An Interview with Alan Kay: "The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas."
content.scholastic.com
content.scholastic.com
It's hard to visualize what exponential growth means, but if you can simulate it using Python, you can suddenly imagine it.
If you look with a squinty eye at most of personal computing today, you'll see we're basically just automating paper—using digital versions of documents and mail.
but then I noticed that the article is dated April/May 2003.
These days personal computing is more about the seamless integration of processing with personal and social activities which is why companies like Apple, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc are doing well.
Seamless hardly! I have to update my status on facebook and twitter separately, upload my photos to picasaweb and facebook separately, check my e-mail, my facebook mail, my news.YC threads, my reddit threads (or mail, whatever they call it).
Yuk!
It's amazing how much has changed in the past 5 years. The web has definitely moved into a more social direction - message boards aren't a place where you post, they're a place you hang out. The 'net is morphing into a social environment, not completely unlike the one those envisioned in fiction [1] just 15 years ago.
Read it.
This is exactly the sort of technological revolution that is required before we can achieve true universal education.