WIRED’s First Investor Speaks at the Very First TED

Imagine a version of Skype or Google Hangouts where instead of a flat screen, you chatted with a 3-D screen molded into the shape like your friend’s face. When your friends move their heads, the screens would too.

That was one of the first “ideas worth spreading” at the very first TED event Monterey, California, in 1984. It was pitched by Nicholas Negroponte, who would go on to found the MIT Media Lab and become WIRED’s first investor and an early contributor to the magazine.

WIRED has been at TED all week, grappling with the annual event’s legacy. On one hand, it liberates ideas from stuffy academic journals and spreads them to the YouTube viewing masses. On the other, it can be a self-congratulation fest for people with more money than sense.

Negroponte predicted that touchscreens would become an important interface for computers.

The event is a paradox, both informative and infuriating, energizing and exhausting. And that paradox was there right from the beginning, as you can see from the video above. This was before TED’s famous 18-minute format, but it contains all the hallmarks of a modern TED talk, complete with high-tech demos and an inspiring story.

Today Negroponte is probably best known for founding the One Laptop Per Child project and railing against network neutrality, but in early 1980s he was the director of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, where he led researchers experimenting in interactive television and new computer interfaces.

Besides his face-mold video chat idea, Negroponte predicted that touchscreens would become an important interface for computers, and demoed some early prototypes of touchscreen devices. He also predicted that not only would we read books on screens, but that books would become more interactive, giving readers the option of drilling into particular areas and skimming over others.

PCs Weren’t Inevitable

Keep in mind that in 1984, the Macintosh had only just been released and, though the Commodore 64 was selling well, it wasn’t at all clear that computers would become an everyday part of most people’s lives, let alone the internet and mobile computing.

Then he talks about a kid in Senegal who taught himself how to program even though no one thought he could read. It turned out that he didn’t think of reading computer manuals as “reading,” because it was practical. Reading, to him, meant reading the seemingly pointless literature that teachers handed out. Negroponte suggested that giving kids computers and letting them see the immediate results of programming might be a better way to engage them with education—a radical concept that’s still controversial today. This anecdote is pure TED: inspiring but naive, arrogantly technocratic yet insightful.

The first TED was anything but a success, and the next event wasn’t held until 1990. It took many more years for TED to become cultural force, spawning a publishing wing and numerous spin-off events, as well as inspiring more populist alternatives like BIL, not to mention savage parodies. But you can see everything that’s wrong and right with TED in this early talk.