Overhyped Innovations (was Re: OS's In ROM's (was: Re: Mac Classic prob (was Macintoshes..

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Sat Jun 27 15:23:19 1998

On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Max Eskin wrote:

> Most of what you list are excellent things that are not yet finished.
> They WILL catch on when they're done.

Most of them are interesting ideas that were touted as great ideas.

> Bob was just a dumb program.

Bob was touted by Microsoft as the way user interfaces would work from
that point on. It was seen as a way to bring computers to mere consumers,
and launched at CES with great fanfare IIRC.

> I find the touch screen comment unpleasant because I think touch screens
> are the key to an easy-to-use interface. Voice recognition and p.p. are
> in use and are gaining ground. What were bubbles, and why didn't they
> catch on?

Touch screens make you take your hands off the keyboard and leave a greasy
mess on your screen while you try in vain to do high resolution tasks with
your low res finger.

Even in humans, voice recognition isn't great. That's why there are so
many different words for "huh?". You'll always be able to communicate
with your computer faster and more accurately with a keyboard.

The supercomputer tar pits are littered with the remains of parallel
processing companies. They go fast only for a relatively small subset of
programs.

Bubble memory was an early type of non-volatile memory, and it was thought
for a while that everybody would use it for solid state disks. It's
serial, and therefore slow, and was pretty much burried by cheaper faster
EEPROMs (like flash).

-- Doug
Received on Sat Jun 27 1998 - 15:23:19 BST