In 1987 Apple was a huge force in the personal computer industry. First of all the industry was ALIVE. Thriving. Evolving. Competing. Apple still had loads of money from the success of the Apple II, the Mac was creating the DTP sector, the now 30-year old desktop paradigm was relatively new and there was no real competition to Mac OS in terms of graphical user interface prowess. This was the time before TalOS/Taligent, before Copland. Before stagnation. This was the time when Apple had the means and the will to do more than sugarcoating existing solid technologies and going after easy money. The Knowledge Navigator was a mock video of Apple’s vision of 2010 personal computers. Some of the ideas found their way in Apple’s ill-fated Newton Personal Digital Assistant — still by far the most impressive PDA ever. Some were realised in the form of the World Wide Web.
Their combination, however, is what made the Knowledge Navigator so intriguing. The intelligence of the machine, the ease of use and interaction. AI and NLP research is slowly working towards this goal, but the Knowledge Navigator still eludes us.
This video was featured in all previous incarnations of my blog since I started writing regularly in 2001. Just before the iPod became what it is, there was a short time when you might have thought that Apple might just manage to be the force that’d take desktop computing beyond the sphere of the desktop paradigm. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen really in the post-iPod Apple. Yet, the original vision remains and is proof of how far we still have to go beyond the smoking disc burner software, the ripple effects and gaussian shadows, the compositing desktop. It’s a testament to the vision those people had at a time when computing was so different, yet so similar to what we have today. It’s proof that there’s more than eye-candy in the evolution of the desktop. I thought it’d be at least prudent of me to feature it again. We’re not there yet.
