Before the iPhone, Apple's Stunning Phone From 1983 152
Several readers pointed out the story of the Apple phone that never was, from 1983. Pictures of the concept phone are impressive, as you'd expect from Hartmut Esslinger, later founder of Frog Design. Even more interesting is that this phone is part of a much larger collection of Apple artifacts curated by Stanford.
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux was always servers first, work stations next, desktops last. Apple is the other way around. It's not fair to compare the two.
Re:alternatively (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many Nokia/Motorola/HTC/Samsung/Microsoft patents this provides prior art against?
I'm OK with that too... the sooner everyone realizes that all cell phone patents are "obvious" derivatives of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, the sooner the lawyers will join the ranks of the unemployed. Flying cars will follow shortly thereafter, I'm told.
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, no. Linux was even created because Linus wanted a free UNIX like desktop.
He wanted something that he could hack on, and the free UNIX at the time was not good enough.
Since the beginning Linux users have touted how this will be the year of Linux on desktop. It has nothing to do with "servers first, desktops last", because Linux users very much have wanted Linux to be number #1 on desktop.
This is how I know you are shilling or trolling. It should be obvious to the slashdot crowd that most of the development in Linux is happening on the base of the system and server and DB related tools. Of course, any Linux user wants his desktop experience to be great as well.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the creators of Linux (and naturally the various flavours of Unix it comes from) also thought about users, but simply had a different subset of users in mind?
Re:Prior art? (Score:0, Insightful)
Forget that, it provides prior art for touch input of all kinds. (All the stylus does is act as a poking stick for the small screen.)
Startrek TNG provides all the prior art needed for changeable touch interfaces,Siri (the enterprise's computer,) even though they really didn't exist in the form they appear on TV. Actually Startrek IV provides the reason for Siri at all.
If you think about it, some of the stuff Apple invented seems eerily similar to the kinds of things that were "easy handwave stage magic." Even (automated) sliding doors and cell phones came out of Startrek hollywood magic.
But because they don't physically and functionally exist, they're not patentable. This Apple phone was something that probably was too expensive or too difficult to produce in quantities at the time.
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:0, Insightful)
I wouldn't call them "baseless" with such a thought out post appearing the same minute the article goes live (look ma, no subscription!). Check his comment history and see how he always chimes in in first minutes or even the first minute, especially when he can say something good about MS or bad about Google.
Compare with previous [slashdot.org] similar [slashdot.org] accounts, each dropped when next goes live.
Offtopic accusations - may be (though "Uh, no. Linux was even created because Linus wanted a free UNIX like desktop. Since the beginning Linux users have touted how this will be the year of Linux on desktop." silliness is probably modded Informative by his alt), but baseless?..
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point. This isn't a users vs tech specs question.
It's a cathedral vs. bazaar question.
The cathedral can pick one priority. The bazaar (by its very nature) cannot.
The bazaar model (and we could debate the extent to which Linux development really follows that model, but as theoretical ideal it's apt enough) implies a set of cooperating interests each pursuing their own goal. In short, the bazaar model gaurantees that the product will be what the people working on it cared about, which may or may not align with their users.
Thus we get things like the kded4 process being permanently unstable because the devs wanted the plug-in modules to work a certain way, and one shitty module brings down all the rest. The user doesn't care about the overhead saved by this model. They just care that their desktop becomes periodically unstable in a way that is nearly impossible to debug. Take your pick of other Linux development problems.
In the cathedral management picks their priorities, and the developers can go defile themselves if they don't like it. That can create the iPad, and it can also create Windows Bob (and the Paper Clip).
The question is, and always has been, which is better overall? While citing best and worst examples from both camps can be illuminating, it does not make for proof that one is better than the other.
So there you go. (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple invented the telephone. So piss off, Alexander Bell! APPLE4LYFE
Uh....slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every post here is just random noise about Apple itself, not about the device.
Was this a working prototype? Did they even have flatpanel displays like that in 1983? What kind of processor would drive the phone? Where the heck would all the internals fit, a 1983 era computer was 10x the volume of this phone "prototype".
I can't imagine that this device was anything but a non-functional "concept" mockup. I don't think it was feasible to build one of these for at least 10-15 years.
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, and always has been, which is better overall? While citing best and worst examples from both camps can be illuminating, it does not make for proof that one is better than the other.
That's probably because both are valid approaches which solve different problems. The Cathedral produces refined solutions which do one thing. The Bazaar produces a multitude of solutions which the Cathedral will knock off in their own image when the market chooses the most popular one[s].
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is successful if one defines success as making huge markups on specialty items through the control of most of the hardware, software, and media channels that are needed to use the items.
By that same token, any monopoly can be successful, and that's how Apple operates.
I'm sure the reason this phone never made it because there was no demand for it. Who wants to spend large sums of money for a dedicated computer attached to a phone that can only be used for phone tasks?? Today's smartphones really took off when games and useful apps could be downloaded to them. The costs at the time would have put the phone above $500, hardly available for just anyone as shown by the lack of mobile phones in cars at the time. And the iDrones weren't around yet, so no one was going to go out and buy it simply because it said 'Apple'.
There are many 'concept' items out there that show what companies are thinking. And most of them never show up simply because they cost too much to make for the demand that is expected.
Re:Not quite (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates has never "given" anything to the world.
Sorry, Gates may be a dick in many ways, but his charitable foundation is quite big.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates_foundation [wikipedia.org]
Re:Really nice looking and interesting phone for 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
If they were not concerned with technical details, why was the touchscreen operated by a stylus? Isn't a finger a superior pointing device?
It is now. But even as late as the mid-1990's, capacitive touchscreens were nowhere near as accurate as resistive touch screens, and resistive touch screens were a lot cheaper. That's why the early Palm Pilots, the Apple Newton, and other similar devices all used a stylus instead of a capacitive touch screen. It's really only quite recently that the capacitive touch screen has been accurate and cheap enough to be used in a device like a phone.
Apple almost certainly thought of their users wanting to use a finger. And finger touch screens did exists (mostly using infra-red), but they either weren't as accurate, or weren't as cheap as resistive screens. :) It's most likely a compromise that's been made to keep costs down.