The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719)

What people said

gjvc · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video [1]from 1997 below... [VIDEO] ...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here: [LINK] It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new. [1] if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.

Read the original HN comment ↗

justin66 · 2026-03 · Reference

> Kay was probably riffing off of that. You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it. [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

gjvc · 2021-09 · Reference

The depressing irony of all this is that despite the massive advances in technology in software and hardware, this kind of tooling, specifically document/content/knowledge/issue management has remained stuck in its containing medium, be that word documents on a shared drive, or textareas on a web page (as I am typing in right now!) It seems that smalltalk-like systems, and derivatives such as the lively kernel contain clues as to what a unified meta-interface to an individual's or organisation's content might look like (and how it might behave). Integration and user adoption is a difficult problem (in general) though -- probably the best example of this is the poor (and in some circles, pretty vile) criticism that Google Wave received, though this type of feedback is probably due in part to a lack of understanding of the problem being solved. "The content revolution hasn't happened yet!" [1] :-) [1] with apologies to Alan Kay, [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗