This smacks of "Apple didn't invent tablets, Microsoft did!!" kind of thinking.
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.
Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves?
This would pretty much disqualify a large chunk of computing research (research in general, really) from being notable according to your criteria, as it wasn't brought to the "mass market".
The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.
They're all important. The ones who keep it on "the 8th shelf in their R&D lab" are who laid the groundwork for the mass marketeers to prevail in the first place. The small-time sellers frequently come from hobbyist backgrounds who are attempting to distribute a more specialized (or more capable for complex use cases) product as opposed to tailoring for maximum units sold.
Those who bring it to the masses deserve praise in as much as the product has utility and how it improves over previous designs. All too often the result will necessarily have to be watered down so it can pass in widespread consumer circles.
Is Bill Gates a hero, but Gary Kildall a zero? Nonsense. Though that's what your logic ultimately concludes.
Quite. Yes, John Deere did create self-driving tractors designed to follow strictly specified paths on vast open fields having controlled access (i.e.: other vehicles & people could be denied entry to the area &/| informed of the situation) and well-defined path markers; this is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to developing a vehicle for use on arbitrary universal-access roads. Likewise, I was using tablet computers created by Wang back in the 1980s, ungainly monsters 3" thick with low-res monochrome screens and short battery life; this was a necessary but not sufficient precursor to the iPad. "Necessary but not sufficient" meaning "yeah, they made something like X way back when but somebody else had to do a whole lot more work to make it the viable & popular product we know today."
John Deere does sell self-driving tractors to a fairly massive market. Just because you aren't in the target market doesn't mean that they haven't brought the technology to market.
While there is a big difference between farms and roads, the tablet analogy doesn't make any sense.
The scope of hazard detection and avoidance is vastly different between a tractor in a field and a car on the highway. They solved a self-driving problem for sure but a different problem than the one of general purpose human transport.
Not the least of which is velocity. Tractors generally move under 12mph. And traffic density. The tractor is the only vehicle in the field, as a rule. And obstacles - there is absolutely nobody out in the field, usually. And noisy environment - a field is often table-top flat and empty of all obstructions. Kind of the definition of a field.
So the John Deere problem space was mostly dead-reckoning navigation to a matter of inches, to get crop spacing right. A very different problem from auto-driving cars.
> And noisy environment - a field is often table-top flat and empty of all obstructions.
Perhaps this is true in certain parts of the country, but certainly wasn't my experience growing up in the Southeast. The land there tended to be mostly rolling hills, basically no field was totally table-top flat. (And the 3rd paragraph in TFA mentions that the land there even in Kansas is hilly so he does the first pass).
Obviously you want few obstacles to maximize the useful land area, but fields often had ponds, creeks, patches of trees that broke things up, not to mention unknown obstacles like fallen trees or fences, wild animals, etc. that happen 'randomly'. I'm actually curious how much of this the software can handle on its own.
So it's certainly a different challenge, but to imagine most fields as perfectly empty, flat, continuous, homogenous spaces is to over simplify things.
Pardon my ignorance. I'm here in Iowa where many fields are most definitely empty, flat, continuous and homogenous. Not to mention very fertile, well watered and yielding among the best of any place in the world. Also the home of agricultural research including, I'm guessing, John Deere pilot projects.
Which biased my view. Interesting to know the technology can handle Kansas, which would be a challenge.
That's OK, I'm sure when you delightfully correct people about this oversight, you don't skim over things like the Newton or the Palm Pilot, or the prop from 2001 that was hugely inspirational, and that you go into great detail about all the technical and usability differences between iPads and early-2000s tablet PCs. I'm sure you give fair and equal coverage to all of these topics when you are correcting people, since you seem to care about history and stuff. Just giving you the benefit of the doubt here.
I bought a Compaq TC1000 when I graduated highschool for $750~. It was one of the very first "Tablet" PCs. It received a LOT of very positive attention when I used it on campus in college. It was a great machine and was very usable even with limited OS support.
Microsoft had a marketing problem (they still do) and not a usability problem.
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.
Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.