alankay1

For "discovered" vs "invented" I think you have to posit your definition of "exist". This puzzled Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, etc.

The Peano axioms describe constraints for instances within a set. Is something already "there" just because we can test the constraints after it appears, or use them to make it?

The foundations of OMeta go way way back (starting with Meta II by Val Schorre ca 1964 -- and in the context of the many different approaches to parsing in the 60s). The modern addition to help make OMeta was the packrat parsing idea. It wouldn't be surprising if some Prolog lore wafted its way in, but I don't recall that any of the many parsing schemes that Prolog has been used for were in the conversations. One of the Ur-centers that most parsing theory has to contend with is "Earley Parsing". However, the idea that a dynamic proof can be used to parse goes very far back.

The "someone" for Smalltalk was Dan Ingalls.

I came up with the Smalltalk half-pager because John McCarthy had shown how to do it -- and because message-passing OOP can be a not too crazy perspective on Lisp (especially a variant of "apply", and especially if you use the FEXPR and closure ideas).

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research in the 60s and 70s is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop.

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.

Memorizing equations is "religion" not "math". "Understanding" is "math".

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 stupid. I (and independently others) have worked out visual proofs of both fraction multiplication and division for younger kids.

But I mostly think that "fractions as ratios" can be left until the child is older and has more chops for derivations.

The Greeks thought about these as different ways to measure intervals, and they worked out the idea of "common measure" as a good solution to dealing with these problems.

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 the basic idea of "Robot Odyssey", but for end-users, using simple logic gates to program multiple robots in a cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a "next Logo" that would allow game players to make the AI brains needed by the robots.

So what I actually said, is that doing it the way you are doing it will wind up with a game that is not successful or very playable.

Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery, because I spelled out what could be really good for the game (and way ahead of what other games were doing). And of course it would work on an Apple II and other 8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on them, etc.)

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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

I was disappointed that something better than Smalltalk wasn't on the Mac and iPhone (Smalltalk was truly wonderful in the context of the 70s, but we considered it just a step in a good direction).

Not understanding Hypercard was one of Apple's largest mistakes in the world of end-users. It was a real breakthrough in something that end-users could really handle and be usefully programmable by them. Besides not understanding its significance on the Mac, we (old Parc hands) pleaded until we were blue in the face to make HC the basis of a really good web browser (it was a great model of a symmetric author-consumer media tool). Missing the latter was a tragedy.

In the light of the first comment, we could then contemplate an end-user system that combined what was great about Hypercard, Smalltalk, and some other experience from the 80s (e.g. the use-cases from Ashton-Tate "Framework", etc.).

1996 before the return of Steve

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.