Fran, where is this? Newton concept video...lost through the ages.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    homhom Posts: 1,098member
    It's not a Newton concept movie, but a concept called the Knowledge Navigator.



    Steve Jobs is the reason we don't have this.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    messiahtoshmessiahtosh Posts: 1,754member
    That is truly sad.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    ...uh, sort of. this was a concept/promo video produced by John Sculley's Apple before the Newton. The Newton is what came out of this idea of the Knowledge Navigator, but the idea that we would have had this by now if Jobs hadn't canned the Newton is a bit dubious. Things were so out of control at Apple, I doubt anything like this would have found its way out of the company in that environment. Apple was very good at thinking up stuff like this but actually getting it done was another matter altogether. It was pie-in-the-sky stuff, even given the best aspects of the Newton.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    homhom Posts: 1,098member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    ...uh, sort of. this was a concept/promo video produced by John Sculley's Apple before the Newton. The Newton is what came out of this idea of the Knowledge Navigator, but the idea that we would have had this by now if Jobs hadn't canned the Newton is a bit dubious. Things were so out of control at Apple, I doubt anything like this would have found its way out of the company in that environment. Apple was very good at thinking up stuff like this but actually getting it done was another matter altogether. It was pie-in-the-sky stuff, even given the best aspects of the Newton.



    True, but...



    Apple had and I assume still has, some of the best natural language interpretation software out there. Rosetta 2 was introduced in 1996, that's almost 10 years ago and it is still a decade ahead of the rest of the hand witting recognition engines out there. Hell MS licensed the original Newton engine for their Tablet initiative. What made Rosetta so powerful was that it wasn't word based or stroke based, like Grafiti, but it looked at the entire sentence and looked at a whole host of criteria before making a guess at what the word was. Oh, I also have to mention that Dragon's first demonstrated natural language speech recognition system was showed on a Newton.



    My point was that when Steve came back Apple killed off all of their advanced UI groups. There have been zero changes to the way we interact with the computer since 1984 and Steve ensured that the next breakthrough will not come from Apple. Just imagine where Apple would be now if the Newton and other advanced UI projects had not been killed.



    Also I want to point out that there is nothing in that video that could not have been accomplished back then excepting the folding screen.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    cowerdcowerd Posts: 579member
    Quote:

    Also I want to point out that there is nothing in that video that could not have been accomplished back then excepting the folding screen.



    Yeah, everything except the folding screen and the software.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    From what I understood, he didn't kill off all the advanced UI personnel, he moved many of them into project teams. I had the impression that the reason we have the iTunes source view, iSync and Expose work like they do is because the advanced UI research people are now applying their ideas directly to products instead of being strictly research.



    Besides, in the broken culture of Apple at the time, those ideas would either never really find the light of day, which was mostly happening anyway, or the ideas were costing the company a few billion in development which it didn't have. It basically made the UI people put their money where their mouth was. It did compromise the "big picture" type of stuff to a fair extent (actually, it seems there is that component, and the people in charge of that are mostly former NeXTies), which is why I think we get things like an uneven Finder and issues with metal versus Aqua apps. But I would say that more of these ideas, if more incremental, are finding their way out of white papers now than in 1991 or 1997.
  • Reply 7 of 10
    blue2kdaveblue2kdave Posts: 652member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by HOM

    Steve Jobs is the reason we don't have this.



    yet...
  • Reply 8 of 10
    messiahtoshmessiahtosh Posts: 1,754member
    I would assume he redirected the initiatives and it is fact that he killed some of them, most likely to keep costs down. Steve came back and streamlined Apple, making them efficiently innovative and focused.



    Now it's time to take a little bit of a leap...the bottom line is safe, so go for the gold again. Shake up the world Steve.
  • Reply 9 of 10
    homhom Posts: 1,098member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by cowerd

    Yeah, everything except the folding screen and the software.



    What does the software do that is so "advanced"? It uses basic speech recognition and speech commands. All of this could have been accomplished back then. It's simple one word at a time recognition for adults that are illiterate. This isn't dictating War & Peace we're talking about. The only two things that could not be accomplished back then were the folding screen and the combo screen/scanner.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    homhom Posts: 1,098member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    From what I understood, he didn't kill off all the advanced UI personnel, he moved many of them into project teams. I had the impression that the reason we have the iTunes source view, iSync and Expose work like they do is because the advanced UI research people are now applying their ideas directly to products instead of being strictly research.



    I'm not entirely sure about my history on this one, but I know that there were two distinct UI groups at Apple at this time. One was the Human Interface Group that was responsible for the Mac. The second was the UI group that was part of the larger Advanced Technology Group. If I'm not mistaken, the HIG was folded back into the Mac team and the ATG was closed. The developers may have been reassigned, but not in the capacities that they had once served. We can thank the ATG for multimedia, the web, PDO's, and a host of other technologies that we take for granted today.



    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    Besides, in the broken culture of Apple at the time, those ideas would either never really find the light of day, which was mostly happening anyway, or the ideas were costing the company a few billion in development which it didn't have. It basically made the UI people put their money where their mouth was. It did compromise the "big picture" type of stuff to a fair extent (actually, it seems there is that component, and the people in charge of that are mostly former NeXTies), which is why I think we get things like an uneven Finder and issues with metal versus Aqua apps. But I would say that more of these ideas, if more incremental, are finding their way out of white papers now than in 1991 or 1997.



    Apple at the time was a mess. Different development groups fighting with each other for attention and money, millions of dollars being spent on projects that had no chance of ever becoming sellable products, software initiatives that never made it past "Wow, this is going to be really cool in a few years" (OpenDoc, I'm looking at you!), and a complete lack of organizational control. However, I reject the idea that it was either the iMac or death. Reorganizing Apple and stopping the culture were necessities for creating the healthy Apple we have today, but it did not require terminating all advanced technology research. Apple is no longer at the forefront of advanced human interaction anymore and it's a shame. I would take a Knowledge Navigator over an iPod any day.
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