Alan Kay - 2012 SCIx Keynote Presentation

And MacOS and Windows and and... It's the "worse is better" approach or whatever that is called that set the 'not-quite-field' (thank you AK for this) back to where it started. To me it feels like we are in a hamster wheel of constant reinvention rather than using the software technologies of the 70ies (mainly from Xerox Parc) as a stepping stone. And whenever the methodologies break down we cry for the next framework/language/hardware platform to solve everything. I for one would love to see a refresh about what is happening to OMeta and its family of technologies developed at Viewpoint [1]. Is this still ongoing? [1] ▶ this video

You're thinking of Mother of All Demos. If you watch some interviews with Douglas Engelbart, the whole philosophy was to do away with the existing mediums of paper and video and embrace the new one possible only with computers, like wikis, simulations, etc. Instead we just put the old mediums on computers to make access more convenient. Doug link Alan Kay addresses the matter ▶ this video too. He worked on XEROX PARC, which inspired Steve Jobs to make the Mac. Brett Victor also leans in that direction link The printed book is a good fit here because it's a single perspective, best absorbed linearly. The more important question to ask is why are we reading a single person's perspective these days? Where are his simulations? How are they different from previous author's simulations? When people talk about complex systems, like battles, politics, etc. they're using simulations in their heads, which are only be described through words, maybe some edited videos. So to compare different author's perspectives we read their books and run a different, imprecise simulation in each of our heads. Why not just run a single precise simulation for each author? Well, most of society only uses computers to edit text. Same text that could have been written centuries ago, but now more conveniently. The possibilities of video have also been explored. I've watched many hours of good documentaries on the Battle of Waterloo. Also Gettysburg and many others. But a few plays of link explained things better. Also played the Total War series but the way large historical battles are represented there is a mess. It can only handle small battles of 1000 men believably.