[sociate] The chasm from Engelbart to Jobs and Gates

While reading John Markoff's excellent history of Silicon Valley's
contributions to computing and the Internet,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033820/jerrymichalskisr> What
the Dormouse Said, I was struck by the yawning chasm that separates
<http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html> Doug Engelbart's
original vision of augmented collaboration from the notably personal
computing visions elaborated by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Early on, Gates produced
<http://berry.engin.umich.edu/oligoarray/images/ms-dos.jpg> MS-DOS, a
fragile little operating system that hardly worked unless you bought more
software from other companies. Remember  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM>
memory management? NetBIOS? Novell's Netware?

 <http://lowendmac.com/compact/byte0284.jpg> Jobs then took the highly
networked visions created at Xerox PARC and somehow turned out a brilliant,
but completely isolated little anthropomorphic machine. For some time, he
didn't want it to have a hard drive, a network or a larger/color monitor.
Sheesh.

Gates then copied that. A mere decade later. (
<http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/win31.jpg> Windows 3.1 doesn't
really count; Windows 95 achieved parity, but only because the Mac OS had
somehow become frozen in time.)

We're still stuck with the (my) desktop metaphor, and on top of that, with
mere personal productivity applications. We ship one another bulky Word and
PowerPoint files, praying the versions don't get mixed up in transit. Those
documents are too large for collaboration, and their proprietary formats
don't allow the linking and remixing needed for creativity.

Other people? Other places? They're over there, on the H: drive or in the
"collaboration" application.

Why have these magical platforms neglected our social nature for so long?
Why are these features still being glued on as afterthoughts, like antlers
on a  <http://members.aol.com/thermog2/shadowrun/creatures/jackalope.html>
jackalope? Can't we loosen up, move things around a bit so that
collaboration, annotation, search and linking are always at hand, for every
object, as native functions of every window?

Doug had a fantastic vision, one he may have clung to too tightly as
implementation details mounted (this Markoff's book points out well). But
the social nature of work was implicit in the vision. That little essential
bit got ignored.

Now, happily, social software is in. Doing things together is cool. Emergent
crowd behavior gets oooohs and aaaaahs and some decent research funding.
About time.

By the way, a similar cognitive gap opened when Marc Andreessen and his
buddies at NCSA added images and other media capabilities to their
<http://news.com.com/Mother+of+invention/2009-1032_3-995679.html> Mosaic
browser, but didn't implement the writeable side that Tim Berners-Lee had
intended the Web to have. So the Web became something browsable, more like
TV and magazines, rather than writable.

Wikis in particular are helping make the Web writable again, which makes me
smile.

It really is time we rethink the computers we're using. They spend way too
much time churning to do things we don't need them to do -- don't get me
started on  <http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html> the many lovely DRM
features being built into the next generation platforms -- and not enough
just doing what we really need.


posted by Jerry at
<http://www.sociate.com/blog/archives/2005_08_01_archive.html#11250433784246
0953> 12:35 AM

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