Ivan, I have some hope for projects like the Raspberry Pi computer, which aims to replicate the 'homebrew' computing experience of the BBC Micro in Britain in the 1980s. Of course, hardware is only part of the equation -- even versatile hardware that encourages electronic tinkering -- and the languages and software that are bundled with the Pi will be key.
Education is ultimately the answer, but what kind of education? Our computer science education is itself a product of our preconceptions of the field of computing, and to some degree fails to bridge the divide between the highly skilled technocratic elite and the personal computer consumer. The history of home computing in the Eighties shows the power of cheap hardware and practically 'bare metal' systems that are conceptually graspable. And I suspect the fact that BASIC was an interpreted language had a lot to do with fostering experimentation & play. Imagine if some variant of Logo had been built in, that allowed access to the machine code subroutines in the way BASIC did... Regards, Iian Sent from my iPhone On 15/07/2012, at 7:41 AM, Miles Fidelman <[email protected]> wrote: > Ivan Zhao wrote: >> 45 years after Engelbart's demo, we have a read-only web and Microsoft Word >> 2011, a gulf between "users" and "programmers" that can't be wider, and the >> scariest part is that most people have been indoctrinated long enough to >> realize there could be alternatives. >> >> Naturally, this is just history repeating itself (a la pre-Gutenberg >> scribes, Victorian plumbers). But my question is, what can we learn from >> these historical precedences, in order to to consciously to design our >> escape path. A revolution? An evolution? An education? > > HyperCard meets the web + P2P? > > -- > In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. > In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
