Benedict Evans

So until the 50s, elevators were manually operated.

They were basically vertical streetcars.

They were trams.

They were pub trains.

And you have a driver who has a lever with an accelerator and a brake.

If you've been into a New York co-op, you may have seen one of these.

They call it an attended elevator.

There's a lever.

You push it that way to go down, middle to stop, that way to go up.

And then in the 50s, Otis creates the autotronic, I think it's called the autotronic elevator, which had electronic politeness, which basically meant the infrared thing that stops the door closing.

But if you get into an elevator now, you don't say, oh, I'm going to use an automatic elevator with electronic politeness.

It's just lift.

We kind of forget how weird and different all the other things were.

And yes, this is new and weird and different in a bunch of kind of strange, confusing, confounding ways we can probably talk about.

But we sort of forget that other things were weird and strange and different too.

I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs.

Once IBM made a PC, that was it.

It's all over now.

And we kind of forget that there were PCs before, and then IBM made one, and that kind of became the standard, but then IBM lost it.

The master of mycology at Cambridge said that history teaches us nothing except that something will happen.