|
|
Howard Rheingold: Food for Throught
posted by Peter William Lount
"Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective
futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what
the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC
and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended
upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers
inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea
of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve
Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought
and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was
not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer
science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn't for people like J.C.R.
Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn't have happened.
But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary,
work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and
von Neumann -- especially von Neumann - created the foundations that the later
toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can't
understand where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand
where it came from."
It's interesting to note that the first chapter
of Howard's online book has the same title as
Alan Kay's 1998 Educom talk.
In addition this feature is also related to the Doug Engelbart
feature. If you haven't watched the Alan Kay and Doug Englebart videos then
you are missing out on amplifying your mind!
Full "Tools For Thought" online book
by Howard Rheingold
From a comp.lang.smalltalk news posting by Larry Trutter.
Thank you Larry for pointing out this amazing resource.
Copyright 1 9 9 9 - 2 0 1 0 b y S m a l l t a l k . o r g "! , A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d .
|
|