4 ms·

This is a thing that happened once. What if it just cannot be recreated?

• david927 11y ago
  It created trillions in value. Why not try?
  • _yosefk 11y ago
    Created for whom, and... did it, really, all by itself? I think it's kinda overblown, to put it mildly.
    • david927 11y ago
      Well, this is the problem with our industry. Any physicist will know who Niels Bohr was and what he did. Not our industry. Computer Science has become a field for twenty-year-old's whose memories span months, or ego-driven Sheldon Cooper's who can't be bothered to credit anyone for anything. Frankly, I'm embarrassed to work in this industry.
      • _yosefk 11y ago
        Yeah, Alan Kay says things to that effect, too. Another way to look at it is, assigning all the credit for those "trillions in value" to Xerox PARC (my oh my, creating so much value and capturing so little? how did that happen?) is a warped way to look at the history of computing and thus is the perfect example of the problem that makes you "embarrassed to work in this industry." As to Niels Bohr... I think the transistor or the concept of decidability are more like what physicists do/achieve than OO or WIMP interfaces. One can disagree with that but one can also agree with that, I think, even if their age is above 20, their memory spans whole years etc. etc.
      • effie 11y ago
        Actually, not every physicist knows what Niels Bohr did. I know a very smart and hardworking physicist who did some complicated math on details of particular renormalization procedure in quantum field theory but could not explain how Bohr's model of hydrogen works. As to the Computer Science detriment, aren't you confusing computer science with a programming job? Do you really mean that the science is done by 21 year old people with no long term memory? I find that hard to believe.
    • steego 11y ago
      Xerox didn't do it all by themselves. Listen to one of Alan's talks and he'll tell you about they stood on the shoulders of guys like Doug Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland. Xerox didn't invent the research atmosphere to facilitate giant leap innovations, they brought in people from DARPA/SRI who were already doing it. Don't get me wrong, Xerox deserves a lot of credit for making some huge contributions to that sphere, but we know they didn't do it all by themselves.
• TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Or, what if it really is simple to recreate, but we can't do it because we try too hard, in a wrong way? If points 2 - 4 are the keys to recreating something PARC-like (and I believe they are), then the problem is pretty obvious - those, especially 2, are the points which most companies try to avoid. Keeping smart people on basic income with no obligations sounds like unprofessional. Like something we do with children, not with adults. Adults need to have deadlines. Their goals should be related to how their company will make money. Everything not related to company making money is not important and should not be done at worktime. -- It's because bullshit like this we don't get much real innovation. Companies, and even whole societies, don't feel like subsidizing a playground for smart adults, that occasionally spawns ideas, which usually can't be monetized directly or entirely. But we need that because real inventions happen in context of a problem, whether real or invented, or sometimes after the fact. The problem needs to be a terminal value for this to work. That is, "Solving X" is a good problem, "Making money by solving X" is a very bad problem. And if you put "Making money" as an input to the invention process, you get shit like obnoxious ads, disguised Ponzi schemes and growth hacking.