The other half of the evidence
Roads Not Taken
Histories written by the winners make the present look inevitable. These are the technologies that lost, many of them backed by capable people and some of them better on paper than what replaced them. Each is explained in the same terms as a winner would be: why it made sense, why it lost, and what lived on.
- Xanadu The Links That Would Never Break A single global library of documents in which every link works in both directions, every quotation stays connected to its source, every version is kept and every author is paid automatically.
- Lisp Machines Computers Built for Thinking Artificial intelligence and advanced software development deserved computers designed from the hardware up for a single, powerful language, Lisp.
- Betamax First, Better, and Alone The first good home video recorder, with a picture quality the company believed superior, would set the standard, and partners would follow the leader.
- Minitel The Network France Built First A national, state-planned information network, delivered through free terminals and paid for through the phone bill, would bring the information age to every household.
- OS/2 The Better Windows Than Windows The industry's two most powerful companies, building one advanced operating system together, would define the successor to DOS for the next generation of personal computers.
- Newton and General Magic The Pocket Computer, Fifteen Years Early A personal computer small enough to carry, operated by pen or touch and connected to networks, would become an everyday companion.
- Iridium A Phone for Anywhere on Earth A constellation of satellites in low orbit would let a single handset make calls from anywhere on the planet, and business travellers would pay a premium for it.
- Itanium The Clean Break the Industry Declined A new 64-bit processor architecture, with parallelism scheduled by the compiler rather than the chip, would replace the aging x86 design and become the industry standard for servers and eventually all computers.
- The Semantic Web The Web That Would Understand Itself If web pages carried precise, machine-readable descriptions of their meaning, using shared vocabularies and logic, software agents could reason across the whole web on people's behalf.
- Google Wave What Email Would Look Like If Invented Today A single new form, part conversation and part document, edited in real time by many people and open to anyone to host, could replace email, chat and shared documents.