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An oldie but goodie has resur­faced on YouTube, at least for peo­ple who were in Boston in 1987 and attended Mac­World Expo (or were fol­low­ers of Apple Com­puter, as it was called back then). At that event, then CEO John Scul­ley showed a ‘The Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor’, a short film pro­duced by The Ken­wood Group for Apple that com­mu­ni­cated his (and Apple’s) vision of what it would be like to work with their prod­ucts in the future. He didn’t say how far in the future it was, but it was clearly a time we would be able to relate to.

Besides the 100% cor­rect pre­dic­tion that we would be con­cerned with the defor­esta­tion of the Ama­zon area and its effects on the level of CO2 in the atmos­phere (although it didn’t go the next step to fore­tell that this and other human activ­i­ties would wreak havoc through cli­mate change*), The Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor also demon­strated some aspects of com­put­ing that did in fact come to pass, oth­ers that are not quite there yet, and a few things that we prob­a­bly won’t see for a long time to come. For those who weren’t lucky enough to see it in 1987 (or would like to take a brief walk down mem­ory lane), here it is:

Here’s what they got absolutely right:

Touch Screen Inter­face
This year seems to be the year of the touch screen, whether it’s Apple’s own iPhone or Microsoft’s Sur­face com­puter (see pre­vi­ous post­ing). Tablet com­put­ers that use a sty­lus for input have been around for quite awhile, but the inti­macy and imme­di­acy of a fin­ger as an input device seems to have truly taken hold in 2007.

Voice Syn­the­sis
Despite the fact that the demo computer’s syn­thetic voice is a bit smoother than today’s syn­thetic voices, we are get­ting pretty close to this. (I myself went the extra mile to pur­chase a voice that sounds a bit like a But­ler with a British accent that my com­puter uses for alerts and other noti­fi­ca­tions.) There are times when many have called for some ser­vice over the phone and mis­taken the syn­thetic voice on the other end of the line for a human.

Video­con­fer­enc­ing
Here the film hits a home run and almost exactly the way it was shown. In fact, in a few hours I’m going to be using it to talk to my par­ents on the other end of the con­ti­nent, back in the US. Next year, the exam­ple of the other pro­fes­sor shar­ing a screen with the local com­puter will be quite com­mon, as Apple’s iChat AV will then include not just video­con­fer­enc­ing, but pre­sen­ta­tion and screen-sharing.

Tele­phony Inte­gra­tion
While not wide­spread, talk­ing on the tele­phone through the com­puter is grow­ing by leaps and bounds. There are sev­eral pack­ages for inte­grat­ing voice mail using the com­puter as the proces­sor and stor­age medium for mes­sages, and the wide­spread adop­tion of VOIP (voice over Inter­net pro­to­col) will only has­ten this trend. The iPhone’s ‘visual voice­mail’ is sur­pris­ing in that it does exactly the oppo­site of the demo (lists voice mails as mes­sages, like an email), rather than announc­ing calls missed or the caller ID of an incom­ing call.

Inter­min­gling of Pro­fes­sional and Per­sonal Data
While this may be seen as a triv­ial detail, it’s worth remem­ber­ing that in 1987, only true geeks kept their cal­en­dar and to-do lists in their com­put­ers, and every­one else con­tin­ued to use day plan­ners, faxes, snail mail and post-it notes for much of their per­sonal orga­ni­za­tion. Only with bet­ter screens, faster proces­sors, and soft­ware that got smarter and bet­ter designed about these tasks (and much of it has quite a ways to go), did the mar­gin­a­lia of per­sonal lives find their way onto per­sonal com­put­ers in offices. Still, this trend isn’t fin­ished yet, and one can still find plenty of Day­timers and pos­tits in most homes and offices.

Here’s what they were a lit­tle too opti­mistic on (although not com­pletely missing):

Speech Recog­ni­tion
The demo goes to great lengths to show that the pro­fes­sor is mum­bling, giv­ing par­tial infor­ma­tion, and not talk­ing to his device as a com­puter, but as another human. At one point dur­ing his tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion, he even pauses and the com­puter fills in with an appoint­ment time, as if it had been fol­low­ing in on the con­ver­sa­tion! While speech recog­ni­tion on com­put­ers has reached the point where it is com­mon to be able to dic­tate an email, let­ter, arti­cle, or even a book to your com­puter and have it type the entire thing out as you speak it, one still has to speak clearly and the com­puter still does make some mis­takes (although a lot fewer than it used to). I once saw a great T-Shirt slo­gan on some­one who was on the team at Apple work­ing on this tech­nol­ogy: “I helped Apple Wreck a Nice Beach” (If you didn’t get it, say it out loud).

Full Colour Map­ping of Geo­log­i­cal Data
Google Maps and Google Earth, along with mashups of data from a vari­ety of sources has started, but there are few sim­ple, easy ways of doing a geo-plot with any data source with­out some mas­sag­ing of the data (although this may not be as much the case in cer­tain cir­cles). There are hun­dreds of com­pa­nies in the field of GIS (Geo­graph­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems), and it’s pos­si­ble that some stan­dards for inter­op­er­abil­ity will start to arise, espe­cially with the rise of XML-based data sources. RSS feeds of Real Estate list­ings have already been mashed up, and traf­fic man­age­ment and weather fore­cast­ing have both employed computer-based map­ping for years. It’s only a mat­ter of time before geo­phys­i­cal data is also avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic in an easy-to-assemble format.

Form Fac­tors and other Hard­ware details
While there has been a move by most com­puter users to lap­tops from desk­tops, there are still a num­ber of things in the demo (Speech recog­ni­tion, per­haps) that are doable on a desk­top but that most lap­tops still don’t quite have the horse­power for. This will change in the next 2 to 3 years (if not sooner). It’s sur­pris­ing that there is no key­board vis­i­ble any­where, but that is prob­a­bly more to make a point (as is also the case with Microsoft’s Sur­face demos). Also, there is the con­spic­u­ous (at least for me) absence of wires for the con­nec­tion to the phone, and no clear micro­phone. While wi-fi con­nec­tions to the Inter­net are a real­ity, a wire­less (voice) tele­phone inter­face built into a lap­top would prob­a­bly only work for Skype or some other VOIP solu­tion. Still, per­haps there is an inter­est­ing poten­tial prod­uct for peo­ple who want to use their com­puter as a cell speak­er­phone with omni-directional microphone.

Here’s what we are still a long way from:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence
Wow, did they ever miss on this one! AI is the fly­ing car of com­put­ing. The idea that there would be an ‘agent’ as they referred to him, liv­ing in your com­puter, respond­ing to you intel­li­gently and with knowl­edge of both you and the out­side world… well I sus­pect we are still a few decades away from this. There are many points in the demo where I said ‘Nice try’, imag­in­ing how today’s tech­nol­ogy would make a mess of searches, tak­ing calls, con­nect­ing you to data, etc.

Still, that’s not a bad hit rate for 20 years. John Scul­ley should give him­self a lit­tle pat on the back for some impres­sively accu­rate vision, and the com­puter indus­try (and Apple in par­tic­u­lar) should be pleased that a lot of this has come true. Now, it will be inter­est­ing to see when the next gen­er­a­tion of col­lege pro­fes­sors (and oth­ers) use these tools as much and as eas­ily as the actor in the demo did.

*At the very least, one has to give Scul­ley credit for being one of the very first peo­ple in pub­lic life to sound the alarm about this eco­log­i­cal issue. It’s very appro­pri­ate that 20 years later we find Al Gore on Apple’s Board of Direc­tors. It’s also per­haps a lit­tle ironic that Al Gore’s office setup — 3 huge screens plus a ded­i­cated flatscreen TV, moun­tains of paper and book­cases filled to over­flow­ing) is absolutely noth­ing like the cli­ma­tol­ogy pro­fes­sor in the video.