I disagree with the tone in Alan's talk here. While it is great to see what was happening in the 50-70s, he makes it sound like there is absolutely nothing worth talking about in the "personal computing" space in the past 30 years.
Pranav Mistry's work on "sixth sense technology" and the mouseless mouse alone raise legitimate counterpoints to much of what is suggested by this talk. For example, Alan touches upon Englebart's fury over what happened with the mouse and how the needs of mass market commercialization trump utility. Yet, I see a future where we are far less dependent on mechanical tools like the mouse. But progress takes time. For example, the first e-ink technologies were developed at PARC in the 70s by Nicholas K. Sheridan as a prototype for a future Alto computer (not mentioned at all by Alan in his talk). Reducing the cost to manufacture such displays has been a long-running process and one I follow intently. For example, only recently has a consortium of researchers gotten together and come up with a fairly brilliant idea to use the same techniques found in inkjet printing to print pholed screens, making the construction of flexible e-paper as cost effective as the invention of inkjet printing to the paper medium. With these newer mediums we will also need greater automation in analyzing so-called "big data". Today most analysis is not automated by computers, and so scientists are separated from truly interacting with their massive datasets. They have to talk to project managers, who then talk to programmers, who then write code that gets deployed to QA, etc. The human social process here is fraught with error. On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Kim Rose <[email protected]> wrote: > For those of you looking to hear more from Alan Kay -- you'll find a talk > from him and several other "big names in computer science" here -- thanks to > San Jose State University. > > http://www.sjsu.edu/atn/services/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/hist/computing.html > > -- Kim > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
