alankay

10 ms·

31.
by alankay 8y ago
The best book about the ARPA/Parc research in the 60s and 70s is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop.
32.
by alankay 8y ago
The best all around book about the ARPA/Parc research community is Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine". Covers pretty much everything pretty much outstandingly.
33.
by alankay 8y ago
Memorizing equations is "religion" not "math". "Understanding" is "math".
34.
by alankay 8y ago
This is easy to derive if you have a little algebra, but it is shoved at kids before they can derive it, so they don't understand it (which is anti-math). The dull ones go along with it, but the brighter ones often think they are stupi
35.
by alankay 8y ago
An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and I love
36.
by alankay 8y 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)
37.
by alankay 8y 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 th
38.
by alankay 8y 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 printin
39.
by alankay 8y 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.
40.
by alankay 8y 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 like
41.
by alankay 8y ago
1996 before the return of Steve
42.
by alankay 8y 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
43.
by alankay 9y ago
You missed the story and the history, and who knew what. Many of the GUI ideas had been around in the ARPA community before Parc, including scrolling. The bit-map display on the Alto brought a few more possibilities -- such as the overlappi
44.
by alankay 9y ago
Don't you think that a good GUI and visualization of the situations and consequences would do the trick (i.e. think about what the GUI accomplished for interacting with computers at all). I fear that too many technical people have no f
45.
by alankay 9y ago
We are "story creatures" and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from "fond stories and beliefs" to "actually think things through". That the moon shot was just a political gesture -- and also re
46.
by alankay 9y ago
Thanks for the references. I haven't seen these, but the ideas have been around since the mid-60s by virtue of a number of the researchers back then having delved into McLuhan, Mumford, Innis, etc. and applied the ideas to the contempl
47.
by alankay 9y ago
People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the u
48.
by alankay 9y ago
Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited,
49.
by alankay 10y ago
I don't think it's too late, but it would require fairly large changes in perspective in the general computing community about computing, about scaling, about visions and goals.
50.
by alankay 10y ago
Welcome to Claude Shannon! It's not about the message but about the receiver ...
51.
by alankay 10y ago
I don't know. But e.g. the possibilities for "parametric" parallel computing solutions (via FPGAs and other configurable HW) have not even been scratched (too many people trying to do either nothing of just conventional stuff
52.
by alankay 10y ago
Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend
53.
by alankay 10y ago
It is worth thinking of an analogy to TCP/IP -- what is the smallest thing that could be universal that will allow everything else to happen?
54.
by alankay 10y ago
Yes, I do advocate tool building -- basically "if you can do it without getting buried, you should".
55.
by alankay 10y ago
It's not "Big Data" but "Big Meaning"
56.
by alankay 10y ago
This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
57.
by alankay 10y ago
There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For imp
58.
by alankay 10y ago
What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)
59.
by alankay 10y ago
What if "data" is a really bad idea?
60.
by alankay 10y ago
I do get depressed -- how could one not? -- the trick with depression is to not allow it to take you into in-action. Re: Unix etc. try to imagine computer systems without "operating systems" as they are thought of today (hint: loo

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