A few weeks ago, we posted the video below to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.
How Apple predicted Siri’s arrival in the ’80s
Back in 1986, Apple CEO John Sculley had a conversation with Apple Fellow Alan Kay, the revolutionary American computer scientist who coined the phrase “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Kay pointed out to Sculley that almost all of Apple’s profits at the time came from the 512K Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe’s Postscript and Apple’s LaserWriter 2.0 printer … all inventions that were lifted from Xerox PARC.
Then Kay said something chilling: “Next time, we won’t have Xerox.” Unless Apple started incubating its own great new ideas, the company would stagnate and wouldn’t have any new products down the road.
The result of Kay’s challenge to Sculley was this 1987 conceptual video of the Knowledge Navigator.
Watch Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video
The idea was to embrace the adage that great ideas take 20 years from first inspiration to be ready for the consumer market, so the video imagines an Apple computer in 2009.
Except it’s not a computer. The Knowledge Navigator is actually an iPad. And in fact, while the design is clunky, the feature set is almost identical to what we’ll be seeing next year in the iPad 3. Plus, many of the Knowledge Navigator’s functions seem like evolutionary ancestors to Siri, iCloud and more.
The iPad, of course, turned out to be a lot better than the Knowledge Navigator, and not just because it doesn’t come with a snooty virtual bow tie butler to lame things up. What’s so amazing, though, is that even without Steve Jobs, Apple was able to correctly anticipate the product it would release in 2009. Well, OK … Apple’s 1987 concept video was a little off. Can’t get ’em all right.
You can read more about the Knowledge Navigator over at Forbes.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
28 responses to “The Story Behind How Apple Predicted Siri and The iPad 3 Back In 1987 [Video]”
they didn’t predict it, they just made it happen…
Amazing! I hace an idea very close to this! Who can help me with it?
Maybe the author should read the Jobs biography. At one point before 1987, while he was still at Apple, Jobs said he wanted to create a personal computer that was like a book, but the technology wasn’t there yet. He was also interested in touch screens and flat panels very early on. It’s possible Kay and others at Apple after Jobs’ departure/ouster came up with the Knowledge Navigator completely on their own, but it’s also possible that they were remembering Jobs’ fantasy of what a personal computer should really be.
Oh come on, we just had this video a few days before Siri was announced…and also the same story
ok now is the time to learn crafting, AI will soon take over office jobs … oh right, crafting is done by robots… hm
Oooh. It even had Siri!
If it involves sneaking into Xerox labs and poaching the latest in copy innovations, I’m with you!
there was another video about this navigator. the video seemed more like an ad, i had that video years ago, and now i can’t find it anymore :(
Where you at Samsung? What were you doing in 1988? Restructuring a business model that would dedicate itself to copying other business and not contribute a single thing to this earth other than making the parts to great devices.
“the feature set is almost identical to what we’ll be seeing next year in the iPad 3”
Hmm. Do you have some psychic ability that others lack, or were you sleeping in Journalism 101?
How about “the feature set is almost identical to the rumors surrounding a mooted iPad 3”?
Not only is that more factual, but it protects you from ridicule when the iPad 3 actually arrives.
This is old news and I had seen this on other sites months ago. When you add the other sensationalistic crap on here today the result is one less subscriber. Later CoM.
I wear a bow tie now. Bow ties are cool.
1980’s iPad running Mac OS…
Also, would be very cool if I can change my voice mail to something Siri says instead of the regular AT&T bs.
Nice :)