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Alan Kay Decries the State of Computing
gnaremooz writes "Computer pioneer Alan Kay (DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs) declares 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.' He believes that PCs should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short."
(And i'm AM joking here mods)
He didn't include macs, where all the creativity and learning IS happening!
More seriously, this could be the effect of having a monopoly or a large single entity controlling how progress is made. I remember in the 80's there was fun times ahead and there seemed allot of things happening. Today its just sterile on the pc side. Cost doesn't allow much indulgence for some of the things he suggested. However I am reminded of that application that was previewed at WWDC, the one with the positions of all the satellites orbiting earth. That was fun as was the CoreImage and CoreVideo presentations. Nothing fun I've seen on the windows PC side, the innovation is elsewhere, in Linux, Apple or the Java 2 Desktop.
Jonathanjk.com
You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part.
/.
You see where it says 'Browser'? Right there, in the sentence you yourself wrote? See it? Good. Now, let's ask ourselves -- does it say 'authoring tool'? It doesn't, does it? It says 'browser'. Not a tool for creating pages -- that can be done by other tools. A tool for _browsing_ pages. Do you see the connection now? It's a _browser_... its primary function is to _browse_. Okay, I'm going to leave you to work on that thought for a bit.
(I decided to pick on that one sentence pretty much at random -- there were many candidates.)
This article appears to have been cooked up from an old but popular recipe:
1 -- Take a guy from academia
2 -- Add no real applications, userland experience, or reality checks
3 -- Leave him to stew in his own juice for a few years, becoming more and more focused on his own tiny pet academic theory. During this step, take care not to expose the academic to the actual work being done by scientists, designers, and regular people.
4 -- When he is convinced he has a 'message' about the 'state of the industry/nation/world', put a keyboard in front of him!
It's a popular dish, but I'd rather see it served in Wired or the sunday papers than here at
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Bussiness people are unimaginative, boring, and turn every decent idea into shit. Film at 11.