Technological time warp

P-I librarian Lytton Smith helped me with research on this story, digging up some great old newspaper stories that shed a lot of light on the state of computers and technology in 1983, around the time Bill Gates gave his first Comdex keynote.

Reading through them, I was impressed with how well some of the stories accurately anticipated the future, and how poorly others did. It also struck me how much certain passages now seem completely antiquated, going into great detail to explain things that today we take for granted. At the same time, parts of some of the stories could have been written today. For examples of all those scenarios, consider these excerpts:

InfoWorld, Aug. 29, 1983: Chris Christiansen, senior analyst for the Yankee Group market research group in Boston, Massachusetts, questions whether Microsoft's product line is broad enough to allow the firm to make a successful transition to retailing.

"The critical question is how Microsoft will fare in the next generation. I don't see how they can sell XENIX [a form of the Unix operating system that Microsoft was marketing] at the retail level. Their future depends on how well they can hold together all the diverse areas they're going into," he adds.

New York Times, Dec. 6, 1983: Windows is the current (or soon to be so) buzzword in user-friendliness. They allow your personal computer to become the ultimate messy desk, at least metaphorically. You can pile all the paperwork in your drawers, files and shoeboxes into layers and layers of electronic papers on your screen.

Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1983: But the success of the IBM machine underscores the importance of software in driving hardware sales, said Bill Gates, 28, president of Microsoft, the Belleview [sic], Wash., firm that helped design the basic software for IBM's personal computer.

He pointed out that IBM designed its machine as much around software capabilities as the actual hardware computer components. Software will be used to determine hardware design in the future rather than the current situation of software being shackled to the hardware design, he asserted.

In comments entitled "Software Ergonomics," Gates, a keynote speaker at the show, said that computer graphics will be "super-important" and that software will not just be user-friendly, but designed to emulate how people actually process information and make decisions. He did not elaborate.

New York Times, Dec. 1, 1983: [H]ere at Comdex, the trade show for the personal computer industry, there is a frenzy of new programs being promoted as "integrated" software, although with no clear definition of that term. "The word has lost meaning," said Alan Dziejma, president of Business Solutions Inc.

That one struck a chord with me because we talk frequently in the newsroom about the fact that many words and phrases used by companies are meaningless, or at least extremely difficult to decipher. The word integrated remains extremely popular in corporate technology circles to this day, although it's more likely now to be an integrated solution, whatever that is.

And finally, here's a classic passage from the March 1984 issue of Creative Computing, in which Ken Uston detailed his time attending Comdex the previous November.

I had the unusual experience of watching a Microsoft employee give a demonstration of the new Windows program with a Lotus executive standing next to me. She explained that Windows is an extension of an operating system that allows you to run several different programs all at the same time and to see the results on the screen simultaneously through separate windows.

With Windows, you can process words with WordStar, calculate with Multiplan, store information with dBaseII, and design graphics all at the same time. I asked whether we would be able to transfer data from one program to another.

The demonstrator hedged. "Not yet."

The Lotus executive watching with me said, "Windows allows co-existence, not true integration."

Just then a Microsoft executive, spotting my press badge, rushed over to contradict, quickly adding, "We'll have true integration."

Posted by Todd Bishop at November 17, 2003 06:35 AM