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> And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago?

I like the current interface of mouse, monitor and keyboard.

I hate using phone apps. The keyboard is too small, and I hate typing with my thumbs, and the screen is too small. When the iPad came out, Apple fanboys says everyone would only use phones and tablets within 5 years. It has been about 12, and a lot of people are still using laptops and desktops.

And voice interface will probably be a disaster. Everyone thinks it will be like "Star Trek", where they have actors who know how to deliver lines. Most people do not speak that well.

To give an extreme example: I know one guy (with a CS degree from UT, no less) who honestly says more filler words than actual words. "Um" and "ah" are his favorites. Then when he does get a sentence going, he stops halfway through, gives you another ten seconds of filler words, and starts a different one. I think if this guy tried a computer with a voice interface, it would achieve the singularity just to smack him.

Amazingly enough: His wife is from Taiwan, he met her when he spent a few years in Taiwan, and I have seen icons w/Chinese characters on his screen. I wonder if he speaks Chinese the same way he speaks English.

Robert Smith of the Cure said one day he and his wife noticed they had left a camera on after recording a message, so they watched the rest. He said they quickly devolved and were shocked at how dumb they sounded.

Just last night, I was faced with painfully "typing" Mythbusters into my TV, it offered to let me speak, and I groaned and tried it for the first time. It worked, to my amazement. But VR does seem to work pretty well with my voice.

As for the "um" and "ah": people adopt a stilted, formal method of speaking with VR systems. It's no more natural than typing an email.

Frankly I wish more people spoke more formally all the time, myself included.

> And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago? Quite simple really: technical innovation is not seen as driving shareholder value.

Well, in of itself it doesn't. You need to come up with technology that has applied uses that people are willing to pay for.

The Xerox WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pointers) UI was (and still is) very well adapted to desktop computers with increasingly large screens and increasingly powerful CPUs (multi-tasking - windowed UI), as well as to humans that are very visually driven as well as adapted to use hands (mouse) to manipulate things.

Finally, in recent years we are moving past WIMP, especially for mobile, in the guise of user interfaces driven by gestures, voice and now (ChatGPT) natural language interaction. These are again things that play to human interaction modalities, but have only been enabled (as well as demanded - mobile form factor) by technological advance.

There's an element of "network effect" here. Most (non phone) apps use the WIMP interface, therefore all OSes support it. All the apps are written for the WIMP interface because 1) that's what the OS supports, 2) that's what all the other apps do, and 3) that's what everybody knows.

To break through that, a new interface paradigm has to be massively better - enough better that it's worth buying a new computer, a new OS, and all-new apps (from a very limited selection) to get it. That's an insanely high bar, which no alternative to the WIMP interface has cleared. So the WIMP interface continues unchallenged... except for phones. It's going to continue to rule the desktop/laptop world, though, and not because of "corporate greed". WIMP will continue because nothing is enough better to be worth the cost of switching.

Up until Windows 95, WIMP could have been toppled by something acheivable and better. That was nearly 30 years ago, so maybe something better that couldn't be acheived back then is supressed by the status quo.

WIMP on hand held devices isn't great (ask early windows mobile). It's just too fiddly. But if touchscreen interfaces were better at a desk, we'd be doing that on desktops and laptops now. Touchscreens are readily available, it's just way more effective to have an interface that isn't occluded by using it.

Voice based interfaces clearlty work for some, but they're really fiddly for non-linear access.

> But if touchscreen interfaces were better at a desk, we'd be doing that on desktops and laptops now.

The ergonomics of touch desktops don't really work. Lifting your arm (big muscle groups) and trying to manipulate fingertip sized widgets (fine motor muscles) in concert is very strenuous. There's a reason writing apologies on a chalkboard used to be punishment in schools.

For one-off activities or very short sessions it might work for some people. However the WIMP interface with its proxied inputs of a keyboard and mouse work far better for more people for longer durations.

Touch and direct input like a stylus works much better on displays that can sit horizontal (or mostly so). No matter how good a touch interface is, people just physically can't use them for long periods on a vertical display.

> Touch and direct input like a stylus works much better on displays that can sit horizontal (or mostly so). No matter how good a touch interface is, people just physically can't use them for long periods on a vertical display.

Yes, and if you set up a horizontal display for a desk, you're going to end up with neck strain. You could maybe do something at an angle, like a drafting table, but probably still balancing neck and arm issues. And you'd probably need to adjust display construction to reduce the distortion from viewing it at such a high vertical angle.

You're completely right. The horizontal display is only better than the vertical touch display, it's still worse than the vertical non-touch display with horizontal input devices.

    So the WIMP interface continues unchallenged... except for phones.

I used Siri on the iPhone for the first time in trying to return a lost property to its owner. The experience left much to be desired. Siri failed.

Do you realize the concepts for computing tablets came out of PARC as well?

Alan Kay gave a couple lectures at Stanford on "How to Invent the Future" and went over all the stuff that came out of there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

Much of what we use today was conceptualized 50+ years ago. PARC's outputs paid off immensely for Xerox over a very long period of time since they picked a tech (laser printing) that was perfect for their wheelhouse. Companies and our culture these days don't allow for exploration like PARC was allowed. There is too much focus on monetizing everything and having an ROI.

Yes - so much of modern computing came from PARC. Ethernet too. The reputation of PARC though has always been that it was a squandered asset - they invented so much genuinely useful technology and Xerox failed to capitalize on the majority of it.

For a while Blue Skies research labs such as PARC, IBM Watson, Bell Labs seemed to have disappeared, but arguably they are back (different companies/labs though) now with a focus on ML/AI. I'm not sure which commercial labs are still doing fundamental material science research though.

I think we will see engineering innovation in the AI/ML space as new processors are developed. We may get more interesting software as well. One problem is that academics need million dollar compute budgets at the moment to even get close to the output of Google/OpenAI/FAIR. Hopefully the DOD, DOE, NSF and NIH and ultimately Congress will act.

>It wasn't hippy tree huggers that sent all US manufacturing to China. undermining the entire US workforce, and leading to the current situation.

The working class still hasn't recovered from what NAFTA did to our share of wealth. (I'm trying to find the tweet + graph where I learned this in vain)

29 years later and we haven't caught up. The TPP (NAFTA, but for China) would have made it worse.

Further reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The TPP specifically didn’t include China.

the entire point of TPP Was to exclude China...

and stay off my lawn!

i also wonder at the amount of DARPA/DoD/secret funds that went into the early advances, and where they are now (a cia guy told me they saved Sun from bankruptcy early on by buying a bunch of machines, Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, etc )

> Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA,

no, it was the aliens on a side trip after they visited Roswell.

Smalltalk didn't have a "killer app."

There was one cool app called "The Analyst", used by CIA it is said. I once saw a demo of how to use it something like an expert system. it had a spreadsheet where any cell could be any Smalltalk object . But seems it has fallen by the wayside and was never ported to newer Smalltalk platforms (?)

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...

https://comp.lang.smalltalk.narkive.com/hZvXNNyC/xsis-the-an...

"killer app" is a term for something that breaks a technology wide open, like VisiCalc for the PC, or Mosaic / Netscape for the Internet. Do you really want to put The Analyst on that plane?

Smalltalk's never been any more than an intellectual influence, albeit a big one.

I think you are both right. The term "killer app" can be used for something that causes people to buy something else no matter how expensive just to have that first thing. Visicalc for the Apple II, Lotus 123 for the IBM PC and clones (previous apps ran equally well on non clone MSDOS machines), and the web browsers as you mentioned.

Normally it is associated with making something very popular, and in that regard the Analyst certainly wasn't. But it did get a small group to buy absurdly expensive D-machines from Xerox just to run it, though I think it was more than those who bought them to run Lisp:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/dolphin/1100_Scientific_I...

More about the Analyst from later in its life:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/

> I'm not kidding, the robot would follow it's route and beep in front of an individual's office when they had mail on the cart.

The future I was promised... sigh.

Yes, individual offices sound nice.

I love modern "actually we don't have enough space for all the people who come here to work" architecture.

Nice roof garden though.

“ Why should a company invent something new when its "more productive" to just squeeze their vendors, employees and customers more tightly?”

That’s why I don’t like having tech giants like Apple and MS. Their output in terms of innovation is very low compared to their size. But they are big enough to either suppress or buy any innovation that’s coming from smaller players.

> If you think housing, economic equity, or employee rights are trampled today, just wait. It's only going to get worse, until the mass of the population wakes up to who is actually screwing them!

A lot of people have been voting for who has been screwing them since they pulled the lever for Saint Ronny with both hands. Why would they realize anything now?

Hah, I love the rant. Maybe if we get psylocibin approved all the depressed programmers and tech folks will develop the creative insight to buil the next generation of PCs!