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What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

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Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#111
post #70
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- e-ink has garbage level latency, which makes it useless for anything even slightly dynamic, including educational videos of course - e-ink doesn't have color, color is helpful in educational material to make it friendly and accessible - there are outlets everywhere, so unless you're going camping, the battery life is not that big of an advantage, more of a slight convenience thing all of these points are why tablet…

The ReMarkable has, by some black magic, managed to reduce the latency by quite a lot compared to, say, a Kindle.

Because they update a small part of the screen, full page turns still take time

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#112
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could…

The economy in the early 80s was in pretty bad shape as far as the average household was concerned, and computing wasn't a "thing" yet. There wasn't yet an internet, not in anything resembling the modern sense, and there were nearly no services designed to be accessed from a computer. So for the majority of the consumer market, computers just didn't really offer $10,000 of value. The business market was maybe a littl…

Moore’s Law was working fine. What technologists could not predict was a Republican president imposing protectionist tariffs that made advanced computers prohibitively expensive in the mid-1980s.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#113

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…

[deleted]

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He brought the iPhone to me, put it in my hands, and asked: “Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?”. My reply was to make a shape with my hands the size of an iPad: “Steve, make it this size and you’ll rule the world”. I find this especially telling after Apple's recent education-focused announcement[1], where Apple continues trying to push the iPad as an educational tool. Is this Tim Cook trying to continue…

The most common place for me to see iPads these days is point-of-sale, everything from sales at small cafes to the front desks of car mechanics and childcare. (The second-most common place is as a distraction device given to three-year-olds.)

I agree with your observations. I can't speak for Kay but I think his comment to Jobs about the size was based on the premis that the iPad would be a production device.

The percentage of users that use computing devices primarily for something other than content consumption is pretty small. I actually think an argument could be made that phones are used more for productive tasks than tablets.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#115
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle". A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could…

The economy in the early 80s was in pretty bad shape as far as the average household was concerned, and computing wasn't a "thing" yet. There wasn't yet an internet, not in anything resembling the modern sense, and there were nearly no services designed to be accessed from a computer. So for the majority of the consumer market, computers just didn't really offer $10,000 of value. The business market was maybe a littl…

>that was something I respected about Jobs (and a few other industrialists) -- the combined ability to understand new technology, visualize how it could be brought to a broad market, and then do it successfully

Jobs participated in a Q&A at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1992, and one of the topics he discussed were the marketing pivots needed for the Mac and Next once he figured out what real world tasks those platforms excelled at that their competition did not. (desktop publishing and enterprise rapid application development)

Video of the talk has recently been made available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#116
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm curious about is what is the Parc Alto of today?

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 variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.

Wild speculation ahead, but I'd speculate that it'd likely also include some of the following:

1. The Memfractor framework: http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/

https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document

2. knowm's memristor based Hebbian Learning technology:

https://vimeo.com/125361591 (Their CEO has reddit btw.: https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/)

3. Some intentionally not-turing complete components with some recursivity in them, which is apparently possible:

http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs...

"We further showed that certain variants of DOT’s recursive self types can be integrated successfully while keeping the calculus strongly normalizing. This result is surprising, as traditional recursive types are known to make a language Turing-complete."

"What is the minimum required change to achieve Turing-completeness? Consistent with our expectations from traditional models of recursive types, we demonstrate that recursive type values are enough to encode diverging computation."

"But surprisingly, with only non-recursive type values via rule (TTYP), we can still add recursive self types to the calculus and maintain strong normalization."

"Can we still do anything useful with recursive self types if the creation of proper recursive type values is prohibited? Even in this setting, recursive self types enable a certain degree of F-bounded quantification, ..."

+other langsec related hijinks, see also http://bootstrappable.org/ and http:// langsec.org/occupy/

4. Software (UX) & hardware (again: UX) elements/modular components that scale using morphic numbers, i.e. the golden ratio and the plastic number (whose square Donald E. Knuth likes to refer to as "High Phi". He even suggested a special mark for it, which nobody ever bothered to include in Unicode): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number

5. Balanced ternary. We've recently made significant advances in solving the hardware issues with ternary hardware. For an example, see here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/0000001... Mirzaee, Reza Faghih; Farahani, Niloofar - Design of a Ternary Edge-Sensitive D FFF for Multiple-Valued Sequential Logic ( Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 )

6. Spatial Analytic Interfaces: https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 Just take a look at the figures to see where this goes. Incidentally, this kind of user interface lends itself well for Dataflow programming...

7. Projective Programming: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax. See also the Racket Medic Debugger https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html / https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf, but far more importantly the sequel to it, called 'Ripple': https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 Li, Xiangqi; Flatt, Matthew - Debugging with Domain-Specific Events via Macros

8. GNUnet and related hijinks, see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a870727... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908. See also P3KI, who FINALLY released a whitepaper: https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Cor...

9. Xanadu, Zettelkasten, Smalltalk, Lisp Machine, Plan 9, Inferno etc. related hyperlink crowd/mesh/cloud/grid/whatever hijinks, both for social and for programmatic cooperation. I'll not link anything on that here, since, well, kind of pointless to feed Alan Kay the kool-aid he in part came up with long ago. ;)

And then there exist a million other things that should go here, too, but for which I lack the time to type them out - I already consider this far, far too terse to make any sense to someone without A LOT of preexisting knowledge.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#117

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…

> He brought the iPhone to me, put it in my hands, and asked: “Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?”. My reply was to make a shape with my hands the size of an iPad: “Steve, make it this size and you’ll rule the world”. I find this especially telling after Apple's recent education-focused announcement[1], where Apple continues trying to push the iPad as an educational tool. Is this Tim Cook trying to continue…

Where as both Steve Jobs and Alan Kay believed in the Dynabook, I find it interesting how starkly different their views are on the stylus. One of the first things Alan Kay had after seeing the iPad was try using a stylus [0], where as Steve Jobs was heavily anti the stylus [0]. So I can imagine a fairly interesting back and forth over the topic. But Alan has only ever mentioned the following two sentences:

> And he says, “Well, people lose their pens.”

> And I said, “Well, have a place to put it.”

[0]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...

[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus...

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#118
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 years later. Why? Because the new SW and UI takes a lot of work to invent -- this allowed us to show Steve "the 80s" in 1979. (Worth pondering this way of going about things.) What was disappointing is that the market couldn't value personal co…

There were machines like the Commodore C64 - and later to some extent the Amiga as well - that more fully embraced and valued computing in that they booted into an environment which allowed you to create programs right away. With the C64 in particular there was no real distinction between the operating system and the programming language, the programming language actually WAS the operating system. The machine booted…

Hypercard and later Visual Basic (to a lesser extent) made programing GUI based applications something mere mortals could do.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#119
post #102
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ebooks can migrate from ipad to ipad (or any other system) without any damage to their contents. books can't.

And you can create backups of them And you can search through the content And you can carry thousands or millions of them in a single device And you can add a new one to your collection without having to physically go anywhere to buy And you can draw and make marks without damaging the content forever And you can create bookmarks in multiple ebooks and have them all available at the same location, also with search fu…

I’m really curiuous to know what is apparently wrong with my comment. Any downvoter care to comment?

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#120

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…

I felt the same, but if I were him and as self aware as he is as to his impact, it'd be hard for me to unwind the BetaMaxing of 'my' work, emotionally. (Economics aside.)

Based on other writings of his, which I've also enjoyed, he doesn't seem shy to throw in these jabs.

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