Twenty years ago this month (i.e., two years before the iPhone), I wrote “Mobile Phone As Home Computer”:
What would you call a device that has a screen, a keyboard, storage for personal information such as contacts, email, documents, the ability to play audio and video files, some games, a spreadsheet program, and a communications capability? Sound like a personal computer? How about “mobile phone”?
A mobile phone has substantially all of the computing capabilities desired by a large fraction of the public. Why then would someone want to go to the trouble of installing and maintaining a personal computer (PC)? The PC has a larger keyboard and screen, a larger storage capacity, can play more sophisticated games, and has a faster communications capability.
If you are an architect and want to run a computer-aided design program, the PC is great. If you are an electrical engineer and want to design circuits, a PC is great. If you are a filmmaker and want to edit video, a PC is great. For all of these customers it would be difficult indeed to supplant the PC. For a large segment of the market, however, the PC represents confusion, misery, and wasted hours.
The PC is a scaled-down circa 1965 mainframe. The hardware engineers have done a brilliant job in changing the way that the circuits are constructed. The software engineers, unfortunately, have presented today’s consumer with much of the same complexity that professional programmers faced in 1965.
Why was it a bad idea? It’s been 20 years and nobody has been successful in the marketplace with anything like this. At least one prediction, though, has come true:
The PC industry, however, is seemingly unable to change. Nothing has been done to address the havoc wreaked on users except to build better desktop search tools for finding those lost files more quickly. You would think that the success of programs such as iTunes, MusicMatch, and Windows Media Player, which present a multi-categorized view of files in the underlying hierarchical file system, would inspire the authors of other PC programs but this seems not to have been the case.
The latest versions of MacOS and Windows 11 are more or less the same as they were 20 years ago, thus leading my unbiased team of fact-checkers (me and Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever) to rate the prediction #MostlyTrue.
It would be substantially easier to implement my 2005 idea today because processing capability in the “dock” (a standard PC in disguise) would no longer be necessary for most users. And there are, in fact, a few unsuccessful products that have been built. From 2021, “5 laptop docks that let you use a smartphone like a notebook”:
@PhilG
Follow up, kinda a meta-comment (why do they allow them to trademark now word stems, people are going to think this is about Zuck):
Do you at least display a grin at some of our comments? You are the unsung hero of the iPhone ecosystem (damn you), no doubt–but do you know how much we toil in the comment mines, unsung and fluidly anonymous? Need we even bother? You got AI, which could generate arguably better comments, which does nothing BUT subtly praise you when you order it to. You won’t allow us to praise or criticize you:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/comment-moderation-policy/
> The least valued comments are reviews of the posting, good or bad. The reader has just read the entire posting. He or she doesn’t need someone else’s opinion that “this was great” or “this was bad”.
This was great, Phil.
You didn’t mention the Newton (over 30 years), no 5G phone of course because mo-bile phones were the size of a Mercedes SL 500 back then. Wasn’t quite there, but it was progress. I remember showing one of the first MessagePad 100s off the assembly line to a flight test engineer–we were thinking about a flight management system for pilots as a startup. He took the stylus and wrote, legibly, “5 + 1”. It responded with “sex”, very Doonsbury-esque.
You could sync the Newton up to the Mac, and I used it a lot for remote monitoring of systems through the serial port with the age-old Apple tradition of needing a special $19 cable to connect to RS-232 DB-25 from their tiny custom ports. It had POTS dialing capability through the modem, IIRC, to dial up women for dates, in a small blackbook database.
If they had used Dylan (prefix and infix Lisp) in the Newton as planned and on the desktop, we’d all be using Lisp machines in our pockets. Java, C++, and Tcl, they claimed, were close enough to Lisp. 🙂 And if Truman had stormed into Moscow after W W II, we wouldn’t have Putin.
I apologize for any over-indulgence, but some more history:
My dad’s business partner bought one of the first IBM-PCs with Basic in ROM. He loaned it to me, and I spent a summer when I was 14, getting over Becky, and inventing the fantasy sport franchise. I implemented the game APBA, a cardboard fantasy baseball game with compiled stats from previous years, in MS Basic. It even had ASCII animated graphics with the extended IBM char set. Our problem, and why I am here and not living next to B. Gates? Weak marketing skills and the insane belief in the lies they told me about finishing my education.
Years later after I was a proud Columbia alumni, my dad said, “You are a liar, a thief, and a parasite. I wish I had that Ivy League money back to buy a Mercedes or a Beechcraft Bonanza.” No kidding, me too–although I paid my loans off without subsidy and by foregoing lattes for 10 years. Forty plus years later it occurred to me that I should have bought an ad in the back of Byte magazine with my computer tutoring money for our baseball game. You tell kids today these things, and they don’t believe you.
It would cost you about $2700 in today’s money back in 1993 for my MessagePad 100 ($1200 then, I had influencer, first-adopter money–otherwise known as single, never married) plus the Mac Classic Color to sync with. First adopters are important, no doubt, a resource we should listen to positive or negative in outcome.
There is some interesting innovation going on:
https://github.com/kelvinhammond/tmsu
> TMSU [Linux only?] is an application that allows you to organise your files by associating them with tags. It provides a tool for managing these tags and a virtual file- system to allow tag based access to your files.
You can mount your tag database as a filesystem using Unix “mount”, and the subdirectories are tags, the listed files are linked to the originals on some other filesystem. It is nice for organizing academic papers and software source.
https://tmsu.org
It’s been a growing concern, as lions expect to have to work on-site again but don’t want to haul another laptop. At blog commenter paygrade, all phones are walled gardens in order to subsidize the cost. It would entail emulating a PC in a phone app. Most animals aren’t bothering with phones, since a raspberry pi is now a lot smaller. The display would be head mounted. The biggest challenge would be learning a novel input besides QUERTY. A lot can be done with 2 paw inertia & gesture recognition that wasn’t possible 20 years ago.
lions, with their paucity of words and paw-city of QUERTY