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It's not just that -- systems like the one Engelbart presented really benefited from all users essentially sharing the same memory space; everyone was on the sa

It's not just that -- systems like the one Engelbart presented really benefited from all users essentially sharing the same memory space; everyone was on the same computer at the same time. As it appeared to the machine, there was essentially one user and that user was a gestalt of all the people using the system at the time. Now we have a web of different machines, which don't trust each other (because we don't trust each other); we haven't progressed in much the same way because we have much different constraints. In a sense, if Engelbart's system was a completely shared space in which everyone lived and was trusted, then of course our systems are inelegant by comparison. We're driving around in assault vehicles interacting with each other at a distance through signs, signals and the occasional open window. But then again, we're not solving the same problem Engelbart was solving. Can we emulate that experience? Of course we can, but we're going to have to change how it operates quite significantly, in order to have it fit with our differing, more complex, social requirements.

justinjlynn 8y ago
Essentially, we built personal computers -- single user, application oriented. Engelbart started with and imagined an interpersonal computer -- all users, data oriented. Those are fundamentally different approaches; one in which systems are isolated and the other in which there is only one system; one in which data is in a standard interoperable semantic format, and one in which files are bags of opaque bytes. It's going to take more than some time for the two to converge, if they ever do.
- walterbell 8y ago
  IoT sensors + ML are trying to climb the steep hill of semantic interoperability, at least in specific domains. But even there, the information flow is not symmetric.
- pwang 8y ago
  Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at every level. Servers and server farms comprised of PCs are horribly complex to scale in a reliable way, and the programming models force programmers to have to either reason about complex "distributed computing" problems, or externalize state into a scalable "database" that has already thought about the problem. End-user PCs act as Frankenstein contraptions, both containing private data for some applications, and containing no data for others. In the former case, the OS ABIs and application paradigms do not treat data security and privacy as a first-class concern, so ransomware and malware abounds. In the latter case, our PCs are brain-dead for most daily productivity without being tethered to a "cloud" (aka Mainframe) run by companies whose sole investor remit is to monetize our data and/or our interactions with other people via their free applications. A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Every output an input.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    I like how you put it. Isn't this quite close to what Alan Kay's group is doing? I'm a bit sad that he doesn't embrace open development more, I feel we only ever get to see some side products like a parser / DSL framework, instead of seeing the whole picture, which is what I'm actually after.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    > A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Which researchers or companies are working on this architecture, other than the negative examples of socialmedia/adtech, WeChat and China’s social credit system?
    - jchrisa 8y ago
      It feels like the work we do at database companies. My earlier work on the Couch ecosystem was inspired by the goal of creating a universal data mesh, so user-driven applications could share data. Now with FaunaDB we are closer to the goal of one cluster for all applications, but with relational constraints and ACID transactions.
    - jbpetersen 8y ago
      Tlon's Urbit is probably the best all-fronts attack on the problem I've seen. Honorable mentions for tackling part of the problem go to IPFS and Scuttlebutt. There's a lot of people who understand the larger vision around the decentralization crowd if you can find them in the haystack of hypesters.
- specialist 8y ago
  Your keen analysis may be analogous to Jef Raskin's Canon Cat, replacing users with processes. Its shared state, non-modal architecture enabled interop as yet unseen else where. So I've read (I've never played with one). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

justinjlynn 8y ago

Essentially, we built personal computers -- single user, application oriented. Engelbart started with and imagined an interpersonal computer -- all users, data oriented. Those are fundamentally different approaches; one in which systems are isolated and the other in which there is only one system; one in which data is in a standard interoperable semantic format, and one in which files are bags of opaque bytes. It's going to take more than some time for the two to converge, if they ever do.

walterbell 8y ago
IoT sensors + ML are trying to climb the steep hill of semantic interoperability, at least in specific domains. But even there, the information flow is not symmetric.
pwang 8y ago
Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at every level. Servers and server farms comprised of PCs are horribly complex to scale in a reliable way, and the programming models force programmers to have to either reason about complex "distributed computing" problems, or externalize state into a scalable "database" that has already thought about the problem. End-user PCs act as Frankenstein contraptions, both containing private data for some applications, and containing no data for others. In the former case, the OS ABIs and application paradigms do not treat data security and privacy as a first-class concern, so ransomware and malware abounds. In the latter case, our PCs are brain-dead for most daily productivity without being tethered to a "cloud" (aka Mainframe) run by companies whose sole investor remit is to monetize our data and/or our interactions with other people via their free applications. A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Every output an input.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  I like how you put it. Isn't this quite close to what Alan Kay's group is doing? I'm a bit sad that he doesn't embrace open development more, I feel we only ever get to see some side products like a parser / DSL framework, instead of seeing the whole picture, which is what I'm actually after.
- walterbell 8y ago
  > A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Which researchers or companies are working on this architecture, other than the negative examples of socialmedia/adtech, WeChat and China’s social credit system?
  - jchrisa 8y ago
    It feels like the work we do at database companies. My earlier work on the Couch ecosystem was inspired by the goal of creating a universal data mesh, so user-driven applications could share data. Now with FaunaDB we are closer to the goal of one cluster for all applications, but with relational constraints and ACID transactions.
  - jbpetersen 8y ago
    Tlon's Urbit is probably the best all-fronts attack on the problem I've seen. Honorable mentions for tackling part of the problem go to IPFS and Scuttlebutt. There's a lot of people who understand the larger vision around the decentralization crowd if you can find them in the haystack of hypesters.
specialist 8y ago
Your keen analysis may be analogous to Jef Raskin's Canon Cat, replacing users with processes. Its shared state, non-modal architecture enabled interop as yet unseen else where. So I've read (I've never played with one). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat