without attribution. It would be interesting to see the effect of bringing those stories into the patent wars.
General Extension
I find the ideas that "futurists" are offering to be old stale ideas from that era and earlier. Much of the credit for inspiring new technologies that is given, justly since the older literature is forgotten, to "Star Trek" and other newer SciFi productions is a reprise of the ideas from that era.
Heinlein's old short story, "The roads must roll" predicted the, probably patented, people movers we find in airports and other places.
I forget the author but "Satellite E-One" predicted private ventures to move into space, I only remembered that due to the title popping up as I typed. There are many others.
One final observation. When we finally first landed on the moon, many older science fiction readers were not so terribly excited. They just asked, "What took us so long?"
-- Josh Bernstein, October 30, 2008
I'm convinced that it's time to eliminate the software patent process, and simply use the existing copyright and trademark protection for software. See my article on blog.startupprofessionals.com titled "Software Patents: Time for a Change" for specifics.Marty Zwilling, Founder & CEO, Startup Professionals, Inc.
-- Martin Zwilling, January 16, 2009