On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
Certainly. We can't argue with Goethe. Yet, I don't think that applies here. You said that our field had become so impoverished because nobody googles Douglas Englebart and watches The Mother of All Demoes, and also noted that evolution finds "fits" rather than optimal solutions. But you didn't really provide any examples of how we are the victims of evolution finding these fits. So I think I am providing a valuable push back by being my stubborn self and saying, Hey, wait, I know that's not true. It just seemed very incongruent to the question of how we see the present: is it solely in terms of the past? And "the real question is what do you want it to do for its end users?" You answer this question with your own perspective, but only saying "*WE* wanted children to learn profound things..." There is good content in your talk, owing to your immense experience and knowledge, but it is dispersed like a spray. If I could summarize one thing to takeaway, it's that the medium is the message, and the performance of the medium changes how people think and interact with computers and each other. But even that takeaway feels buried in digressions. The other takeaways I got was: * a note to self to read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. * "Nobody wants a coordinate system if we don't have to use one, for goodness sakes." * We still don't write computer system's that take into account the user's context * You mention that you "worked on fonts", but didn't say anything about the books you read and research you did on displaying fonts Just 2 cents. > Dick Shoup at Xerox PARC and later at Interval, conceived and showed > something very similar. Tried googling this using various phrases and spellings. Zero results. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
