Gamer. Movie fan. Rib eater. Co-creator of the VG Boys Podcast, check it out on iTunes, Spotify or anywhere you podcast. @me with game stuff, I dig it!
IN 1994 SUN MICROSYSTEMS FILMED A WOMAN SWIPING THROUGH A TOUCHSCREEN TABLET AND VIDEO CALLING A COLLEAGUE MID TASK. THE iPAD SHIPPED 16 YEARS LATER
shot on 35mm film, more than a hundred engineers and designers on it, set in the year 2004, and here's the thing almost nobody mentions
it wasn't allowed to be science fiction, the team had one hard rule, only show things they actually believed could be built, so this wasn't a fantasy reel, it was a spec sheet pretending to be a movie
she drags documents with her fingers, talks to the machine, pulls a file from the other side of the world, drops into a live video call without thinking about it, this is a boring afternoon for you now, it was an impossible budget in 1994
the strange part is they weren't dreaming, they were trying to build it, then the company that filmed the future quietly moved on and a different company shipped it a decade and a half later and got called visionary for it
nobody stole it, they just forgot it was already designed, down to the gestures your thumbs make every morning
you think the touchscreen era started when you first held a phone that felt alive, it was fully storyboarded before some of you were born
watch it once and you can't unsee how little we actually invented ↓