In the mid 80s in business school we had company executives come in and tell us how their business worked, and then we broke off into group discussions to come up with suggestions. One week someone from Shell came in to talk about their gas stations, and in my group I proposed adapting the storefront credit card scanners to the pump; my group shot that down (too vulnerable to fraud, they thought), but they liked my idea of some kind of hand cleaning wipes next to the pump.
In fairness, it turns out the scanner technology was already being implemented at mass scale, but still. And nobody has implemented my hand wipes!
When I was a kid, I thought it would be hella cool if I could just point a doohickey out my window facing where the family car was parked, press a button, and the car would start. That way it would warm up on those cold Central Illinois winter days before we got into it. Decades later the auto industry came up with Remote Start.
No one has invented it yet, but I’m sure the day will come when the TV industry comes up with a way for me to mix my own sound, so I can (for example) shut off the annoying announcers* and just listen to the damned game organically.
*During the 2016 World Series, as the FSM is my witness, I was going to throw my damned TV through the window if Joe Buck said One More Fucking Thing about Bartman Balls or Billy Goats.
We had to design “something new” in an engineering graphics class. I made drawings for a clipboard with a light in the clip to allow one to read maps in a car without turning on the inside lights. It was being manufactured with in ten years. I’ve always wondered if the guy teaching the class stole ideas from his students.
I had that idea wrt RC cars not long after the first time I saw one in person in ~1979 or so. I’m wondering now why I didn’t notice them on TV well before that. I wasn’t aware RC model planes were a thing until much later. I was born in 1967.
Back around twenty years ago, I tried mixing honey and mustard together because I thought it would be an interesting combination of flavors. I can’t say I was the first person to do this but it was back before the combination became a popular commercial product.
In 1980, it was clear that tv sets would eventually move to a higher definition. I came up with the idea of building a box that could translate between the old tv standards and a higher definition. It would allow a new tv to use the old standards or an old tv to use the new higher definition standards.
In 1982, I was flying with my brother in a Bell Long Ranger helicopter on a 700 mile flight to my home. My brother was a long term helicopter pilot who had flown all over the place. About two hundred miles into the flight, I was totally lost. I was already familiar with the old Loran systems still being used, the radio beacons often used for navigation. I was also familiar with the new CD drives that could store information. So I had suddenly had the idea of tying information from the radio systems to a location and showing its position on a map on a computer screen with the maps stored on the CDs.
I tried to get one major investor interested in the idea. He was the CEO and majority stock owner of two companies on the New York Stock Exchange at the time. He wasn’t interested. It also never crossed my mind to apply for a patent. The way patents are done is to make them as general as possible and GPS would easily have been covered.
Another idea came to me in a dream about twenty years ago. Unfortunately, it was clear that the way we were headed would make the idea not worth the effort. The idea was to produce a monitor with two or more connections for computers. Set each computer on a distinct background color in order to distinguish between the windows on the computer and the background. Track the windows on the monitor to know which one is below the cursor. With this, you could have one monitor handle computers with very distinct operating systems – for example, mixing windows, mac, and bsd computers all from a single scheme. Of course, now days, we just use X windows to do this with no special hardware.
In the early 2000s, I would routingly use chflags to set the schg flag on files that should not change on my OpenBSD servers. For example, “chflags -R schg /usr” to make every file and directory in the entire /usr hierarchy immutable. To remove the flag, it was necessary to drop the computer into single user mode and then use “chflags -R noschg /usr”. An attacker would be completely unable to replace or modify any of the files used by the operating system there. Also, the /bin and /sbin directories.
It was enough of a pain n the ass to do this for patches and to add additional packages that I only did this for about three years.
Today, it is clear that immutable operating systems are becoming more and more attractive. For example, my laptop currently runs Fedora Silverblue.
I thought it would be cool to have both CICS and Roscoe on the same terminal and a way to switch between them automatically. A few years later, we got such a product.
I thought having athletic socks with pockets would be useful (for some reason). Several years later a co-worker mentioned that a friend of his had had the same idea. Turned out they had already been for a while, although I doubt anyone made any money on them.
When I was in my early 20s (late 80s) and Pay-per-View on cable was a brand new thing and DVRs didn’t exist yet, I had the idea of subscribing to a channel where you could choose what you wanted to watch any time of day (at the time I was working as a cook and got home at 3 AM). I told my Mom about it and she suggested I write a letter to the cable company. I did. A few years later, On Demand was a thing. Many years later, Netflix switched from DVD rentals to streaming. To this day, I’m convinced I invented streaming. I also still think there should be an aggregator service that gives you full access to all of the content on every platform for a fixed fee, and I’ll bet it happens.
In 1982 the military had been using GPS for several years. It was the shootdown of KAL 007 in 1983 that prompted Reagan to make it available to civilians.
Actually, as of 1982 it was still only in the “demo” stage, more or less. Only limited availability in certain areas of the U.S. during limited times when enough satellites were over the horizon. After KAL-007, Reagan promised it would be unlocked for civilian use once fully deployed.
I had reason to research this for a time travel story; I wanted to know if the protagonist’s GPS would work.
Well, uh, yes. In the Navy we had NTDS in the late 80s.
ETA: Naval Tactical Data System. It was a map that aggregated own-ship positioning from GPS and overlaid contact information from ship sensors like radar and sonar.
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