4 ms·

From 1994 by the looks of it; I don't think that's apparent on the (print-friendly) link, but it's all the more interesting with that in perspective! Related t

• gamache 18y ago
  Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today? I don't know that I would place Hillis on the same level as Kay, given the conditions of today. Right now, Apple is making a killing by selling machines whose user interface is a descendant of Kay's work, whose programming environment is a descendant of Kay's work, and whose form factor is a descendant of Kay's dynabook concept. Kay, in effect, blueprinted today yesterday. Hillis, on the other hand, made his impact in parallel computing. Whereas Kay's work dealt with today (yesterday), the stuff Hillis did yesterday deals with tomorrow. In the next decade or two, we might watch Hillis' work come to fruition as Kay's already has.
  • prakash 18y ago
    good insight!
• stcredzero 18y ago
  Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today? _why is showing that he's very good at taking what others have done and putting them together in cool ways. As far as world-changing foresight goes, Kay and Hillis were born late enough to see what's coming down the road in the computer revolution, but early enough to be a prognosticator. We may be at the wrong time in history to find others like them. What is going to happen when memory gets a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper, faster, and more reliable? (That last may be the most important factor.) What's going to happen when we really start hacking our biology? I think at this moment in time, we're only positioned to prognosticate hazy shadows of things to come and only those of 2nd rate importance. Like how Jules Verne could presage something with the capabilities of the Nuclear Sub, but had almost no chance to predict the PC and Internet. E.M. Forster presaged the Internet, however. http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html