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Yesterday, in the context of reading a tweet asking whether teens/young twenty-somethings actually struggle with files and filesystems or if that's just an internet urban legend (anecdata says probably true), I came across a link someone posted to an interview with Alan Kay at Fast Company. Four and a half years old now, the interview nonetheless coincided with a period where the iPhone and iPad (and their associated metaphors) had captured a huge swath of the public, an entire generation of people learning that only one program runs at a time, multitasking is impossible, and that limited input capabilities are a feature, the details of their devices details hidden not just by default, but fully, competely.
Zoomer/Alphas and Tech Literacy
Interview: The Father of Modern Computing is Not Impressed
Alan Kay is something of a legend. One of the pioneers at PARC, Xerox's research centre, he worked on the SmallTalk project, whose language and environment would prove influential on generations of future languages and their developers. But he also worked on something else, an idea for a hybrid book/computer that to the naked eye looks all the world like the sort of iPad or Android tablet you can pick up for a few hundred dollars today. Like a larger, more tactile iPhone. A device for children to learn and explore and create. He called it the Dynabook.
Kay first came up with the idea as a doctoral student, in 1968. After a meeting with Seymour Papert, the inventor of Logo, Kay began thinking about computing from a child's perspective. At the time, computing was necessarily a big, expensive venture. The dominant model of computing was the mainframe, enormous systems that took a room's worth of space. The minicomputer revolution was just starting to take hold: in 1965, DEC came out with the PDP-8, the precursor to the PDP-10 so famous in hacker lore. It was still wildly expensive (equivalent hardware would cost over $150,000 today), but it was smaller. People had always been thinking what-if, but were faced with very real hardware limitations. Now the hardware was getting smaller, and wild ideas started becoming possible.
Kay's thoughts about children's computing were stimulated by Papert's ideas, that children's computing had to be an appropriate embodiment of the real thing, that learning is a process by which people construct ontologies based on their own interactions with the exterior world, according to the Constructivist philosophy of Jean Piaget. As children do, they learn. And if they do an activity that is in essence a type of real programming, this will serve as a basis to allow for understanding more advanced lessons as time goes on.
Kay's doctoral research was on programming languages - specifically, the FLEX language he created - but while at the University of Utah he worked with David Evans, one of the early pioneers of computer graphics, and Ivan Sutherland, creator of the influential Sketchpad program. You can see how the ideas started to form. Something in the air. The right people in place. And so after Kay completed his PhD, he took a position at Xerox PARC, where he would not only continue his influential work in programming language design, but also formulate the idea of a book-like computing device with multimodal inputs: a keyboard, an attached stylus, a screen to write on. What he called the Dynabook.
The Dynabook, it needs to be stressed, was never actually made, only described. And at the same time, industry pressures were making computers smaller and smaller. The Xerox Alto was a famous precursor of the personal computer; it influenced the Apple Lisa, and then the Macintosh. Kay was dismissive of early personal computers, seeing them as unimaginative and less powerful continuations of the mainframe and the minicomputer. The Macintosh, he said, was the first computer worth criticizing, one which broadened the creative environment and offered a wider set of affordances to the user. If the golden era of the personal computer was the 1980s, then the 1990s was its commodification: PC clones, Mac clones (briefly), the era of the Pentium expanding to make room for lower-priced offerings from AMD.
The 1980s were about the computer itself: limited hardware, software-via-floppy, limited communication by modems. The world-changing events of the 1990s were still years away, the web and hypertext not yet invented.
I'll catch myself: HTML was not yet invented. Hypertext was another one of those things in the air at PARC, and Alan Kay is dismissive of what set the world on fire in the 90s. The web was "infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible"; "simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we're still suffering from."
The Hypertext Editing System (HES)
Kay's opinions are driven by what is offered versus what is possible, a kind of sadness that the pioneering early work from what is now fifty to sixty years ago was in many ways more sophisticated and enabling than what we have today. That's not to say more powerful; the phone that you or I have in our pockets is as powerful as lower-end, consumer grade hardware. In some ways, more powerful. All the cameras and lenses and image-processing software: as much as end-user computing has suffered, photography has never been the same.
In January, 2007, Steve jobs invited Kay to the unveiling of Apple's revolutionary new computing device, the iPhone. Afterwards, Jobs handed Kay the device and, echoing Kay's earlier tempered praise of the Macintosh, wryly asked, "Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?"
Kay was astonished by the iPhone, but not for the reason consumers were. He thought a tablet device, the rough shape of the Dynabook, would be a natural starting point. As he said in the interview, the iPhone would have been fine - if the people who had created it understood what computing was about. But, he said, they didn't, and what they produced is an illusion, a simulacrum, as true to the real thing as Guitar Hero was to an actual guitar. There's no stylus, forcing you to use your finger; where's the basic concept of being able to undo what you just did; for heaven's sake, how do I get at my files?
I think Kay's wrong, or perhaps idealistic at time of interview. I think Apple knew exactly what they doing, aware of exactly the kind of world they were trying to create. Obsessed then and now with experience, they saw PCs of that time as positively garish. The ability to run anything a flaw, rather than a feature. Much better to gatekeep what the user can see and feel: all apps must come through an app store; better, all apps must come through *the* app store. And not enough to simply facilitate. Instead, a cut of every transaction processed through the store. Apps, music, you name it. Apple would have their share.
The end result was a user experience that was streamlined and pretty and hostile and shitty. Users no longer had access to their files. Typing was better than on feature phones, but still mostly bound to awkward taps that were easy to miss, far slower than a traditional keyboard. How, Kay asked, did you undo? You didn't. This was never part of the design because, for Apple, this was never part of the experience, any creativity carefully specified application by application. Type a quick update. Upload a picture. Check your email, scroll and scroll.
We're more than fifteen years past the launch of the iPhone and the successful and terrible revolution it ushered in. Is the iPhone worth criticizing? Absolutely. But not for the reasons that Jobs hoped. Rather than creating a device that expanded our capabilities, Apple created the reverse. We've become dumber. We've created less, spending the last decade and a half sleepwalking through the time after work and school that should absolutely be for and about ourselves.
What does the iPhone let us do? Everything and nothing. What is Steve Jobs' legacy? Immense, but not for the reason he would've wanted. The longer this paradigm persists, the more Apple owns what we've become, and more so, what we haven't. Fifty years after the conception of the Dynabook, we're trapped in amber, able to see the shape of what could be and powerless to realize it, our phones holding us somewhere between sad and sedated. Meanwhile, Kay's promises, his influences, reverberate softly. The echoes of what could've been. Something like a distant dream.