The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719)

It might all still go the way of the TV [0]. We've been seeing the demise of general computing in real time. The current generation may be the last that got to pop the hood on the internal workings of the Internet, from inspecting HTML source of a web-page to disassembly of whatever was running it, if source code was not available (or at least port scanning and possible stack bashing). With corporations doing their best to remove that ability, and consumers gladly buying curated experience boxes, it all might culminate with an encapsulated silo park selling all you can eat broadcasting (think one-way directed stream, with consumer only getting to send back analytics). So in a way, Gibson got very many things right, maybe even the core thing. I remember thinking in the 90's "Oh, he got it so wrong, the Internet changes everything". Hah. Alan Kay's "the computer revolution has not happened yet" is more relevant today than ever [1]. It's up to us to change that. [0]I think JWZ (Jaimie Zawinski) spoke about that in "Coders at work", can't find the exact source. [1]PDF: [link] There's also a youtube video of his presentation [this video]

The depressing irony of all this is that despite the massive advances in technology in software and hardware, this kind of tooling, specifically document/content/knowledge/issue management has remained stuck in its containing medium, be that word documents on a shared drive, or textareas on a web page (as I am typing in right now!) It seems that smalltalk-like systems, and derivatives such as the lively kernel contain clues as to what a unified meta-interface to an individual's or organisation's content might look like (and how it might behave). Integration and user adoption is a difficult problem (in general) though -- probably the best example of this is the poor (and in some circles, pretty vile) criticism that Google Wave received, though this type of feedback is probably due in part to a lack of understanding of the problem being solved. "The content revolution hasn't happened yet!" [1] :-) [1] with apologies to Alan Kay, [this video]