I found a folder on the 4TB archive called Ideas. Dates run from August 1989 to 2002. Old Classic Mac files — Word for Mac 5.0, the .FBCIndex from the Full Text Search engine, a Newton project. Most of it readable.
What’s in there is a record of thirteen years of product ideas, written before most of the products existed.
1989: Car Computer Notes. The earliest file. A design for a custom center console for a vehicle — for people who use their car as an office. Detailed item list: maps, phone book, cassette recorder, inclinometer, altimeter, camera, first aid kit. This was the Isuzu Amigo era.
1992: Prospero Electronic Publishing. A business plan. Partners: me (president), Minsoo Kang (research and product development), Bub Joo Lee (legal). Launch product: the complete works of Sigmund Freud, in German and English, on CD-ROM. Hypertext, search, notes, highlighting. We called it the Freud project. The company was Prospero. It didn’t happen, but the plan was real. See: Prospero Electronic Publishing
1993: Technology Wish List. A newsletter column I wrote and distributed via CompuServe (70471,371) and US mail. The premise: technologists lose sight of the forest for the trees, and users should be louder about what they actually want. Column 1 was the intro; Column 2 was about communications. I was 27. I listed my influences as Guy Kawasaki, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, and Charles Bukowski. My politics: “very moderate Anarchist.” Religion: “agnostic with leanings toward Tao and Zen.” I liked the Macintosh, Land Rovers, pale-skinned brunettes, and rainy weather. I released all ideas to the public domain.
1993–1995: Phone ideas. Apple phone speed dial, pager integration, answering machine routing, unified communications server. The throughline: I don’t want to be interrupted by people I don’t know. I want the system to handle it.
~2000: Portals. A document called portals.txt, proposing a multi-screen operating system. Pocket portal (palm), personal portal (pad/laptop), desk portal (desktop), wall portal. Master data store. Journaling filesystem. Multi-hierarchy organization. Hot-swap hardware, UPS, RAID. Every portal as a “view” into the same data. The iPad launched in 2010.
~2001: Phone Assistant. Voice response for home phones. Incoming call arrives — phone doesn’t ring. System looks up caller ID in LDAP. If the number is recognized, it rings through. If not, it handles the caller politely without bothering me. “Don’t ring the phone unless it’s someone I know.” Siri launched in 2011.
The pattern is consistent: I kept describing products that would arrive ten years later, in worse form than I’d imagined.