I got to see Bill Atkinson at a guest lecture for a class I took last year (recording available online [1]), and this is so true.
He talks about General Magic, which shipped basically an early smartphone in 1994:
I co-founded a company called General Magic, we wanted to make personal communicators that would be intimate devices, with you all the time... we wanted to do something smaller that would be in your pocket and with you all the time, and we failed. We really couldn’t - the components were too expensive, there wasn’t a good capacitive touch sensing that you could do gentle swipe...
And the meteoric rise of the Internet drew the attention away from it and all our partners kinda went to work on the Internet. And yeah, they were right to do so.
We were just ahead of our time. I’m pleased to see some of the ideas that we had bore fruit in the long run, and that’s really what I saw, and the first iPhone was hey - somebody’s finally done the personal communicator.
The lecture also has one of my favorite lines from any lecture I've attended:
You know, I’m not like advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
There is documentary called General Magic which used old footage and interviews to describe their rise and fall. In one scene, Bill is said to have written a big chunk (don’t remember exactly what but I was in awe) of it very quickly. I saw it on a plane when browsing through Emirates’ catalogue.
And here are some more links to the original interview with Leo Laporte, the Mondo 2000 article, and some other stuff about his talk, that I posted to a previous HN discussion:
Bobbie: Was Brad really serious when he said "no hands" were raised in response to Bill's question??! Kids these days, sheez! ;)
>Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
>The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
>Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
He talks about General Magic, which shipped basically an early smartphone in 1994:
I co-founded a company called General Magic, we wanted to make personal communicators that would be intimate devices, with you all the time... we wanted to do something smaller that would be in your pocket and with you all the time, and we failed. We really couldn’t - the components were too expensive, there wasn’t a good capacitive touch sensing that you could do gentle swipe...
And the meteoric rise of the Internet drew the attention away from it and all our partners kinda went to work on the Internet. And yeah, they were right to do so.
We were just ahead of our time. I’m pleased to see some of the ideas that we had bore fruit in the long run, and that’s really what I saw, and the first iPhone was hey - somebody’s finally done the personal communicator.
The lecture also has one of my favorite lines from any lecture I've attended: You know, I’m not like advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
[1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...