16 ms·

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it's no wonder it had a limited direct impact. I wonder if it's a trend that Alan underestimates the importance of economics for technology to actually have an impact. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/347 http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/34...

AceJohnny2 9y ago
> He brought the iPhone to me, put it in my hands, and asked: “Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?”. My reply was to make a shape with my hands the size of an iPad: “Steve, make it this size and you’ll rule the world”. I find this especially telling after Apple's recent education-focused announcement[1], where Apple continues trying to push the iPad as an educational tool. Is this Tim Cook trying to continue Steve Jobs' vision of Alan Kay's vision? Or do Apple seriously believe the iPad as it is has a business chance in the cash-strapped education market? [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/03/apples-chicago-events-highlight-creativity-in-education/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/03/apples-chicago-events...
- sjwright 9y ago
  The most common place for me to see iPads these days is point-of-sale, everything from sales at small cafes to the front desks of car mechanics and childcare. (The second-most common place is as a distraction device given to three-year-olds.)
  - 0x445442 9y ago
    I agree with your observations. I can't speak for Kay but I think his comment to Jobs about the size was based on the premis that the iPad would be a production device. The percentage of users that use computing devices primarily for something other than content consumption is pretty small. I actually think an argument could be made that phones are used more for productive tasks than tablets.
    - alankay 9y ago
      But the deep point of the inventions of personal computing and the Internet was not primarily to make old media more convenient, but to "augment human intellect" by making the next qualitative media after writing and the printing press. The commercialization of these went after the lowest simplest properties, and this hid from most people what the computer is really about. Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers. Getting fixated on a poor problem can mask the problems that need to be worked on. A big one is "real education". Another is "real governance and democracy". An analogy is to the Kennedy moonshot, which set back space travel more than 50 years. Real space travel has to be done quite differently than just relying on chemical rocketry, and the better ways to do it were swamped by the "stunt" to this day.
      - mercer 9y ago
        > Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers. Isn't this already well under way, considering people's day-to-day use of phones and tablets for google searches, wikipedia, calendars, maps, and various 'helper' apps (for meditation, productivity, project planning, etc.)?
- wvenable 9y ago
  My son's school has a Rubbermaid tub of iPads that they wheel from classroom to classroom on a cart as needed. He was talking today about playing games on the PCs in the computer lab, and my wife asked about the iPads, and you know what he said? "Those are for doing work."
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Or do Apple seriously believe the iPad as it is has a business chance in the cash-strapped education market? It does. It just has to sell on hype instead of any actual utility. It's a very common sales strategy.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Huh. I read on a tablet all of the time, I guess that makes me a prisoner of hype! Minority view, yes.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Education is not about just reading, but regardless - you know what's better for reading than an iPad? A paper book. And if your concern is weight, you know what combines the best qualities of a paper book and a tablet? An e-book reader with e-Ink display. (This is sad, really. As I understand, e-Ink tech is patented to death, so there's little progress there.) Still, I'm not saying iPads are useless in general. The topic is relative merit of iPad vs. other possibilities, in education. My claims are as follows: - iPad is a bad idea in education, partly because of the low capabilities of the device, and partly because not much apps that would would make full use of the capabilities of the device in order to encourage learning (this is kind of similar to "edutainment" or "educational games" for PC - utter crap that only fools parents) - given that, iPad looses to plethora of other tools available for teachers, most of which are low-tech - neither of the two points above will prevent iPad from succeeding on this market, as the hype is strong enough to overcome rational obstacles -- Incidentally, I feel like back in 2015. I thought iPads already succeeded in getting sold to schools en masse, and it already turned out to be a colossal waste of money. I'm pretty sure we already had those discussions on HN.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives. Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.
- icc97 9y ago
  Where as both Steve Jobs and Alan Kay believed in the Dynabook, I find it interesting how starkly different their views are on the stylus. One of the first things Alan Kay had after seeing the iPad was try using a stylus [0], where as Steve Jobs was heavily anti the stylus [0]. So I can imagine a fairly interesting back and forth over the topic. But Alan has only ever mentioned the following two sentences: > And he says, “Well, people lose their pens.” > And I said, “Well, have a place to put it.” [0]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab... [1]: https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-or-a-task-manager-they-blew-it/ https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus...
  - alankay 9y ago
    In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just because the learning curve is lower.
    - endlessvoid94 9y ago
      What do you think of the apple pencil?
      - alankay 9y ago
        The Cintiq 13" with Autodesk Sketchbook app on a good Mac or PC is by far the best experience for people who are skilled at drawing (like me)
blackoil 9y ago
Computing does not follow standard inflation. 9 years is 6 generation of Moore's law. e.g. today's 80$ phone is more powerful then iPhone 2007.
maxerickson 9y ago
I think he's well enough aware that the Mac was cheaper. For instance: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2017/04/04/7-steps-for-inventing-the-future/2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2017/04/04/7-steps-fo... It's not made very gracefully, but the point is that the Mac wasn't a big leap forward in capability, it was the consumer version of the thing they had working a decade earlier. Of course it's an open question what sort of computers Apple would have made if Jobs hadn't visited PARC.
- SllX 9y ago
  It isn't any less an open question, but I think there's a good shot that Jef Raskin's original concept for the Macintosh would have made it to market under Apple's banner. Possibly the best look we'll ever get at the type of Human-Computer Interface he wanted to build is written down in "The Humane Interface", although I believe he did, and correct me if I'm wrong, develop a system for Canon that implemented some of his designs.
  - GeekyBear 9y ago
    Jef went to work for Canon after leaving Apple and created the Canon Cat which implemented his original vision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
radicaldreamer 9y ago
What I'm curious about is what is the Parc Alto of today?
- alankay 9y ago
  A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.
  - gpdpocketer 9y ago
    What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on? http://pyra-handheld.com/ http://pyra-handheld.com/ Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet to see the Pyra/Pandora classes of devices?
    - alankay 9y ago
      The physical nature of the device needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about visual angle, resolution, pointing, drawing, typing, extensions of the hardware (especially via software), capacity, speeds that match to human nervous system, etc. The software nature of the device also needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about the GUI, how does it help in learning itself and other things, what kinds of things can I see and contrast and compare, what kinds of things can I do by programming, what kinds of things can kids do by programming. And so forth. What do you think?
  - no_identd 9y ago
    Wild speculation ahead, but I'd speculate that it'd likely also include some of the following: 1. The Memfractor framework: http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/ http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/ https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document 2. knowm's memristor based Hebbian Learning technology: https://vimeo.com/125361591 https://vimeo.com/125361591 (Their CEO has reddit btw.: https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/ https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/) 3. Some intentionally not-turing complete components with some recursivity in them, which is apparently possible: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs-ECOOP-2017-27.pdf http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs... "We further showed that certain variants of DOT’s recursive self types can be integrated successfully while keeping the calculus strongly normalizing. This result is surprising, as traditional recursive types are known to make a language Turing-complete." "What is the minimum required change to achieve Turing-completeness? Consistent with our expectations from traditional models of recursive types, we demonstrate that recursive type values are enough to encode diverging computation." "But surprisingly, with only non-recursive type values via rule (TTYP), we can still add recursive self types to the calculus and maintain strong normalization." "Can we still do anything useful with recursive self types if the creation of proper recursive type values is prohibited? Even in this setting, recursive self types enable a certain degree of F-bounded quantification, ..." +other langsec related hijinks, see also http://bootstrappable.org/ http://bootstrappable.org/ and http:// http:// langsec.org/occupy/ 4. Software (UX) & hardware (again: UX) elements/modular components that scale using morphic numbers, i.e. the golden ratio and the plastic number (whose square Donald E. Knuth likes to refer to as "High Phi". He even suggested a special mark for it, which nobody ever bothered to include in Unicode): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number 5. Balanced ternary. We've recently made significant advances in solving the hardware issues with ternary hardware. For an example, see here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/00000013/00000001/art00004 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/0000001... Mirzaee, Reza Faghih; Farahani, Niloofar - Design of a Ternary Edge-Sensitive D FFF for Multiple-Valued Sequential Logic ( Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 ) 6. Spatial Analytic Interfaces: https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 Just take a look at the figures to see where this goes. Incidentally, this kind of user interface lends itself well for Dataflow programming... 7. Projective Programming: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax. See also the Racket Medic Debugger https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html / https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf, but far more importantly the sequel to it, called 'Ripple': https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 Li, Xiangqi; Flatt, Matthew - Debugging with Domain-Specific Events via Macros 8. GNUnet and related hijinks, see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a87072702243a38f3abe2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a870727... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908. See also P3KI, who FINALLY released a whitepaper: https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Core__Trust_Scenario_Whitepaper__1.6.pdf https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Cor... 9. Xanadu, Zettelkasten, Smalltalk, Lisp Machine, Plan 9, Inferno etc. related hyperlink crowd/mesh/cloud/grid/whatever hijinks, both for social and for programmatic cooperation. I'll not link anything on that here, since, well, kind of pointless to feed Alan Kay the kool-aid he in part came up with long ago. ;) And then there exist a million other things that should go here, too, but for which I lack the time to type them out - I already consider this far, far too terse to make any sense to someone without A LOT of preexisting knowledge.
tooltalk 9y ago
why do you find that irritating? The Alto wasn't build for the mass market -- Xerox produced only several thousands units and used mostly internally. It was also developed when they didn't have all the necessary, affordable tech and parts that later made far more affordable copycats (ahem) possible. The Star was Xerox's first commercial product aimed at the mass (business) market -- but like the Lisa which came later didn't succeed because of their high cost.
alankay 9y ago
We understood Moore's Law, so it made sense in the early 70s to make a personal computer in 1973 that would have the power of much less expensive personal computers 10 or more years later. Why? Because the new SW and UI takes a lot of work to invent -- this allowed us to show Steve "the 80s" in 1979. (Worth pondering this way of going about things.) What was disappointing is that the market couldn't value personal computing, especially the general market. For example, the Lisa with its hard disk was really the better machine to be the flagship for Apple. In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". Instead, PCs could only be sold at consumer price levels, more or less as novelties and in business as spreadsheet machines -- and this forced the Mac to be much smaller (both in RAM and disk) so that it was more like a toy than a vehicle. So, no, we (not I - I was part of a research community) did not underestimate the importance of economics. Note that my original Dynabook paper in 1972 said these would eventually be sold for the same price as color TV sets. But we did underestimate the ability of the early market to value computing.
- cma 9y ago
  > In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could make sense. For individuals at the time I'm not sure. That's not to say people don't spend extravagant amounts on cars beyond the base level of needed functionality. I just can't think of too many purchases at that level that get obsolete so quickly.
  - firmgently 9y ago
    Although consumerism was already in full effect in the 80s people hadn't been conditioned into anything like the crazy update cycle we're in nowadays. I suppose the business world may have been different (seems unlikely?) but at least in home/personal computing people weren't buying new computers every 2-3 years - people did keep them for years. Maybe technically they'd have been devalued but if you're still using an item and it's doing its job the resale value isn't a consideration (in the late 90s it was still common for people in eg. sales offices to be using thin terminals with green-screen monitors, despite Windows PCs being readily available).
sedachv 9y ago
> I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sorry, but what is really irritating is the comparison you are making. 1973 component prices are in no way comparable to 1984 component prices, and Xerox's target market and desired margins were completely different from Apple's. If you actually look at the commercial machines that Xerox developed after the Alto prototypes, you find things like the Star, that came out for $16,000 in 1981. Compare that to the Apple Lisa, which came out for $10,000 in 1983. And it is not really a fair comparison, because the Star had much better hardware in every respect. What would be a fair comparison to the Lisa in terms of hardware capabilities would be the 1978 NoteTaker, built with off-the-shelf components for about $15,000 (my estimate: https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-personal-computer-you-havent-heard-of.html https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-perso...). The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive. If you want to say that not selling cheap mass-market products has "limited direct impact," that is true, but is also not a very insightful observation.
- jecel 9y ago
  > The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive. http://oldcomputers.net/xerox-820.html http://oldcomputers.net/xerox-820.html This was a rather plain CP/M computer released almost at the same time as the Star. Pretty sad when you think how much better it would have been for them to just make the 3 year old Notetaker with no changes instead.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Irritating? Not me. A bit of braggadocio? Sure. But I'll allow him that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
michaelcampbell 9y ago
I felt the same, but if I were him and as self aware as he is as to his impact, it'd be hard for me to unwind the BetaMaxing of 'my' work, emotionally. (Economics aside.) Based on other writings of his, which I've also enjoyed, he doesn't seem shy to throw in these jabs.

AceJohnny2 9y ago

> He brought the iPhone to me, put it in my hands, and asked: “Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?”. My reply was to make a shape with my hands the size of an iPad: “Steve, make it this size and you’ll rule the world”. I find this especially telling after Apple's recent education-focused announcement[1], where Apple continues trying to push the iPad as an educational tool. Is this Tim Cook trying to continue Steve Jobs' vision of Alan Kay's vision? Or do Apple seriously believe the iPad as it is has a business chance in the cash-strapped education market? [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/03/apples-chicago-events-highlight-creativity-in-education/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/03/apples-chicago-events...

sjwright 9y ago
The most common place for me to see iPads these days is point-of-sale, everything from sales at small cafes to the front desks of car mechanics and childcare. (The second-most common place is as a distraction device given to three-year-olds.)
- 0x445442 9y ago
  I agree with your observations. I can't speak for Kay but I think his comment to Jobs about the size was based on the premis that the iPad would be a production device. The percentage of users that use computing devices primarily for something other than content consumption is pretty small. I actually think an argument could be made that phones are used more for productive tasks than tablets.
  - alankay 9y ago
    But the deep point of the inventions of personal computing and the Internet was not primarily to make old media more convenient, but to "augment human intellect" by making the next qualitative media after writing and the printing press. The commercialization of these went after the lowest simplest properties, and this hid from most people what the computer is really about. Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers. Getting fixated on a poor problem can mask the problems that need to be worked on. A big one is "real education". Another is "real governance and democracy". An analogy is to the Kennedy moonshot, which set back space travel more than 50 years. Real space travel has to be done quite differently than just relying on chemical rocketry, and the better ways to do it were swamped by the "stunt" to this day.
    - mercer 9y ago
      > Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers. Isn't this already well under way, considering people's day-to-day use of phones and tablets for google searches, wikipedia, calendars, maps, and various 'helper' apps (for meditation, productivity, project planning, etc.)?
wvenable 9y ago
My son's school has a Rubbermaid tub of iPads that they wheel from classroom to classroom on a cart as needed. He was talking today about playing games on the PCs in the computer lab, and my wife asked about the iPads, and you know what he said? "Those are for doing work."
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Or do Apple seriously believe the iPad as it is has a business chance in the cash-strapped education market? It does. It just has to sell on hype instead of any actual utility. It's a very common sales strategy.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Huh. I read on a tablet all of the time, I guess that makes me a prisoner of hype! Minority view, yes.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Education is not about just reading, but regardless - you know what's better for reading than an iPad? A paper book. And if your concern is weight, you know what combines the best qualities of a paper book and a tablet? An e-book reader with e-Ink display. (This is sad, really. As I understand, e-Ink tech is patented to death, so there's little progress there.) Still, I'm not saying iPads are useless in general. The topic is relative merit of iPad vs. other possibilities, in education. My claims are as follows: - iPad is a bad idea in education, partly because of the low capabilities of the device, and partly because not much apps that would would make full use of the capabilities of the device in order to encourage learning (this is kind of similar to "edutainment" or "educational games" for PC - utter crap that only fools parents) - given that, iPad looses to plethora of other tools available for teachers, most of which are low-tech - neither of the two points above will prevent iPad from succeeding on this market, as the hype is strong enough to overcome rational obstacles -- Incidentally, I feel like back in 2015. I thought iPads already succeeded in getting sold to schools en masse, and it already turned out to be a colossal waste of money. I'm pretty sure we already had those discussions on HN.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives. Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.
icc97 9y ago
Where as both Steve Jobs and Alan Kay believed in the Dynabook, I find it interesting how starkly different their views are on the stylus. One of the first things Alan Kay had after seeing the iPad was try using a stylus [0], where as Steve Jobs was heavily anti the stylus [0]. So I can imagine a fairly interesting back and forth over the topic. But Alan has only ever mentioned the following two sentences: > And he says, “Well, people lose their pens.” > And I said, “Well, have a place to put it.” [0]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab... [1]: https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-or-a-task-manager-they-blew-it/ https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus...
- alankay 9y ago
  In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just because the learning curve is lower.
  - endlessvoid94 9y ago
    What do you think of the apple pencil?
    - alankay 9y ago
      The Cintiq 13" with Autodesk Sketchbook app on a good Mac or PC is by far the best experience for people who are skilled at drawing (like me)

blackoil 9y ago

Computing does not follow standard inflation. 9 years is 6 generation of Moore's law. e.g. today's 80$ phone is more powerful then iPhone 2007.

maxerickson 9y ago

I think he's well enough aware that the Mac was cheaper. For instance: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2017/04/04/7-steps-for-inventing-the-future/2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2017/04/04/7-steps-fo... It's not made very gracefully, but the point is that the Mac wasn't a big leap forward in capability, it was the consumer version of the thing they had working a decade earlier. Of course it's an open question what sort of computers Apple would have made if Jobs hadn't visited PARC.

SllX 9y ago
It isn't any less an open question, but I think there's a good shot that Jef Raskin's original concept for the Macintosh would have made it to market under Apple's banner. Possibly the best look we'll ever get at the type of Human-Computer Interface he wanted to build is written down in "The Humane Interface", although I believe he did, and correct me if I'm wrong, develop a system for Canon that implemented some of his designs.
- GeekyBear 9y ago
  Jef went to work for Canon after leaving Apple and created the Canon Cat which implemented his original vision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

radicaldreamer 9y ago

What I'm curious about is what is the Parc Alto of today?

alankay 9y ago
A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.
- gpdpocketer 9y ago
  What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on? http://pyra-handheld.com/ http://pyra-handheld.com/ Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet to see the Pyra/Pandora classes of devices?
  - alankay 9y ago
    The physical nature of the device needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about visual angle, resolution, pointing, drawing, typing, extensions of the hardware (especially via software), capacity, speeds that match to human nervous system, etc. The software nature of the device also needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about the GUI, how does it help in learning itself and other things, what kinds of things can I see and contrast and compare, what kinds of things can I do by programming, what kinds of things can kids do by programming. And so forth. What do you think?
- no_identd 9y ago
  Wild speculation ahead, but I'd speculate that it'd likely also include some of the following: 1. The Memfractor framework: http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/ http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/ https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document 2. knowm's memristor based Hebbian Learning technology: https://vimeo.com/125361591 https://vimeo.com/125361591 (Their CEO has reddit btw.: https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/ https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/) 3. Some intentionally not-turing complete components with some recursivity in them, which is apparently possible: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs-ECOOP-2017-27.pdf http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs... "We further showed that certain variants of DOT’s recursive self types can be integrated successfully while keeping the calculus strongly normalizing. This result is surprising, as traditional recursive types are known to make a language Turing-complete." "What is the minimum required change to achieve Turing-completeness? Consistent with our expectations from traditional models of recursive types, we demonstrate that recursive type values are enough to encode diverging computation." "But surprisingly, with only non-recursive type values via rule (TTYP), we can still add recursive self types to the calculus and maintain strong normalization." "Can we still do anything useful with recursive self types if the creation of proper recursive type values is prohibited? Even in this setting, recursive self types enable a certain degree of F-bounded quantification, ..." +other langsec related hijinks, see also http://bootstrappable.org/ http://bootstrappable.org/ and http:// http:// langsec.org/occupy/ 4. Software (UX) & hardware (again: UX) elements/modular components that scale using morphic numbers, i.e. the golden ratio and the plastic number (whose square Donald E. Knuth likes to refer to as "High Phi". He even suggested a special mark for it, which nobody ever bothered to include in Unicode): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number 5. Balanced ternary. We've recently made significant advances in solving the hardware issues with ternary hardware. For an example, see here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/00000013/00000001/art00004 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/0000001... Mirzaee, Reza Faghih; Farahani, Niloofar - Design of a Ternary Edge-Sensitive D FFF for Multiple-Valued Sequential Logic ( Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 ) 6. Spatial Analytic Interfaces: https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 Just take a look at the figures to see where this goes. Incidentally, this kind of user interface lends itself well for Dataflow programming... 7. Projective Programming: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax. See also the Racket Medic Debugger https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html / https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf, but far more importantly the sequel to it, called 'Ripple': https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 Li, Xiangqi; Flatt, Matthew - Debugging with Domain-Specific Events via Macros 8. GNUnet and related hijinks, see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a87072702243a38f3abe2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a870727... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908. See also P3KI, who FINALLY released a whitepaper: https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Core__Trust_Scenario_Whitepaper__1.6.pdf https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Cor... 9. Xanadu, Zettelkasten, Smalltalk, Lisp Machine, Plan 9, Inferno etc. related hyperlink crowd/mesh/cloud/grid/whatever hijinks, both for social and for programmatic cooperation. I'll not link anything on that here, since, well, kind of pointless to feed Alan Kay the kool-aid he in part came up with long ago. ;) And then there exist a million other things that should go here, too, but for which I lack the time to type them out - I already consider this far, far too terse to make any sense to someone without A LOT of preexisting knowledge.

tooltalk 9y ago

why do you find that irritating? The Alto wasn't build for the mass market -- Xerox produced only several thousands units and used mostly internally. It was also developed when they didn't have all the necessary, affordable tech and parts that later made far more affordable copycats (ahem) possible. The Star was Xerox's first commercial product aimed at the mass (business) market -- but like the Lisa which came later didn't succeed because of their high cost.

alankay 9y ago

We understood Moore's Law, so it made sense in the early 70s to make a personal computer in 1973 that would have the power of much less expensive personal computers 10 or more years later. Why? Because the new SW and UI takes a lot of work to invent -- this allowed us to show Steve "the 80s" in 1979. (Worth pondering this way of going about things.) What was disappointing is that the market couldn't value personal computing, especially the general market. For example, the Lisa with its hard disk was really the better machine to be the flagship for Apple. In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". Instead, PCs could only be sold at consumer price levels, more or less as novelties and in business as spreadsheet machines -- and this forced the Mac to be much smaller (both in RAM and disk) so that it was more like a toy than a vehicle. So, no, we (not I - I was part of a research community) did not underestimate the importance of economics. Note that my original Dynabook paper in 1972 said these would eventually be sold for the same price as color TV sets. But we did underestimate the ability of the early market to value computing.

cma 9y ago
> In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could make sense. For individuals at the time I'm not sure. That's not to say people don't spend extravagant amounts on cars beyond the base level of needed functionality. I just can't think of too many purchases at that level that get obsolete so quickly.
- firmgently 9y ago
  Although consumerism was already in full effect in the 80s people hadn't been conditioned into anything like the crazy update cycle we're in nowadays. I suppose the business world may have been different (seems unlikely?) but at least in home/personal computing people weren't buying new computers every 2-3 years - people did keep them for years. Maybe technically they'd have been devalued but if you're still using an item and it's doing its job the resale value isn't a consideration (in the late 90s it was still common for people in eg. sales offices to be using thin terminals with green-screen monitors, despite Windows PCs being readily available).

sedachv 9y ago

> I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sorry, but what is really irritating is the comparison you are making. 1973 component prices are in no way comparable to 1984 component prices, and Xerox's target market and desired margins were completely different from Apple's. If you actually look at the commercial machines that Xerox developed after the Alto prototypes, you find things like the Star, that came out for $16,000 in 1981. Compare that to the Apple Lisa, which came out for $10,000 in 1983. And it is not really a fair comparison, because the Star had much better hardware in every respect. What would be a fair comparison to the Lisa in terms of hardware capabilities would be the 1978 NoteTaker, built with off-the-shelf components for about $15,000 (my estimate: https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-personal-computer-you-havent-heard-of.html https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-perso...). The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive. If you want to say that not selling cheap mass-market products has "limited direct impact," that is true, but is also not a very insightful observation.

jecel 9y ago
> The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive. http://oldcomputers.net/xerox-820.html http://oldcomputers.net/xerox-820.html This was a rather plain CP/M computer released almost at the same time as the Star. Pretty sad when you think how much better it would have been for them to just make the 3 year old Notetaker with no changes instead.

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Irritating? Not me. A bit of braggadocio? Sure. But I'll allow him that.

deleted 9y ago

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michaelcampbell 9y ago

I felt the same, but if I were him and as self aware as he is as to his impact, it'd be hard for me to unwind the BetaMaxing of 'my' work, emotionally. (Economics aside.) Based on other writings of his, which I've also enjoyed, he doesn't seem shy to throw in these jabs.