001216.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 16 Dec 2000 13:00:00 GMT
I'm driving my family down to Myrtle Beach for the week, returning on Christmas eve, in sha' allah. Updates are likely to be sparse, though I will be connected during the week.

Jay Worthington Interviews Eben Moglen at Immaterial Incorporated - The Encryption Wars: A long rant on encryption, property, user interfaces, free software. We have all the computers we need. Just put Linux on them and wire them together. Birthright bandwidth: 400-600 Mhz for each person. Free. [/.]

In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.

Vita Nuova - Inferno Plug-in: an 800K IE plug-in that implements an entire operating system. Sample programs: include some nice graphics and a Unix-like shell. Very cool! [/.]

Add comment Edit post Add post