There is always this tension between idealism and realism within engineering. Victor descries the ignorance we show the idealism of Engelbart, and Englebart, in

There is always this tension between idealism and realism within engineering. Victor descries the ignorance we show the idealism of Engelbart, and Englebart, in turn, expressed "sadness" at how little progress we've made. And yet, consider someone else Victor considers a hero, Seymour Papert, inventor of the Logo programming language. When we learned it on the Apple IIe, it was without connectivity to any other device, and usually with just the manual to guide us. Collaboration was happening, but on a much longer time-scale. It wasn't milliseconds, but rather months and years. It wasn't mediated by network packets, but by shrink-wrapped software boxes and expansion cards purchased at big-box retailers. A remarkable amount of progress happened on that slow, physical time-scale, but much of it was incompatible with shorter time-scales and global messaging. For example, Windows, having grown up in the slow time-scale, was hit hard by the fast time-scale, it's immune system non-existent. It's too easy to wave away the problems we really experienced (and experience) with malware. Englebart made simplifying assumptions that people wanted to collaborate, and were not malicious and did not want to harm each other. But these assumptions are all false, and a large, possibly majority proportion of modern engineering effort directly and indirectly addresses these unfortunate realities.