(2018-12-10) Ohno Techs Masturbatory Historiography

John Ohno: Tech’s Masturbatory Historiography. There’s this approach to computing history where we focus on work that looks shallowly similar to current norms, claim that work was ‘prophetic’ or ‘ahead of its time’, & mostly ignore differences & intent except as quirks. Because of the recent 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, we’re getting a fresh batch of them.

These folks weren’t trying to predict our current future. They were trying to create a future worth living in, & we failed to make that happen.

Douglas Engelbart wasn’t trying to create Skype & Jira.

Ted Nelson wasn’t (and isn’t) trying to create the Web or CD-ROM.

Alan Kay wasn’t (and isn’t) trying to create the Macintosh.

Engelbart, Nelson, & Kay are part of a particular tradition: trying to use computers as an extension of human cognition. Not just memory, but imagination, & other mechanisms that we don’t have names for.

Engelbart was (along with Sutherland & Licklider) interested in intellectual augmentation and symbiosis

The feeling of symbiosis with the machine is, even today, alien to most of us! Aside from a handful of people who have become very proficient with a command line or REPL, we have never experienced the computer as a seamless extension of the mind (as we frequently do with notebooks and other kinds of freeform tools): instead, the computer remains at best a collection of poor-quality highly-specific single-use tools.

Nelson is interested in expression: making footnotes, intertextual references, and all kinds of context directly visible. What the web calls a hyperlink is what he called a ‘jump link’: you activate it, your original context disappears, and you are thrown into hyperspace. Jump links are a slight improvement over channel-surfing, but they do not represent visible context (which Xanadu has, for the past 60 years, represented as parallel columns with visible connections between them).

Kay, influenced by Piaget & Papert, was interested in building environments for growth. Papert saw the computer as an opportunity to build a ‘math-land’, where children learn math the same way children living in France learn French (i.e., where natural human curiosity and the drive to create leads them to learn things that are normally a classroom slog). The graphical Smalltalk environments Kay worked on were ‘computerlands’

Meanwhile, today’s home computers don’t even ship with a development environment, and most computers are tablets or phones (which don’t have a keyboard and ultimately act as glorified televisions).