I hope I didn't say "there was absolutely nothing worth talking about in the
'personal computing' space in the past 30 years" (and don't think I did say
that).
"Let us all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim
priority" -- Goethe
So some recent manifestations of ideas and technologies such as multitouch,
mouseless, and SixthSense, should be praised.
However, it is also interesting to discover where ideas came from and who came
up with them first -- this helps us understand and differentiate "high
creativity from low context" from "low creativity from high context".
I don't know who did the mouseless idea first, but certainly Dick Shoup at
Xerox PARC and later at Interval, conceived and showed something very similar.
One of the central parts of this was to use image recognition to track people,
hands, and fingers.
Similarly, the SixthSense idea has much in common with Nicholas Negroponte's
(and many in his Arch-Mac group at MIT) idea in the 70s that we would wear
things that would let computers know where we are and where we are pointing,
and that there will be displays everywhere (from a variety of means) and the
Internet will also be everywhere by then, and there will be embedded computers
everywhere, etc., so that one's "helper agents" will have the effect of
following us around and responding to our gestures and commands. There are
several terrific movies of their prototypes.
Multitouch, similarly is hard to find out who did it first, but again Nicholas'
Arch-Mach group certainly did do it (Chris Herot as I recall) in the 70s.
And what Engelbart was upset about was that the "hands out -- hands together"
style did not survive. The "hands out" had one hand with the 5 finger keyboard
and the other with the mouse and 3 buttons -- this allowed navigation and all
commands and typing to be done really efficiently compared to today. "Hands
together" on the regular keyboard only happened when you had bulk typing to do.
It should be clear that being able to sense all the fingers in some way that
allows "piano keyboard" like fluency/polyphony is still a good idea. Musical
instruments require some training and practice but then allow many more degrees
of freedom to be controlled.
And, though Nick Sheriden was the leader of the PARC "electrophoretic
migration" display project, it was colloidal chemist Ann Chiang who
accomplished many of the breakthroughs in the 70s. That Xerox didn't follow
through with this technology was a great disappointment for me. It was really
nice, and even the prototype had higher contrast ratios than the e-ink displays
of today (different approach, different kinds of particles).
And a few things have happened since 1980 .... but the talk was supposed to be
about the Dynabook idea ....
Best wishes,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: John Zabroski <[email protected]>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
>Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 1:12 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
>
>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
>>
>>
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