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For "discovered" vs "invented" I think you have to posit your definition of "exist". This puzzled Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, etc. The Peano axioms describe constraints for i…

The "someone" for Smalltalk was Dan Ingalls. I came up with the Smalltalk half-pager because John McCarthy had shown how to do it -- and because message-passing OOP can be a not to…

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research in the 60s and 70s is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop.

The best all around book about the ARPA/Parc research community is Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine". Covers pretty much everything pretty much outstandingly.

Memorizing equations is "religion" not "math". "Understanding" is "math".

This is easy to derive if you have a little algebra, but it is shoved at kids before they can derive it, so they don't understand it (which is anti-math). The dull ones go along wi…

An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky'…

The Cintiq 13" with Autodesk Sketchbook app on a good Mac or PC is by far the best experience for people who are skilled at drawing (like me)

The physical nature of the device needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about visual angle, resolution, pointing, drawing, typing, extensions of…

But the deep point of the inventions of personal computing and the Internet was not primarily to make old media more convenient, but to "augment human intellect" by making the next…

In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just be…

A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM vari…

I was disappointed that something better than Smalltalk wasn't on the Mac and iPhone (Smalltalk was truly wonderful in the context of the 70s, but we considered it just a step in a…

1996 before the return of Steve

We understood Moore's Law, so it made sense in the early 70s to make a personal computer in 1973 that would have the power of much less expensive personal computers 10 or more year…

Simula can't be praised too highly, and it was a huge influence. But if you take the care to check, you will find out that what I termed "Object Oriented" was quite different from …

The 7±2 was thoroughly proven for sequences of numbers, letters, words, etc. by George Miller and followers. Much has been done since, and this shows that for many things we can ha…

See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for…

See my comment above, including the last paragraph

Just to help with a few facts (easy to find for those who care). http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ Smalltalk started working in 1972, the Alto in 1973, and Smalltalk o…

You missed the story and the history, and who knew what. Many of the GUI ideas had been around in the ARPA community before Parc, including scrolling. The bit-map display on the Al…

Brian Silverman, who has done some miraculous "bringing back software to life" (and some HW as well), has always wanted to do this. The problem here is partly that no one is quite …

The Alto only had 1024 words (4k bytes) of microcode, so it is included in the estimate. The NoteTaker used several 8086s (the first ones) and was entirely in Smalltalk except for …

What he means is that names are a local convention, and scaling soon obliterates the conventions. Then you need to go to descriptions that use a much smaller set of agreed on thing…

Yes, this got very clear in a hurry even in the ARPAnet days, and later at Parc. (This is part of the Licklider "communicating with aliens" problem.) Note that you could do a littl…