Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival

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Strong rec kennethfriedman · 2017-09 · on “Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)”

OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes) incremental. Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely growing in popularity, which is great. But even the "notebook" concept is a very limited "low pass filter" version of the visions of Engelbart, AKay, TN, etc. The video that AKay has been sharing around in the post than @dang linked to[0] is a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's systems. [0] [this video]

Strong rec ryukafalz · 2023-03 · on “50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World”

The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: [this video] Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.

Recommends alankay · 2017-09 · on “Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true”

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 ubiquitous idea from Nicholas). Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind". If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown

Recommends seltzered_ · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

#Softwarish - I'm biased a bit more towards interface development: greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True - [LINK] steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - [LINK] glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - [LINK] chris granger - in search of tomorrow - [LINK] alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - [this video] bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - [LINK] #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - [LINK] deb chachra -

Recommends shalabhc · 2018-09 · on “The Early History Of Smalltalk (1993)”

To get another taste of the kinds of systems possible in the 70s, in spite of the constraints, see Kay's demo of a revived Smalltalk-78 system: [this video] (I believe this system is about 10-20K LOC software in total) Notes about the the revival are here: [LINK]

Recommends alankay · 2019-04 · on “Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)”

It's out of the context of this thread, but we were quite sure that "simulation-style" systems design would be a much more powerful and comprehensive way to create most things on a computer, and most especially for personal computers. At Parc, I think we were able to make our point. Around 2014 or so we brought back to life the NoteTaker Smalltalk from 1978, and I used it to make my visual material for a tribute to Ted Nelson. See what you think. [this video] This system --including everything -- "OS", SDK, Media, GUI, Tools, and the content -- is about 10,000 lines of Smalltalk-78 code sitting on top of about 6K bytes of machine code (the latter was emulated to get the whole system going). I thi

Recommends pjmlp · 2021-06 · on “Try APL”

> Thanks for sharing, I love these types of stories. Really makes me pine for the "old" days, and wonder if there's a parallel universe where technology took a very different route such that languages like APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are used instead of JavaScript, Java, and C#, and what that world looks like. Easy, here is some time travel, "Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival" [this video] "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" [LINK] However to be fair, Java, C# and Swift alongside their IDEs are the closest in mainstream languages to that experience, unless you get to use Allegro, LispWorks or Pharo.

Recommends infinite8s · 2021-12 · on “PineNote Developer Edition – E-Paper Tablet”

Well, something like the smalltalk-78 that Alan Kay demos here ( [this video] ) would be an ideal starting interface for e-ink based tablet.