4 ms·

Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complet

by jecel 11y ago

Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.

aroch 11y ago
Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/20070505235023!SelfExploratorium.ppt http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523... http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops. Thanks again for the link!
- corysama 11y ago
  If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him. Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)

by jecel 11y ago

aroch 11y ago

Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/20070505235023!SelfExploratorium.ppt http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523... http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops. Thanks again for the link!

corysama 11y ago
If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him. Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)