A nice Goethe quote: "We should all share in the excitement of discovery
without
vain attempts to claim priority".
So we can be happy that Chuck Moore did a few things when he did, without
worrying about when the ideas first appeared. Computing -- like natural science
-- has always been ripe for multiple discoveries of the same ideas -- and more
so than natural science because our "field that never quite became a field"
doesn't really care about its own history. (This often leads to "reinventions
of
the wheel that are actually flat tires", but this is a side point.)
On the other hand, I personally cherish the real inventions and inventors in
our
field -- for example John McCarthy, Ivan Sutherland, etc., who also built on
the
past but in startling and even almost magical ways to produce qualitatively
different and more powerful POVs which are so needed in our design-centric
field.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________
From: John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Sent: Wed, January 5, 2011 7:52:27 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] The Elements of Computing Systems
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 7:41 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrie...@gmail.com>
wrote:
D'oh, I love touch screens. What I tried to say was that OF is mostly just
Forth, and I think that was what made it so lovely to work with.
>
>It was nice to be able, for example, to interactively troubleshoot PPC based
>Mac
>hardware using Open Firmware. I seem to be having some trouble articulating
>the
>thought, but I think it really jibes with the idea that an operating system is
>a
>collection of things that don't fit into a language (paraphrasing Design
>Principles Behind Smalltalk.)
>
I remember reading a Chuck Moore quote similar to Dan Ingalls, but with a
slightly different perspective. I know its been quoted on Lambda the Ultimate
before. Anyone know what I am thinking of? Can't recall it. Basically, as I
understand Chuck Moore's way of thinking, he kind of questions everything, to
the point of asking, "Why do we even need a file system [abstraction]?" and so
and so.
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