The Tech Biz Is Not Much Different Today Than It Was In the 70s

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Tim Lee says we routinely sell technology short:

People underestimated the first PCs in the 1970s. They were so underpowered that you could hardly do anything useful with them….The same thing happened with the internet. In the 1980s it was hard to use and couldn’t do very much. People mocked the idea that it could eventually support billion-dollar businesses. Then we got Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and people stopped laughing. It happened again with mobile phones. People mocked the concept of using phones to check email or take photos. And then … you get the idea.

Lee goes on to say that now, just as we’ve all learned our lesson and have stopped dissing new tech, a lot of new tech is starting to look like it deserves a bit of dissing:

By 2010, these stories had become the default way technology pundits like me looked at the world. “New technologies always look overly complex and underpowered at the outset,” we’d say. “But they don’t stay that way.” But in this decade, we’ve been seeing more and more examples where the PC analogy doesn’t seem to be working….Google Glass….Nest….Roomba.

I know the whole world is desperate for my take on this. Here it is: Lee is suffering from—oh, hell, what’s it called? One of those memory bias things. Basically, we remember stuff from the past that became famous and forget everything else.

First off: We all like to make fun of past naysaying that looks stupid today. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” Ken Olsen said in 1977. Hahaha! What an idiot.1 But the truth is that, generally speaking, PCs weren’t underestimated in the 70s—not for long, anyway. Visicalc and Electric Pencil and even early database managers were quite usable enough for most people to see their promise. And by 1983, when Lotus 1-2-3 was released on the IBM PC, everyone took PCs seriously. At most, there were a few short years when early PCs were unfairly disparaged, and probably not even that.

Ditto for the internet. It was opened to commercial use in 1992, and the dotcom boom started within a couple of years.2 And nobody mocked the idea of using cell phones to take photos. The first camera phone came to the US in 2002, and was almost instantly hailed as a terrific next step. Within a year or two every phone sold had a camera.

And also this: We tend to remember anything that became big. Because, you know, it became big. This is the memory bias I was talking about. All along, however, we’ve also disparaged a lot of stuff that deserved to be disparaged, and hyped a lot of stuff that never panned out. We’ve since forgotten about all those failures, leaving behind a memory of only the big, successful innovations. It’s like thinking that the 1850s must have been a golden age of novels because of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but forgetting about all the dreck that deservedly disappeared from bookshelves almost immediately. Consumer tech is the same way. Remember when everyone said 8-tracks was stupid? They were right! Remember when Pascal was going to revolutionize programming? It never happened.

Ditto for today. A lot of dumb stuff gets hyped and then never pans out. A lot of smart stuff gets ridiculed and then takes off. Same as always, even if the tech itself has changed immensely. But our memories fail us, and that makes the present seem a lot more different from the past than it really is.

1Ken Olsen was no idiot. He claims he was quoted out of context, but even if he wasn’t, he was just talking his book. His extremely successful company sold minicomputers, so it behooved him to criticize everything that was both bigger (mainframes) and smaller (PCs).

2For the record, nobody mocked the idea of supporting big business enterprises on the internet. Just the opposite. In the 80s, the internet was restricted to the academic and science communities, and they were afraid of big businesses taking over the internet. That’s why ordinary schmoes like you and me couldn’t use it until 1992.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate