331–340 of 1001 posts
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
The next question was "what are the keyboard shortcuts" and the answer was "escape toggles text entry in the shell, research says using the mouse is quicker".
It was a hard sell.
I thought it would revolutionise lots of things. Turns out it took 10 years longer than I expected and is just a "fun" feature for now.
erlang. As a programmer it was a revelatory thing of beauty. When we tried to spread it within our org we found that the 'typical' (even relatively strong) programmer resisted its concepts and found it hard to learn. Therefore it didn't scale for us.
Optical computing. I remember talking to a bloke working on it back in 1990, and he said they had a working optical transistor so all the hard bits were done. Soon we'd have computers that used multiple frequencies of light to process operations concurrently on the same hardware! Still waiting...
So he's right about optical computing, but just not in the way you anticipated :)
Just extremely fixed functions with mind-blowing capacity.
E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
I remember when I tried the first headset sometime between 1999 and 2002. I thought "This will be big". 15 years later it's still not big.
Tablets
I expected tablets to become omnipresent. But phones took that spot instead.