In the following video, Knight-Ridder predicted an iPad-like tablet in 1994 (of course, with iPad, the stylus is not included, but available if you’d like).
Also, check out the “news” list shown at the 6:59 mark:
[Attribution: TUAW, 9 to 5 Mac, paleofuture. Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Apple is preparing for potential price adjustments on its upcoming high-end iPhones, with reports indicating that the iPhone 18 Pro models…
Apple on Monday seeded the seventh developer betas of its upcoming major operating system updates. The releases cover iOS 27…
In a striking illustration of how corporate tax structures and long-running legal battles can reshape national revenues, Apple paid Ireland…
Apple’s latest AirTags are on sale for their lowest price yet. A four-pack of the second-generation AirTag is currently available for $79.99…
On August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs formally stepped down as chief executive officer of Apple, ending one of the most transformative leadership…
I forgot about the shoulder pad look.
I don’t remember hair being that bad back in 1994. This was post-Nirvana.
Be kind, these weren’t the hippest of folks.
Scary.
Lawsuits and claims of apple stealing ideas will sure to show up next.
Watch the video more closely. They use a Newton in there. Obviously, it was an inspiration for their “Tablet.”
sarcasm.
but you know someone will blame apple somewhere…
Actually, released Newton was the smallest of three designs that were planned and designed since 1987.
So yes, while Newton is the first actual PDA in contemporary meaning, it is also the first tablet.
Looks like they all have PowerBook Duo with Duo Dock on their desks. Wow, 1994 was when the very first PowerPC Macs were released; most Macs in use were still “68k.” Pretty good speculation from 17 years ago.
I would call this more than speculation. They do have a working prototype. They were a bit optimistic about customer loyalty to newspaper vendors. This story didn’t only predate iPads, it predates Google and their ad model. You can see that they were anticipating both in this story. This is fascinating.
I read that as Knight Rider, and I was about to get all impressed with David Hasselhoff. What a let down.
Lol I thought same thing.
Well, not the David hasselhoff part.. But KITT.
Same for me. The worst part, if true, it would have been from “Team Knight Rider” that was around 94 not 84. Never seen it? Count your blessings.
That was amazing how not far off they were. The concept of something close to printing but not a PC, post PC. Of course the iPad is much more, however the video almost sounds like iBooks. It is sad that the concept fell apart. MS’s inability to see a tablet as nothing more than a add on to a laptop stifled us for over a decade. Apple had all the vision and knowledge to get it done. I liked seeing all the old Mac’s in the background.
Sad that the “news” is almost the same, those were headlines from that time.
I predicted it in 1983.
Heck we saw them on Star Track 1970 era ….
“…turn pages just like you would with paper”
Yes, clicking a tiny icon with a stylus is just exactly like that. 😉
If they’d only known.
If you see a stylus, they blew it.
So, they ripped off the Knowledge Navigator from 7 years before.
That guy stole Steve Jobs’ glasses.
He also predicted Wolf Blitzer.
haha he looks like him
a few points of interest to me:
– i wonder if steve new about this
– despite this being mid 90’s and supposedly he says they were working with newspapers, newspapers did not see it coming when the ipad appeared
Am I the only that saw the headline and thought ‘holy smokes, Knight Rider. I loved that show’. Of course I was much, much younger when it first aired. 🙂
I love people who don’t read the other comments before posting.
I think she spilled clam sauce on the tablet. Oh, and I loved my Radius rotating monitor back then.
I have a Dell monitor that rotates, attached to my iMac as a second monitor. You have to manually set the rotation settings in system preferences – no sensors in the monitor to tell the OS which way it’s oriented. But at least you can say – I have given up trying that trick with XP!
Saw another vision of the future in 1966 on a show I think called “Star Trek” a communications device eerily similar to today’s cell phones. And the Pad that was used for Kirk’s daily report, although he did use a pen to sign it.
Makes me wonder if Jobs of someone in Apple had seen this before work started on the iPad. Apple isn’t the only ones trying to bring us a great digital future, but they seem to be the leading edge.
So where are all the results from this R&D group now that publishers are struggling to figure out how to produce decent digital magazines and newspapers?
Bam! They so missed the impact of the “information super highways”. Instead suggesting you’d get the data for the newspapers from kiosks on cards.
In 1994, the first Internet browser was a year away, and modems were painfully slow. No wonder they didn’t predict streaming media. As for what happened to the tech, Knight-Ridder was involved with lots of small experiments in digital delivery and computer-newspaper-broadcast collaborations, but nothing caught on. In some ways they were ahead of their times, in other areas they were stuck to the past.
Full disclosure: I worked at The Miami Herald as a reporter in the late 1970s and tried out for a job working for Roger Fidler, then the paper’s design director.
Actually, modems weren’t painfully slow. They were just about right, unless of course you were from the future.
pretty sure I was using NCSA Mosaic – a web browser – in 1993
at the time, the 14.4 modem didn’t *feel* painfully slow – especially compared to the 9600 baud modems which you could practically see throwing up plain text as fast as it could download it – it was exciting and new
also almost all websites were all about the information – the text – rather than pretty pictures and, again, the hypertext transfer protocol was exciting and new…
Actually on protocol browsers were new but clos dprotocol browsers like those that interfaced with Compuserve/ or BBS’s or America Online would download and format your info complete with photos etc right on your screen with interactive capability in layouts like that even with tiny bits of video occasionally.
EVERYONE knew everything would eventual be dispalyed on a small magazine thing tablet device someday and everyone inthe magazine industry knew when it happened it woudl change the publishing business.
vivzizi
The running joke was “when they can read it electronically on the toilet the days of printed magazines and newspapers are over”.
Literally that was the joke since the 1980’s.
Reading this on my iPad. Haven’t opened a physical newspaper in years. I feel like a weird future voyeur watching the video!
It was kinda spooky how accurate they were with the predictions. Color display, using a pointing device to click for more information, being able to select video and enhanced graphics, portability. That those ideas predated the mainstream web is pretty remarkable.
What they didn’t get is how the web has taken over information distribution and multitude of ways information can be distributed (news services, focused websites like MDN, blogs, twitter, facebook…..).
They missed the idea of using your finger to navigate. Only Apple got that one.
They couldn’t predict wireless data transmission either.
NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993. It already had color display and used point and click for more information. The idea was not yet “mainstream,” but the HTML with graphics, image map, etc. already existed in 1994. The researcher in the video was describing web. He just did not call it web, since most people still called the network ARPA or DARPA net. “internet” and “world wide web” were still new words.
Not to mention Star Trek
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago.ars
Star Trek PADD 23 years ago!
http://trekmovie.com/2010/01/27/steve-jobs-uses-star-trek-to-intro-padd-ipad/
I love those circa 1994 Macintosh fonts used in the electronic newspaper. It brings back great memories for a fanboy since the debut of the Lisa computer, such as myself. Despite their share of bumps in the road, Jobs, Woz, and the rest of the innovative crew at Apple have surely changed the world for the better.
I’d say that that was a very prophetic piece of video!
Wow, I just saw this for the first time using my iPad.
I nteresting that touch was not an option then or with Microsoft’s tablets.
…and apple predicted it in 1984 when I made the Newton!
Dont believe me? Compare the Newton tomthe kindle.
Apple is 20 years ahead of everyone else.
Trouble was, the Tablet was so incredibly expensive, that poor couple could only afford one plate of chicken curry…
I noticed that too. It’s so strange when they exchange the tablet for the plate and he just starts eating off it. Stranger still that he’s so preoccupied with the tablet and she’s not getting on his case to pay attention to her, but a I guess if you only have one meal, the more he’s preoccupied, the more she gets to eat.
I tried to find K-R’s stock symbol and couldn’t find it. I guess I don’t read enough newspapers. “Knight Ridder (pronounced /ˈrɪdər/) was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought by The McClatchy Company on June 27, 2006, it was the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspapers.”
How could a company foresee the technological future so well and yet not figure out a business model that would allow print media to survive in the iPad age.
iPad-like? Or tablet-like??
I’m an Apple fan as much as the next guy, but geez people… get off Apple’s n*ts!
My brother wanted to borrow my compaq concerto (1992 486 tablet PC) to take to work because all the people in his office were getting iPads. Unfortunately I had sold it just months earlier as I never user it.
The concerto does the same things the ipad does, it just runs older hardware and software. You can even browse the web on it as mine had 8mb of ram and it would run windows 95 or 3.1 (pen version). I had a PCMCIA sound card so it could play music. Battery life was about 2-3 hours when new.
Oh and it came with a detachable PS/2 keyboard, you didn’t have to buy it separately, and the keyboard protected the screen. It also had handwriting recognition and an on screen keyboard of course. AND it had a built in stand so you didn’t have to sit it flat on the table.
All the other missing features like wireless could be added via the PCMCIA slots.
People forget iPad wasn’t the first tablet. It just made them more accessible and I think it didn’t hurt to have built a whole library of software for the iPhone people could use on it. Making it look cool and pleasing to the touch helped too.
And it had Siri… She asked the tablet to read the news article and it responded and then started to read it! (When she is driving her car)