Tablets: Not only Moses enjoyed them

I found an article on businessinsider.com about the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who wrote in 1999 he would doubt that Amazon or other Internet retailers will ever generate the huge profits their stock prices suggest. It made me start thinking about all these predictions we hear in the media every day.

“No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free”, said King William I of Prussia about the invention of trains in 1864. In 1977 Ken Oslo, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was convinced, that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”.

But there is no need to look so far into the past. With a little research I discovered an interesting article in the New York Times from July 2, 1998, where Peter H. Lewis introduces his readers to “Electronic Books”. He quotes the inventor of one of the first e-readers, the EB Dedicated Reader, Dan Munyan. Munyan calls his innovative device for about $1,400 the “first true electronic book”, since it has twin-screens and can display “two full-size, facing pages at once, in the exact format of the printed-on-paper version, with color and the ability to show engineering diagrams and mathematical formulas”, writes Lewis.

“A single-screen device is not a book – it’s a tablet. The last person to read and enjoy a tablet was Moses”, says Dan Munyan.

Isn’t it funny to read that in 2011, when tablets are exploding in popularity, a year when worldwide spending on tablets is projected to reach $29.4 billion and to increase at an annual rate of 52 percent through 2015? Who knows what devices we will be using 13 years from now, how we will get from Berlin to Potsdam and what we will spend money for…