Joho has a great summary of Ted Nelson's recent talk at the Oxford Internet Institute. Nelson coined the term "hypertext" and has, since then, been on a (relatively usuccessful, unfortunately) quest to revolutionize interface design. In the talk, he reminds people that technology development is rarely apolitical, and frequently driven by strategic business decisions rather than innovative thinking about how people could use computers.
He talks about the great British engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who wanted the width of RR tracks to be set at the optimally safe distance but lost to the economic interests of the carriage makers. He likewise talks about Nikola Tesla 'who invented the modern world,' including the electrical grid. Tesla wanted to give free electricity to everyone in the world by 'charging up the electrical field of the planet so that anyone with a coil could just tap off what they like.' Westinghouse stopped backing him as a result of this. 'What's the business model?' Finally, he talks about Wernher von Braun vs. Chuck Yeager. Yeager gets credit for breaking the sound barrier, although (says Nelson) a British pilot preceded him. Nelson says that Yeager later said 'I could have gone orbital, but they told me not to.' This was in 1947. Why did we hold Yeager back, he asks. Because, von Braun felt that if he let a little plane got orbital instead of large rockets, it would disrupt his political agenda. Von Braun shared Heinlein's vision of colonizing space. (Ted says this story is 'partially conjectural.')
The point: There are hidden agendas in most technological decisions. He asks why programs insist on us not entering spaces or hyphens into phone numbers. 'The real technical reason is the programmer is a jerk.' The engineer, says Ted, passively-aggressively requires the user to do something 'rigorous.' This is the techie mentality at its worst. Software is too important to be left to the techies; they need an 'overarching vision.' The reason computer games are so much better than office software is that the people who create computer games love to play games while the people who make office software 'don't give a shit.'
'Today's computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life.'
He talks about Doug Engelbart who shares Ted's view that 'the current computer world is absolutely lousy.' He lays this primarily at the foot of Xerox PARC's assumption that the computer GUI ought to imitate paper. Rather, it should enable rapidly changing links among the thousands among ideas and scraps. He shows some great examples of French literary works (e.g., Victor Hugo) literally cut and pasted together. But Xerox PARC called a simple hide and show operation 'cut and paste,' thus making it harder to do complex rearrangement of pieces.
[via Joho the Blog]
Posted by johndanseven at December 1, 2005 12:47 PM