tim o'reilly not quite predicting the iphone

(Grabbing some stuff I wrote a few months ago on the Lost in Mobile Whats App Group:)

Finally this thing I wrote in 2002

Saw Tim O'Reilly (of everygeek's favorite computer book company) give a rambling talk on "Emerging Tech Trends" last night at local computer bookstore Softpro. Some thought provoking stuff. He mentioned that the Apple iPod is being used (or could be?) to carry around the information for people's Macintosh desktops...so you could go take your iPod to your buddy's Mac, and suddenly it looks like your computer. It made me think how far we are from the ultimate PDA/laptop combo...what if you had something that looked and acted like a typical PDA, but it had plugs for a monitor, keyboard, mouse, power, etc, so you could use it on the go, or as a reasonable desktop. It would have the standard dayplanner software, but you could still get to the desktop programs in PDA mode....it's an intriguing idea, and I suppose I'd have to admit Microsoft PocketPC's are closer than Palm to realizing that dream at this point, though they're still pretty far off.

So, two things that missed out on:

1. that comes from a time when laptops felt more like a luxury than a default, so having a pluggable portable component to carry your "desktop" experience would be great
2. it didn't quite foresee the cloud - when I do need to transfer or share information, it's generally simplest to synch or bounce it off the network. (this was just a tad before ubiquitous wifi and cellular data as well...)

Also, in searching my site for "ipod" using my semi-clumsy search engine I realize there used to be an awful lot of great sites on tripod... (and you can't spell tripod without the ipod 😀 ) and that of course reflects the weakening of the DIY web - homepages being replaced with twitter bios and facebook profiles. Sharing in your group is increased... but at what costs.