Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

>Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.

This will probably blow your mind:

1988 presentation where Alan Kay confidently predicts media-driven websites that became the norm only around 2010. He also talks about virtual reality and real-time 3d graphics.

We still haven't caught up with his vision for exploratory interactive computing and user-driven simulations.

The fact that computers can/will/should be networked and also used for interactive collaboration rather than just raw number crunching was evident to some people as far as 1962. Maybe even earlier.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Augmenting Human Intellect is not an easy read, but it is well worth it, and not just as a matter of historic curiosity.

View on HN

> 1988 presentation where Alan Kay

Great find! He nailed it.

"Man is the animal that learned to shape tools, and then the tools shaped man. We're very aware of the first part as ourselves as tool shapers, but we’re very unaware of how the tools come back and shape us..."

Then ties that into what will become the internet:

"That communications net is going to take us from a situation where we use computers from the outside, to a situation where in effect we'll be living inside one vast computer.

It sounds awful, but in fact we already live inside a number of grids. We live inside a power grid, where we wouldn't know what to do if it was taken away. Soon we’re going to be living inside of an information and knowledge grid. Such that wherever we go, we’re always going to be in contact, with power to make things happen, communication to get people to do things and ways of processing the information that comes around."

Excellent links, haven't seen the Kay presentation before :)

For anyone interested in going down this (extraordinarily interesting) rabbit hole: the book What the Dormouse Said [0] by John Markoff paints a vivid picture of early (1945-1984ish) computer history. Featuring Engelbart, Jobs, Jim Fadiman, Stanford, MIT, Xerox, Tim Leary, and more. A light yet informative read; highly recommended.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...

> https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125 > 1988 presentation where Alan Kay [...]

I'm getting no sound throughout the whole video, and youtube lists it as having music from a particular Debussy recording, which is then also unavailable (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhogGOTnT9I)

Muting the sound is the usual response to streams and videos that plays audio that someone claims to own the rights to. Is this another casualty to how easy youtube makes it for copyright trolls (or people indistinguishable to copyright trolls)?

It plays fine for me, but it does have a 3D demo with some classical music at the end, so maybe YouTube disabled sound based on your location.

Also compare https://www.gwern.net/Timing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com