In 1987, under the direc­tion of CEO John Scul­ley, Apple pro­duced a vision of the future. It served two audi­ences, evan­ge­liz­ing the masses with a glimpse of Apple’s market-​leading vision, and pro­vid­ing the company’s engi­neers with a chal­lenge and a goal.

Note: This is actu­ally a much later video from the 1990s, sup­ple­ment­ing Sculley’s orig­i­nal vision with a fram­ing pre­sen­ter and more use cases for the future technology.

While the over­all idea was the domain of sci­ence fic­tion in 1987, the indi­vid­ual pieces needed to make it a real­ity were well into devel­op­ment. Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor was, in fact, a con­ser­v­a­tive bet to some­one immersed in the high tech­nol­ogy of the age.

Apple’s new Siri prod­uct, born of research from the pres­ti­gious SRI, show­cases how far we’re come in 25 years. There may not be a man in a bow tie per­son­i­fy­ing our com­puter, but we can now inter­act with our infor­ma­tion con­ver­sa­tion­ally, and that’s pow­er­ful. For days fol­low­ing Tim Cook’s Siri pre­sen­ta­tion, blog­gers were quick to call Siri the embod­i­ment of Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tors vision. What’s really spooky is, as Andy Baio pointed out, there are things in the Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor video that point to it tak­ing place in Sep­tem­ber 16, 2011 — just shy of Apple’s Octo­ber 4^th announcement.

This isn’t the first time com­par­isons were drawn between Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor and the present-​day state of the art, how­ever. We all want to believe we live in the promised future. Jim Carlton’s 1997 book Apple proclaims:

A decade later, the Internet’s World Wide Web would explode, pro­vid­ing the same abil­ity to scan vast data­bases as the Nav­i­ga­tor promised while com­mu­ni­cat­ing with other peo­ple through the com­puter at the same time. […] Scul­ley was also years ahead of his time in pre­dict­ing the impor­tance of big 1990s trends such as the computer’s new abil­ity to com­bine video and sound. For all his later fail­ing as CEO, Scul­ley would go down in com­puter his­tory as a great vision­ary and seer.

It seems Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor is still serv­ing it’s orig­i­nal pur­pose. It’s pro­vid­ing us with a vision of the future and giv­ing us some­thing to mea­sure our progress against. It may be another 25 years before we see some­thing exactly like it, but devel­op­ers will keep striv­ing toward it and con­tinue cel­e­brat­ing each part they suc­cess­fully create.

Since it’s a hol­i­day week­end, here’s some addi­tional reading/​viewing that’s well worth your time:

Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor Impli­ca­tions (1988) : Steve Woz­niak, Alan Kay, Ray Brad­bury, Alvin Tof­fler and oth­ers pon­tif­i­cate on the fea­tures included in the Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor vision and how we might inter­act with com­put­ers in the future.

Bud Col­li­gan weighs in : In the com­ment sec­tion of Andy Baio’s piece, Apple’s Direc­tor of Higher Edu­ca­tion Mar­ket­ing from 1985 – 1988 describes the gen­e­sis of the Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor concept.

The Mak­ing of Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor : The video’s co-​creator describes the ideas & some details behind how the video was made.

Dave Greel­ish inter­views John Scul­ley (part 1) (part 2) : A late 2011 inter­view with John Scul­ley, revis­it­ing his days at Apple and the deci­sions he made. They also dis­cuss Alan Kay, his Dyn­a­book con­cept, and the Knowl­edge Navigator.