10 ms·

The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

100 points by brucehauman 11y ago

kordless 11y ago
The Computer Revolution Happens, would be a better subject to discuss. This isn't something that is going to quit happening one day. It'll never stop happening.
bobby_9x 11y ago
more than a minority of specialists? All of the software, apps, and services out there should tell you that it's more than this. I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. I'm still not sure why adblock was thrown in there. It has only made it more difficult for indy sites and thw average person to make money and is helping to create an environment where only large corporations can survive. The same revolution happened with the music industry: unless you are signed to a major label, it will not pay the bills.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. Yeah it was. Some of us started programming at 5 or 6 years old in the 1980s and 1990s. That doesn't mean we're better at it than people who start at later ages, but it does show that it was possible for kids to code (and I'm sure some even made money at it) back then.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    And so it was in the late 90s / early 2000s. I first touched code when I was 6-7, but otherwise started seriously programming when I was 12-13. The only thing you needed was a computer, a library in town, and parents who didn't limit your computer time very much.
- daveguy 11y ago
  I started programming in the 80s with BASIC as an 8 year old. So yes, it was very possible in the 80s for kids younger than 10 to learn to program. AdBlock is in reference to the quote from the early 70's from Alan Kay as a suggestion of one of the first "simple programs" a computer user might want to program. This was in the 70s long before ARPA net was called the internet and he had the foresight to identify ads as a nemesis to an enjoyable user experience.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Maybe people think that an 'app' has some intrinsic value whereas a basic demo is just spaghetti. ps: any source for Alan Kay ads quote ?
    - daveguy 11y ago
      I take it you aren't a programmer. 1) most everyone learns to code with a short demo. 2) short demos for learning to program and understanding concepts are essentially spaghetti free -- the problem is you can't even do the simplest "hello world" in walled app gardens that require elaborate toolkits and permissions. 3) source from the fine article: originally published in Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston (August 1972)
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        > I take it you aren't a programmer. that burn If I say I won the putnam does it make a difference ? ps: thanks for the ACM ref.
        daveguy 11y ago
        Then maybe you're a programmer that was so gifted you didn't have to learn like the rest of us (with hello world and simple number guessing games). If so, I completely understand why you would have the impression that simple demo code isn't necessary and everyone should just jump right into codin' apps. Sorry for the burn. You should be aware that basic demo code has quite a bit of intrinsic value especially when the users are free to try it out on their own.
- datapat 11y ago
  >I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. In 1980s UK kids were writing games that sold in their hundreds of thousands. Maybe not 10 year olds, but 16 year olds like Christian Urquhart, Matthew Smith, Eugene Evans are well known names I can remember off the top of my head. There were other, less known, even younger kids than that writing popular games, and even more younger kids learning to program.
zepto 11y ago
This is gibberish. The programming tools on the iPad are already quite powerful - far better than those old basic powered micros. There is also no reason to believe that XCode or the equivalent will not come to iOS now that the devices are nearly performant enough. As far as a completely open system like Smalltalk goes - that was a wonderful world which I wish we lived in, but we don't - not because of Apple, but because of malware, black-hats, and cyberwarfare.
- _ph_ 11y ago
  Apple does not have to open up the whole system - there are some good reasons for limiting the access of applications to the system part of the filesystem and the bare hardware. However, Apple also very much limits the ability to run e.g. Squeak as an app on IOS, you might run it, but not download source code over the internet. And if you read the Anandtech iPad Pro test you can see how much software is held back by the restrictions on exchanging data between apps. I am writing this as an Apple user and owner of several IOS devices. IOS was a huge accomplishment in touch UI usability, now it is time to develop the computing part to similar levels.
  - zepto 11y ago
    I completely agree. I just think that Apple does too, but just isn't moving as fast as we want them to.
  - type0 11y ago
    Ipad dumbs down personal computing by doing things in this way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o (Alan Kay talk, 14-15min)
    - zepto 11y ago
      I love Alan Kay, but he's just wrong there. And since the PC and Android are not locked down - why don't we see the magic there?
      - 11y ago
kemiller 11y ago
I think minecraft fits the bill pretty well actually. Kids make all kinds of things in there, and it's not fragile in the way traditional programming is. The article sort of gets hung up on form factor. Tablets are yet another window into the universe of computing, and there's a lot of creation happening. I suspect that the real promised land will need VR for Lego-like construction of components and/or AI-assisted compilers enabling a sort of DWIM programming. As it is programming is just too fragile to be of interest to the "laity."
- malloryerik 11y ago
  I thought of Minecraft too, and the other games that can be modded. The ComputerCraft mod is interesting, especially a version where you can use a simple GUI inside Minecraft itself to create Lua scripts that control robots "turtles" and computers in the game world: http://computercraftedu.com/ http://computercraftedu.com/ A seven-year-old can make programs (maybe from smaller functions that they've already written) that will hopefully find the diamonds, build the houses, and manage the farms of their Minecraft life. This seems possible because of the limited number of objects and actions in a Minecraft world, while Minecraft is still rich enough for plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and aha moments...
corv 11y ago
There are many more people capable of programming their devices nowadays but I'd wager there's less programmers to each user now.
ised 11y ago
To the author: I could not agree more. In the long term history of computing, I would hope this stage we are in now is not the height of the "revolution". In my humble opinion, to which I am entitled, current Apple hardware is still well-designed like the Apple hardware of the past, but none of it resembles a "bicycyle for the mind". These phones and tablets are "computers" but are programmable only by permission; they are consumption instruments that are meant to support some plan to dominate the communications, media, entertainment industries. Not my idea of a programmable, pocket-sized, networked computer. All due respect to Apple and their wild commercial success, but looking to the future, I get more excited about my RPi or Teensy than I do about my Apple devices. I have little interest in paying for a license to a bloated, complex, proprietary IDE (Xcode) and seeking approval from an "app store" when I can write ARM assembly from a netbook or laptop using a free and open source assembler and run it instantly on the RPi. The revolution is yet to come. I hope. kparc.com/o.htm
- MCRed 11y ago
  Don't be silly- Apple gives Xcode away for free, it is not bloated nor complex, nor particularly proprietary (who do you think made LLVM?) and you don't need to seek anyone's approval to upload your software to github or to run it on your own device. You can write Arm assembly on your laptop and run it on your iPhone even easier than you can on an rPi. You are really wasting time hating on Apple and spinning them (i you really are an apple device owner) since Apple is the one who broke open the mobile device so you could run software with out permission (Before you had to get AT&T for Verizons permission to put code on your phone) and who made high quality development tools and platforms available for free. Apple is the one who shipped the Apple 1 with BASIC... and they haven't stopped.
  - hobs 11y ago
    Apple didnt even have a mobile store at launch, it took third parties to get them out of their web only approach, you couldnt even write apps for the iphone until later patches.
  - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
MCRed 11y ago
I grew up before the generation of kids who booted into basic-- I started programming with a soldering iron. I designed my first computer. Then I designed a video card for it. Then I had to write a BIOS for it. Here's the reality though, Hypercard was a failure. People didn't use BASIC on the Apple II. some did, sure, but most didn't. Most people are not programmers and not programming inclined. Apple gives away the tools you need to build software for your iPad or iPHone-- in the form of Xcode which is FREE FOR EVERYONE to use. It's one of the best tools out there-- when Microsoft was still charging thousands a year, Apple put theirs out for free (and of course, these days Linux and GCC and Ruby on Rails and the whole programming tradition of open source puts even more tools in people's hands.) But heres the thing. Most people don't care. It's never been a better time to be a programmer. But the vast majority of people don't want to be.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  But heres the thing. Most people don't care. It's never been a better time to be a programmer. But the vast majority of people don't want to be. That just means the tools aren't done yet.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    Or that most people don't want to be...
  - Pamar 11y ago
    Hammers and screwdrivers are - I think - pretty mature tools. Still lots of people do not care for DIY and prefer to buy premade or pay someone else to take care of custom solutions.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Hammers and screwdrivers still require quite a bit of thought and planning. IMO, the tools of the "real computer revolution" won't be done until they're at least as effortless as the Star Trek holodeck ("computer, give me a table here, made out of metal").
ntumlin 11y ago
In my opinion the most powerful and useful thing a computer does isn't flappy birds or finding massive primes, but allowing people to communicate more easily. Everything the computer does on top of letting people tell things to other people half way across at world at the speed of light (or close enough) is just icing on the cake.
agumonkey 11y ago
Here's my newest favorite computer http://museum.mit.edu/150/19 http://museum.mit.edu/150/19
- platz 11y ago
  https://youtu.be/IOiZatlZtGU?t=22s https://youtu.be/IOiZatlZtGU?t=22s
mercer 11y ago
As a programmer and tinkerer (hacker?) I cannot agree more with the sentiment of the article. And what follows is not a direct response to article, which I found surprisingly positive altogether, but more of a general rumination on my own relationship with 'computers' and what I often see happening among my peers as well. I think it's important not to only see things as a 'computer specialist', especially if that perspective (perhaps rightfully) can lead to pessimism these days. Throughout my childhood, the main reason why computers excited me was the promise of realizing all the sci-fi stuff I read about and saw on television: tricorders, virtual reality, video communication, voice- and touch-interfaces, zoom-in-and-enhance high-resolution maps, instant access to the knowledge of the world through some kind of AI (all voice-enabled, obviously). And now, all these things actually exist (to a large degree), and in a device that I carry in my pocket! The child that I was did not for the most part care about building these tools, or being about the modify and inspect them. He cared about using them. And he's excited about the immense progress in what feels like a very short time. This adult that I am, meanwhile, has a tendency to instead mostly complain about wifi-issues, siri not picking up on my commands, inability to install flux on my phone, app crashes, the new Google Maps interface, dropped Skype calls, the state of front-end development, and so on. However justified that may be, I've found that focusing on what that kid wants and overcoming the issues that stand in the way has been a much better motivator than focusing on that adult. To name a specific example. Based on the articles and discussions here I sometimes feel a bit... sad that I've mostly been working in web development since coming of age. Apparently we're reinventing the wheel badly, javascript is a pretty bad or at best mediocre language, html/css are terrible because they were not intended for app development, npm is a shitty package manager, and so on. Sometimes I even start feeling nostalgic for the good old days by proxy. But then, when I finish a little journalling/project logging tool that scratches a personal itch, and I can instantly release that to the web and let my brother play around with it, or when I write a little bookmarklet that allows me to fold/unfold/upvote HN comments using the letters on my keyboard, well, then I feel good again. Because then I remember that not that long ago I wrote a game in Delphi. It required trying to figure out how to so something based on random computer magazines and a single Delphi for Dummies book, it required waiting days for help from some dude in Florida who thankfully was happy to assist me. It required putting the game on a floppy disk and hoping that as it was passed along to my dad and his colleagues, it would somehow get into the hands of others. That's when I get excited again about working with computers, and the progress we've made. And that's the mindset that makes it easier for me to try and think about ways to get my younger siblings and others as excited about building and tinkering as I am.
IIAOPSW 11y ago
I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their images come from a camera instead of owning a paintbrush. Heck even on a web-forum where contributing content is as low friction as sharing links, only ~10% of users do it. And only 10% of that 10% actually make the content that's posted. 90% of people are happy to passively consume content. I wish the author were right. I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution. I still think that when I buy a device I should actually own it (which entails freedom to modify). But let's face it idealistic nerd types. We lost. Most people are consumers not creators. Get over it, go to work, program for them, and wipe away your tears with a stack of money.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Creativity isn't a trait, it's a skill. It can be learned like any other.
- jamesrcole 11y ago
  > I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution. When has there ever been a huge hidden demand for revolutionary technological developments?
- danenania 11y ago
  I have to strongly disagree. Humans are innately creative--just watch any child play if you doubt this. What many people lack is not creativity, but the confidence and skills to creatively express themselves. The majority of people do not have that spark they were born with nurtured, they have it squashed.
  - mercer 11y ago
    Childhood is my go-to argument in favor of 'everyone is creative'. I've not talked to a single person who wasn't highly creative as a child, and just realizing that makes me sad sometimes.
tejapr 11y ago
Indeed. I am particularly excited about Intel/Micron's 3D xpoint technology, which will be on sale next year. Extrapolating the exponential rate of improvement in storage technologies, I wouldn't be surprised if we had persistent TB storage at SRAM speeds by 2040.
joelg 11y ago
For the record, the title was taken from the title of AKay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, which is well worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
TRUTHY56 11y ago
this article is nonsense. it is like saying the transportation revolution will happen only when people are able to build/modify their own cars, instead of looking at widespread use as the revolution's measure because the technology is easy for even a layperson to use.

100 points by brucehauman 11y ago

The Computer Revolution Happens, would be a better subject to discuss. This isn't something that is going to quit happening one day. It'll never stop happening.

bobby_9x 11y ago

more than a minority of specialists? All of the software, apps, and services out there should tell you that it's more than this. I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. I'm still not sure why adblock was thrown in there. It has only made it more difficult for indy sites and thw average person to make money and is helping to create an environment where only large corporations can survive. The same revolution happened with the music industry: unless you are signed to a major label, it will not pay the bills.

nitrogen 11y ago
I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. Yeah it was. Some of us started programming at 5 or 6 years old in the 1980s and 1990s. That doesn't mean we're better at it than people who start at later ages, but it does show that it was possible for kids to code (and I'm sure some even made money at it) back then.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  And so it was in the late 90s / early 2000s. I first touched code when I was 6-7, but otherwise started seriously programming when I was 12-13. The only thing you needed was a computer, a library in town, and parents who didn't limit your computer time very much.
daveguy 11y ago
I started programming in the 80s with BASIC as an 8 year old. So yes, it was very possible in the 80s for kids younger than 10 to learn to program. AdBlock is in reference to the quote from the early 70's from Alan Kay as a suggestion of one of the first "simple programs" a computer user might want to program. This was in the 70s long before ARPA net was called the internet and he had the foresight to identify ads as a nemesis to an enjoyable user experience.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Maybe people think that an 'app' has some intrinsic value whereas a basic demo is just spaghetti. ps: any source for Alan Kay ads quote ?
  - daveguy 11y ago
    I take it you aren't a programmer. 1) most everyone learns to code with a short demo. 2) short demos for learning to program and understanding concepts are essentially spaghetti free -- the problem is you can't even do the simplest "hello world" in walled app gardens that require elaborate toolkits and permissions. 3) source from the fine article: originally published in Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston (August 1972)
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      > I take it you aren't a programmer. that burn If I say I won the putnam does it make a difference ? ps: thanks for the ACM ref.
      - daveguy 11y ago
        Then maybe you're a programmer that was so gifted you didn't have to learn like the rest of us (with hello world and simple number guessing games). If so, I completely understand why you would have the impression that simple demo code isn't necessary and everyone should just jump right into codin' apps. Sorry for the burn. You should be aware that basic demo code has quite a bit of intrinsic value especially when the users are free to try it out on their own.
datapat 11y ago
>I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. In 1980s UK kids were writing games that sold in their hundreds of thousands. Maybe not 10 year olds, but 16 year olds like Christian Urquhart, Matthew Smith, Eugene Evans are well known names I can remember off the top of my head. There were other, less known, even younger kids than that writing popular games, and even more younger kids learning to program.

zepto 11y ago

This is gibberish. The programming tools on the iPad are already quite powerful - far better than those old basic powered micros. There is also no reason to believe that XCode or the equivalent will not come to iOS now that the devices are nearly performant enough. As far as a completely open system like Smalltalk goes - that was a wonderful world which I wish we lived in, but we don't - not because of Apple, but because of malware, black-hats, and cyberwarfare.

_ph_ 11y ago
Apple does not have to open up the whole system - there are some good reasons for limiting the access of applications to the system part of the filesystem and the bare hardware. However, Apple also very much limits the ability to run e.g. Squeak as an app on IOS, you might run it, but not download source code over the internet. And if you read the Anandtech iPad Pro test you can see how much software is held back by the restrictions on exchanging data between apps. I am writing this as an Apple user and owner of several IOS devices. IOS was a huge accomplishment in touch UI usability, now it is time to develop the computing part to similar levels.
- zepto 11y ago
  I completely agree. I just think that Apple does too, but just isn't moving as fast as we want them to.
- type0 11y ago
  Ipad dumbs down personal computing by doing things in this way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o (Alan Kay talk, 14-15min)
  - zepto 11y ago
    I love Alan Kay, but he's just wrong there. And since the PC and Android are not locked down - why don't we see the magic there?
    - 11y ago

kemiller 11y ago

I think minecraft fits the bill pretty well actually. Kids make all kinds of things in there, and it's not fragile in the way traditional programming is. The article sort of gets hung up on form factor. Tablets are yet another window into the universe of computing, and there's a lot of creation happening. I suspect that the real promised land will need VR for Lego-like construction of components and/or AI-assisted compilers enabling a sort of DWIM programming. As it is programming is just too fragile to be of interest to the "laity."

malloryerik 11y ago
I thought of Minecraft too, and the other games that can be modded. The ComputerCraft mod is interesting, especially a version where you can use a simple GUI inside Minecraft itself to create Lua scripts that control robots "turtles" and computers in the game world: http://computercraftedu.com/ http://computercraftedu.com/ A seven-year-old can make programs (maybe from smaller functions that they've already written) that will hopefully find the diamonds, build the houses, and manage the farms of their Minecraft life. This seems possible because of the limited number of objects and actions in a Minecraft world, while Minecraft is still rich enough for plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and aha moments...

corv 11y ago

There are many more people capable of programming their devices nowadays but I'd wager there's less programmers to each user now.

ised 11y ago

To the author: I could not agree more. In the long term history of computing, I would hope this stage we are in now is not the height of the "revolution". In my humble opinion, to which I am entitled, current Apple hardware is still well-designed like the Apple hardware of the past, but none of it resembles a "bicycyle for the mind". These phones and tablets are "computers" but are programmable only by permission; they are consumption instruments that are meant to support some plan to dominate the communications, media, entertainment industries. Not my idea of a programmable, pocket-sized, networked computer. All due respect to Apple and their wild commercial success, but looking to the future, I get more excited about my RPi or Teensy than I do about my Apple devices. I have little interest in paying for a license to a bloated, complex, proprietary IDE (Xcode) and seeking approval from an "app store" when I can write ARM assembly from a netbook or laptop using a free and open source assembler and run it instantly on the RPi. The revolution is yet to come. I hope. kparc.com/o.htm

MCRed 11y ago
Don't be silly- Apple gives Xcode away for free, it is not bloated nor complex, nor particularly proprietary (who do you think made LLVM?) and you don't need to seek anyone's approval to upload your software to github or to run it on your own device. You can write Arm assembly on your laptop and run it on your iPhone even easier than you can on an rPi. You are really wasting time hating on Apple and spinning them (i you really are an apple device owner) since Apple is the one who broke open the mobile device so you could run software with out permission (Before you had to get AT&T for Verizons permission to put code on your phone) and who made high quality development tools and platforms available for free. Apple is the one who shipped the Apple 1 with BASIC... and they haven't stopped.
- hobs 11y ago
  Apple didnt even have a mobile store at launch, it took third parties to get them out of their web only approach, you couldnt even write apps for the iphone until later patches.
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago

MCRed 11y ago

I grew up before the generation of kids who booted into basic-- I started programming with a soldering iron. I designed my first computer. Then I designed a video card for it. Then I had to write a BIOS for it. Here's the reality though, Hypercard was a failure. People didn't use BASIC on the Apple II. some did, sure, but most didn't. Most people are not programmers and not programming inclined. Apple gives away the tools you need to build software for your iPad or iPHone-- in the form of Xcode which is FREE FOR EVERYONE to use. It's one of the best tools out there-- when Microsoft was still charging thousands a year, Apple put theirs out for free (and of course, these days Linux and GCC and Ruby on Rails and the whole programming tradition of open source puts even more tools in people's hands.) But heres the thing. Most people don't care. It's never been a better time to be a programmer. But the vast majority of people don't want to be.

nitrogen 11y ago
But heres the thing. Most people don't care. It's never been a better time to be a programmer. But the vast majority of people don't want to be. That just means the tools aren't done yet.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Or that most people don't want to be...
- Pamar 11y ago
  Hammers and screwdrivers are - I think - pretty mature tools. Still lots of people do not care for DIY and prefer to buy premade or pay someone else to take care of custom solutions.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Hammers and screwdrivers still require quite a bit of thought and planning. IMO, the tools of the "real computer revolution" won't be done until they're at least as effortless as the Star Trek holodeck ("computer, give me a table here, made out of metal").

ntumlin 11y ago

In my opinion the most powerful and useful thing a computer does isn't flappy birds or finding massive primes, but allowing people to communicate more easily. Everything the computer does on top of letting people tell things to other people half way across at world at the speed of light (or close enough) is just icing on the cake.

agumonkey 11y ago

Here's my newest favorite computer http://museum.mit.edu/150/19 http://museum.mit.edu/150/19

platz 11y ago
https://youtu.be/IOiZatlZtGU?t=22s https://youtu.be/IOiZatlZtGU?t=22s

mercer 11y ago

As a programmer and tinkerer (hacker?) I cannot agree more with the sentiment of the article. And what follows is not a direct response to article, which I found surprisingly positive altogether, but more of a general rumination on my own relationship with 'computers' and what I often see happening among my peers as well. I think it's important not to only see things as a 'computer specialist', especially if that perspective (perhaps rightfully) can lead to pessimism these days. Throughout my childhood, the main reason why computers excited me was the promise of realizing all the sci-fi stuff I read about and saw on television: tricorders, virtual reality, video communication, voice- and touch-interfaces, zoom-in-and-enhance high-resolution maps, instant access to the knowledge of the world through some kind of AI (all voice-enabled, obviously). And now, all these things actually exist (to a large degree), and in a device that I carry in my pocket! The child that I was did not for the most part care about building these tools, or being about the modify and inspect them. He cared about using them. And he's excited about the immense progress in what feels like a very short time. This adult that I am, meanwhile, has a tendency to instead mostly complain about wifi-issues, siri not picking up on my commands, inability to install flux on my phone, app crashes, the new Google Maps interface, dropped Skype calls, the state of front-end development, and so on. However justified that may be, I've found that focusing on what that kid wants and overcoming the issues that stand in the way has been a much better motivator than focusing on that adult. To name a specific example. Based on the articles and discussions here I sometimes feel a bit... sad that I've mostly been working in web development since coming of age. Apparently we're reinventing the wheel badly, javascript is a pretty bad or at best mediocre language, html/css are terrible because they were not intended for app development, npm is a shitty package manager, and so on. Sometimes I even start feeling nostalgic for the good old days by proxy. But then, when I finish a little journalling/project logging tool that scratches a personal itch, and I can instantly release that to the web and let my brother play around with it, or when I write a little bookmarklet that allows me to fold/unfold/upvote HN comments using the letters on my keyboard, well, then I feel good again. Because then I remember that not that long ago I wrote a game in Delphi. It required trying to figure out how to so something based on random computer magazines and a single Delphi for Dummies book, it required waiting days for help from some dude in Florida who thankfully was happy to assist me. It required putting the game on a floppy disk and hoping that as it was passed along to my dad and his colleagues, it would somehow get into the hands of others. That's when I get excited again about working with computers, and the progress we've made. And that's the mindset that makes it easier for me to try and think about ways to get my younger siblings and others as excited about building and tinkering as I am.

IIAOPSW 11y ago

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their images come from a camera instead of owning a paintbrush. Heck even on a web-forum where contributing content is as low friction as sharing links, only ~10% of users do it. And only 10% of that 10% actually make the content that's posted. 90% of people are happy to passively consume content. I wish the author were right. I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution. I still think that when I buy a device I should actually own it (which entails freedom to modify). But let's face it idealistic nerd types. We lost. Most people are consumers not creators. Get over it, go to work, program for them, and wipe away your tears with a stack of money.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
Creativity isn't a trait, it's a skill. It can be learned like any other.
jamesrcole 11y ago
> I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution. When has there ever been a huge hidden demand for revolutionary technological developments?
danenania 11y ago
I have to strongly disagree. Humans are innately creative--just watch any child play if you doubt this. What many people lack is not creativity, but the confidence and skills to creatively express themselves. The majority of people do not have that spark they were born with nurtured, they have it squashed.
- mercer 11y ago
  Childhood is my go-to argument in favor of 'everyone is creative'. I've not talked to a single person who wasn't highly creative as a child, and just realizing that makes me sad sometimes.

tejapr 11y ago

Indeed. I am particularly excited about Intel/Micron's 3D xpoint technology, which will be on sale next year. Extrapolating the exponential rate of improvement in storage technologies, I wouldn't be surprised if we had persistent TB storage at SRAM speeds by 2040.

joelg 11y ago

For the record, the title was taken from the title of AKay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, which is well worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

TRUTHY56 11y ago

this article is nonsense. it is like saying the transportation revolution will happen only when people are able to build/modify their own cars, instead of looking at widespread use as the revolution's measure because the technology is easy for even a layperson to use.