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Frame from Tomorrow's World: Mobile Phone 13 September 1979 - BBC Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Tomorrow's World: Mobile Phone 13 September 1979 - BBC

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Cited on HN 3 times, 2019–2022, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Shared as a period piece showing how past TV predicted technologies that later became common.

A 1979 BBC Tomorrow's World segment where Michael Rodd tries an experimental British cordless mobile phone prototype.

“Here they are explaining the cutting edge of mobile phones in the day” (HN, 2019)

3 citations · News · partly dated

3 Hacker News comments

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@tim333 Jun 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python
Read more
It's debatable if this is AI but basically it looks at all the moves you can make then all the responses an opponent can make and then what you can do back etc. and attaches scores based on pieces taken and the positions. And then goes with the best score. Conventional chess programs use a similar algorithm and ones like AlphaZero are similar except they use machine learning and neural nets to judge how good positions are rather than a simple point score system. I remember trying to write a similar one after seeing the algorithm explained on the TV show Tomorrow's World, around 1980. (Here they are explaining the cutting edge of mobile phones in the day [this video] )
Old TV segment on early mobile phones.
@123pie123 Apr 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Technologies I thought my son would never use
Anyone from the UK who remembers the TV program "Tomorrows World", is wise to predicting the future! They kind of predicted a few things right-ish [this video] Although I think the technology that exists now is much better than what I thought it would be like as a kid. Except for flying cars, I still want one
Past TV predictions of the future that came partly true.

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