First fondleslab found in 1970s kids TV sci-fi gem At last it can be revealed: Apple owes the look of the "magical" iPad to a team of telepathic teens from the 1970s - The Tomorrow People. The 'jaunting' group's leader, John, played by actor Nicholas Young, could often be seen sporting his futuristic tablet - complete with silvery casing, shiny black bezel and 9.7in display - …
>Surely it was God that invented the paving slab if we're basing it on the commandments.
Sounds about right - he never was one for making life easy.
"You should live here. It's wonderful" - lacks fresh water, surrounded by enemies on three sides and faces a contested sea on the other side with plenty more enemies waiting to attack.
"Tell these people where they are going wrong" - results in you being nailed to a tree.
Any sensible God would have given Moses the commandments on paper. Or better yet, shown everyone in the camp by means of ten metre tall glowing writing in the sky. But no. This poor sod stumbles to the top of a tall mountain and all God can say is "Hello there. Take these paving slabs with you when you go back down willyou? There's a good chap".
"Or perhaps a flat, rectangular-shape with a screen on one face is pretty much the only form factor a tablet computer can take."
It isn't so much that it's the only form one can take, and thus it Must Look Like This. It's the fact that Apple patented it claiming it was a unique "invention" having no (known) prior art. Now we have proven prior art (again), their design patent should be void.
John was as I recall the oldest and the defacto leader. He was probably deemed to be in his 20s. (It was only the awful 90s remake that everyone had to be hyper-young and trendy and so on.... shiver)
IIRC he had also spent sometime training with the "Galactic Federation". They only dealt with the Tomorrow People, cos they were inherently non-violent. So I guess there was a kind of pacifist/hippy message to it.
((Compared to the american's casting of 20-40 year olds as teens the actor was a bit young for the part. ))
I used to watch the Tomorrow People as one of my favourite shows.
They did not need 3G or any cellular technology, because they had an alien mentor from a more advanced planet (the Trig) who provided access to a limited amount of advanced technology to augment the still developing telepathic abilities of the group. They regularly used remote data gathering and communication devices, so this proto-ipad probably did not need 3G, and may have used a near-field technology, as it was only used in their lab.
In addition, they had an advanced AI called TIM who coordinated all of the technology, although it was not portrayed as techno-magic, and there were definite limits to what they could do.
On a related note, was Captain Kirk in ST-TOS not forever using a device, often given to him by Yeoman Rand (gotta love those uniforms) not an electronic device? I know it used a stylus, so was probably more like a Newton than an iPad, but still.
Science fiction TV gets a lot of credit for predicting the future, but most of it is undeserved; taken across the genre as a whole the prediction hit rate is extremely low, it's just everybody forgets about the ones that got it wrong and refuses to shut up about the ones which had something that vaguely resembles what the future actually turned out to be.
Just remember, folks, whenever you catch yourself talking about how your favorite sci-fi predicted some particular part of the future -- no matter how sure you are that you're really right, and it really did -- you're still standing right next to the guy who smells like cheese and won't stop wittering about how if it weren't for Star Trek TOS we'd have never had mobiles. Think twice, won't you?
suggested that we would be carrying communication devices made out of a MTV1 Sinclair portable television, complete with CRT display!
On the uniform front, I prefer those from UFO, although this may just be the streak of lecherousness in me! Such tight slacks, and the Moonbase shiny dresses. Mmmmmmm. Not so keen on the string vests warn by the male Skydiver crew, though.
Sky 1 was the flying part of Skydiver 1 (there was more than one Skydiver - there are references to Skydiver 3). The Sky part was the plane, and that only had one crew member, the pilot, who was always the Captain.
The women on the -diver part did also wear string vests, but had substantial under-garments underneath. Not nearly as interesting as the Moonbase uniforms.
BTW. The televised version (at least the more recent ITV 4 screenings) of UFO Episode 1 had several scenes cut out when compared to the DVD, which included the conversion of Grabrelle Drake's duty jumpsuit to the mini-skirt recreational garb (while she was wearing it, mind).
IMHO, UFO was originally targeted as a series for adults, not children, and some of the episodes were originally never broadcast in day/early evening slots, but later in the evening. It was only the association of Gerry Anderson with puppet shows that made the ITV companies play it in the same slots as Stingray/Thunderbirds/Captain Scarlet (normally just before World of Sport on a Saturday morning, or at least that is when LWT and Southern Television played them).
This adult target explains why it was a much darker series than previous Anderson shows, and contained several episodes that I regard as not suitable for children at all. Definitely set me on the edge of my seat at the age of 9.
Yup, you got me fair and square there on my Skydiver error :) It's been too long since I got my UFO DVDs out. The ITV4 showings were almost as bad as the BBC's editing treatment of Space:1999. Thankfully I have the DVDs of both series.
Great excuse to get the UFO set out tonight *smile*
I suspect that my post above will be the final, conclusive proof that I am indeed a nurdy geek, even after all these years. Almost all of the post came from memory, with me referring to Wikipedia only as a sanity check. After that feat of memory, it's a shame I can't remember what I saw on telly yesterday.
My coat is the Parka with the Boxtree Complete Gerry Anderson Episode Guide in the inside pocket.
Yes, Arthur C. Clarke did describe geo-stationary orbit in a book, but it wasn't a Sci-Fi book, it was a rocket science book! He also a published a paper in the British Interplanetary Society journal and Wireless World.
'Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?', published in Wireless World in October 1945
does it matter where and how its published?... so long as someone else comes up with the concept and acurately describes its form and function then surly that counts as prior art?
personally, I belive a patent should only be issued once a working prototype can be submitted along with the patent application.
who had pads/tablets out months before Apple. but it was devised by ROGER PRICE in his story of the The Tomorrow People, produced by Thames Television for the independent (commercial) British ITV Network, running between 1973 and 1979.
Still, even though Jobs wasn't the world's slab/pad/tablet inventor - could it be Moses - he was the first in Cupertino. Still prior art though.
, in 1972 - http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html - so the Tomorrow People tablet is certainly not the earliest tablet concept. From those pictures it also seems to be pen-based, rather than responding to finger touches. The cosmetic resemblance to the iPad is remarkable, though.
But usually you only have 'radicals' like Alan Kay talking about them at first. Then when people in the forums talk about such a technology, and the first companies have brought out devices which are 60% right, Apple brings out a device that's 80% right, but missing some crucial points (like actual usability). Their products get popular thanks to marketing and everybody else copies them badly, again missing the important points.
One recent example is mobile computing. Early devices just stored a few kilobytes of appointments and telephone numbers and had to be synced via special software. A 2 line display made reading long texts nearly impossible.
Then later you had the Palm/WindowsCE era. Still nearly no network connectivity, but better displays and external storage. One crucial thing missing is a good shell so you can do some actual work on it.
Then came the Sharp Zaurus and the Nokia N770. Suddenly you had small mobile devices you could actually _do_ stuff on. And Nokia actually had distribution channels in Europe so the N770 quickly sold out, and they made the N800, the N810 and the current model, the N900. Those are devices which essentially are computers.
Then Apple brought out their iOS devices which finally could be connected to the network directly and featured a browser. The idea of a ApStore is so much better compared to the usual crude way of installing software on non-free systems, it took off. (Again, payment can easily be done independently of software distribution)
Still you cannot do anything with it unless you jailbreak it.
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