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Apple 1987 concept video showed advanced search engine  (View post)

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, February 19, 2009
15 years ago5,760 views

This youtube video shows the Apple Knowledge Navigator, a 1987 concept video produced by Apple.

The user performs a journal search using an interactive voice-operated search engine. Very nicely done, and very insightful for 22 years ago.

And there were no popup-ads either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mLqJNDWx-8

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

prove us this video was made in 1987, or it didn't happen.

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

It doesn't matter if it was made in 1987, I'm 90% sure this is just a video made to show what they would like to make, but the product wasn't ever made, this is just a guy talking with some video effects or a video playing on a screen.

mbegin [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

> prove us this video was made in 1987, or it didn't happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Sure, like James says, it's a concept video of a device they couldn't have hoped to make in the 1980s. Companies make concept videos for a variety of reasons. One such reason is to inspire their staff by producing their "ideal fantasy design", then to step back and build a real product that can actually be made.

Here are examples of modern concept videos. Maybe in 22 years we can look back at these and see how real they became:

Nokia 888 Concept Phone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G32JmZkRddc

Morph Concept Nanoscale Phone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs

Above 5 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]mbegin Wikipedia proves nothing, but it's OK for that time ;-)

Mark Draughn [PersonRank 5]

15 years ago #

I remember seeing this video at a presentation at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Part of NCSA's mission was to explore personal computing applications that required supercomputer-level processing at the time, but which would make sense when everyone has a supercomputer on their desk.

I was skeptical about the natural-language processing and rightly so. It still isn't as good as shown. On the other hand, the search capability with query completion has proven quite possible independently of the natural language query mechanism, something I never would have thought of.

At the time, the most interesting bit was the real-time climate simulation. We assumed that would have to be done using some sort of grid computing technology with rapid setup and takedown. We're still not quite there, but something like Amazon's cloud could probably launch it in a few minutes, and we have specialize applications like Google search that can grab an awful lot of computing power in a split second.

personne [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

It really shows you how inbred things get without the internet.

John Miller [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

This seems an awful lot like something I've seen on a television show... maybe Star Trek? The concept is great, but I don't think it was really an Apple original. Not that I wouldn't love an Apple like that, though.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Here's a great concept video from Microsoft, looking forward to 2019:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Nice post Roger! Thanks for sharing this, really Interesting. I like the take-a-snapshot-and-data-is-transferred approach to sharing information between devices.

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