Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Ronfar's avatar

"One hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse" is standard for computer game playing, but yeah, I see what you mean. We don't type documents on video game controllers, after all.

Other candidates for "could have taken over the world?"

1) IBM, back in the days when it was THE computer manufacturer. Similarly, Apple Computer could have ended up with a Microsoft-like domination of the home computer market, but they lost out to the IBM compatible machine that ran Microsoft's version of DOS. And speaking of Microsoft, haven't they pretty taken over the world already? Imagine what a James Bond villain do with a few back doors into the Windows operating system...

2) AT&T, back when it had full control over its phone lines, to the extent that it was illegal in the U.S. to connect a non-AT&T phone to their telephone network.

3) 19th century energy companies. Today, you need electricity to do pretty much anything - could people back in the era of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla leveraged that into a Take Over The World scenario? I've made half-joking remarks about the Singularity having occurred in 1876, when Thomas Edison invented the industrial research laboratory, but there really is a grain of truth to it.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Sure, but what they don't do is learn how to type on a one-handed chorded keyboard and use that entirely instead of a standard keyboard as Engelbart and his team expected they would.

Apple has often managed to force new hardware standards on the world by deciding at just the right time this is a better way to do things; if you try it you'll be more productive. (Machines with no floppy drive, pen-based PDAs, multitouch input phones and many other moves all had their skeptics). On the other side, Microsoft has often managed to sell monolithic this does everything application suites that aren't quite as good for some purposes as specific specialized apps from different vendors. So it's not inconceivable that someone could have sold the world a monolithic application requiring multiple new interface methods. But the limiting factor on doing this isn't foresight. There's also marketing, luck, timing, persistence, charisma, design talent, development talent, managerial ability and more. It would be quite a coincidence if one small group at SRI had excelled in all of those at once and my sense of it is that general business savvy was a weak point.

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts