By "Victorian plumbing", I meant the standardization of the plumbing and hardware components at the end of the 19th century. It greatly liberated plumbers from fixing each broken toilet from scratch, to simply picking and assembling off the shelf pieces.
So far, the discussion has mostly being about "how to" fix the current situation. They are great, but I am more interesting in the "historical precedences" that we could use as lessons and analogies. For example, in the plumber case, the lesson could be that standardization of the parts abstract away the need to know to forge a facet, so my mother, probably not a technical person in any century, could go to a hardware store and fix the problem herself. Also, by "programming", I did not meant text, visual, or any other forms of computer programming per say, but rather an "attitude" towards the computing medium in general -- to less of a passive button pusher, more a deliberate assembler and manipulator. Ivan On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Shawn Morel <shawnmo...@me.com> 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." > > > > I'm not sure how to understand this. The demo is probably somewhere on > > youtube and when I have time I will try to watch it. However, neither > > wikipedia: > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos > > > > nor wired: > > > > http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1209 > > > > mention anything about programming by user. They say there were windows, > > mouse, hypertexts, videoconferencing and other similar stuff. Not a word > > about programming. So perhaps a gap between users and programers was > > already well established by then. > > WOW! that just goes to show how much is culturally forgotten. This is a > perfect example of "news" vs "new". The people to which this was news by > definition have preconceived notions. The commentary they write is through > the lens of how they know what to explain. They leave out things they don't > have existing concepts for - much like the story of the shaman seeing > Christofer Columbus' ships for the first time: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQcBQc3oaKg The analogy is actually a > great one for all of science - what we really observe are the ripples. > > Anyway, I digress, as for the demo... The NLS (the oN Line System) was all > about end-user, domain-specific programing (albeit, not really what we > would call "programming" when viewed through the lens of today's practices). > > You have to sort jump into the context of the era. People were talking > about augmenting human intellect via machines, "navigating thought vectors > through idea space", etc. Forget "a bicycle for the mind," the vision of > Vannevar Bush and Englebart was much closer to the post-humanist view > espoused by proponents of the singularity. > > A very key element about the NLS was the ability to program into it new > scripts and commands based on the semantics of the information! > > This was deeply personal but also very group work oriented as well. The > SRI team did all of their meetings and group work in this collaborative > programable space. Conference rooms had tables organized around a set of > computer monitors in the middle. You could bring up references as part of a > discussion for all others to see. Today's Power Point and projector screens > at the head of a table are really a cheep copout > > shawn > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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