236K views · Mar 4, 2012 · 5:46 · 0 HN recommenders · 10 mentions · discussed 2016–2026
Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video, made for John Sculley's EDUCOM keynote, showing a professor conversing with a tablet-based AI assistant.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN uses it as the classic early vision of conversational AI assistants, compared against modern AI products.
1987 Apple vision of a conversational assistant
Interesting historic piece. the TV movie is called Hyperland (1990): link Similar videos with good visions can be found from AT&T (the big old one), Microsoft and Apple - all from ca 1990. Apple Knowledge Navigator TV advertisement (1987): this video AT&T 1993 "You will" TV advertisement: link , link "Information at your Fingertips" Microsoft presentation at COMDEX 1995: link "Microsoft Network" (MSN 1.0) TV advertisement (1995): link
Apple's 1987 concept film of a future assistant
And Starfire was an updated take on Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987): this video All of these visions feel like they stem from TMoAD. Does anyone make inspirational concept films for industry/academia/etc like these anymore?
Early vision of conversational AI assistant
The conversation back and forth with a bit of AI whimsy reminds me a lot of Apple's Knowledge Navigator video: this video Siri could've been this but overtime it has become more and more neutered to the point that it feels like talking to a drunken command line interface.
1987 Apple ad showing tablet-era vision
He wasn't, but he didn't show Jobs' humility. Jobs could have given the same answer; he was no less visionary than Gates. This interview was from 2007. Apple started work on tablets (the Newton) in 1987, when they ran ads like this: this video
Apple's 1987 AI assistant vision compared to today
Didn't anybody ever watch Apple's Knowledge Navigator movie? Well now we're basically here. It's neat but the issue we have now is AI literally recommends killing yourself and making pizza with glue. this video
Vision of reliable question answering from 1987
Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. Combining two broken systems - compromised search engines and unreliable LLMs - seems unlikely to yield that vision. Legacy, ad-based search, has devolved into a wasteland of misaligned incentives, conflict of interest and prolifirated the web full of content farms optimized for ads and algos instead of humans. Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what intermiediaries want them to see - which means a different business model in seach, where there are no intermediaries. I do not see a way around this. Advancing models without advancing search is like having a michelin star chef work with spoiled ingredients. I am cautiously optimistic we will eventually get there, but boy, we will need a fundamentally different setup in terms of incentives involved in information consumption, both in tech and society. [1] link [2] this video
“I would really love for Apple Knowledge Navigator to be real”
Apple's 1987 vision of an AI agent
I would really love for Apple Knowledge Navigator to be real: this video and I'm surprised that people don't bring this visualisation up more often.
Example of an ambitious computing vision not yet realized
Yeah, Windows 2000 was probably the best operating system Microsoft ever produced. It had no crashes, a snappy/intuitive/sleek user interface, and DirectX support for games. I am currently running Mac OS X because I never liked Windows XP/Vista/10/11. In hindsight, the progress Microsoft made in the ten years between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 2000 seems incredible. They transitioned from a 16-bit shell running on top of DOS to a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc. Twenty-five years later, there has been basically no progress. At a minimum, I would have expected something like the Knowledge Navigator this video
1987 Sculley-era Apple vision of the PDA
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the break through Apple Newton (that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip). this video PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple a decade later was to KILL OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement, iPad, that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software-wise, not because Apple didn't have capability to do it right, but because of their INTERNAL POLITICS. [ link ] FWIW, I "sense" that with many of those personalities out of the way now, Apple is finally unifying macOS and i{Pad}OS for the upcoming devices.
Apple's envisioned AI assistant from 1987
I assume it’s only a matter of time before we see something like the Knowledge Navigator that Apple envisioned back in 1987. this video
