There are a million more things that could be said about all this, but I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.
Laptops, web browsers, and email will be left at home. Literally.
I think this is too strong a statement; it sounds almost threatening and that wasn't really the intention. 75% of what I mean is that the new platform should offer so much exciting potential for creating and communicating in new ways, laptops and email won't feel appealing anymore. The other 25% is worrying about how people get weaned off of their old comfortable tools, and "take the plunge" into a new and unfamiliar (and possibly initially flaky) way of working. (I suspect that true commitment requires "getting your hands dirty" being directly involved in developing the new thing in the first place.)
Without such a platform, I think we'll make lots of cute demos which ultimately won't amount to much.
Even if you do just want to make cute prototypes (or even usable tools), a new platform should provide a qualitative shift in what tools are possible, or even conceivable.
Alto/Smalltalk is an obvious example, where once the platform was in place, people started inventing WYSIWYG word processing, desktop publishing, drawing and painting apps (done by twelve-year-olds... in two or three pages of code...)
A less obvious example is Sketchpad. Many of us think of Sketchpad as the "ur-prototype". But Sketchpad only happened because of Wes Clark's TX-2 computer! There was exactly one TX-2 in the entire world, Ivan Sutherland had it to himself, and out came Sketchpad.
Clark's design for the TX-2 "integrated a number of man-machine interfaces that were just waiting for the right person to show up to use them in order to make a computer that was "on-line". When selecting a PhD thesis topic, an MIT student named Ivan Sutherland looked at the simple cathode ray tube and light pen on the TX-2's console and thought one should be able to draw on the computer. Thus was born Sketchpad, and with it, interactive computer graphics."
That's one of the goals here -- to enable the next Ivan to "show up", see the facilities that this system provides, and come up with some crazy thing that no one else could have thought of. Sketchpad wouldn't have happened if Ivan had to build his own computer from scratch, and it won't happen with us if every project starts with cobbling together laptops and cameras and projectors and Python code.
On Dec 7, 2015, at 5:28 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
This came up at lunch today, so I thought it might be a good time to send something out and let people chew on it for the next month before the offsite.
The summary is:
- We should now be working under the assumption that we have at least five years to invent and explore the Big Thing.
- That means devoting next year to bootstrapping a foundation. This is, developing a spatial computing system that is suitable for us to do our daily work in, and to communicate in. (Think Alto/Smalltalk) Without such a platform, I think we'll make lots of cute demos which ultimately won't amount to much. With such a platform, we'll have a chance to "live in the future", which is our (only) mandate as a PARC-style research lab.
- By the end of 2016, I expect us to be working exclusively "in the world". Laptops, web browsers, and email will be left at home. Literally.
- Who "we" is will be determined by who of the current group is willing to commit, and who we hire into it.
Let's imagine we can come up with a ten-year vision. Basically everything we did at Xerox PARC was thought of as a five-year horizon when we did something. It turns out five-year horizons are necessary in order to get done earlier. So in a five-year horizon, most of the inventions come about in the first three years. If you set a three-year horizon, you're not going to get them. Because that just isn't the way people work. That five-year horizon allows people to do the right thing the first year. If you try and narrow it in too much they will not do the right thing the first year.
<Screen Shot 2015-12-07 at 5.09.36 PM.png>
2016 is our year to "do the right thing the first year".
I was on the fence about sharing vs rewriting the following email to Alan, since it came out of a place of frustration, but I think you'll all understand.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bret Victor
Date: December 3, 2015 at 8:42:13 PM PST
To: Alan Kay
Subject: Re: Real web authoring?
Hi Alan,
I agree that it's a problem, and a very obvious problem.
I think Toby's former startup
Notion has some of the right ideas, although they're hiding their hand a bit so as to not scare people off right away.
I can't do it. The web is a dead end, screens and GUIs are dead ends. I don't want anything to do with them anymore, I see them the same way that some people might have seen "time-shared teletype terminals" in another era. I made a vow about half a year ago that I would never design anything for a screen again, and while I reneged a bit for the essay, I want to start getting serious next year.
I gave a little speech at the opening ceremonies for the lab two years ago, and said that I didn't want the lab to be a bunch of people sitting around staring at text on their laptop screens. But that's what it is, and it's gotten more and more frustrating. I don't want this to be another Interval Research, where we bring together smart people and nothing happens because they don't have the leverage of a new way of working.
I need to spend 2016 building a spatial computing environment that's good enough for people to throw away their laptops and live and work in it exclusively, and where we can throw out all the layers of cruft and (literally) see and understand the entire system from top to bottom. ************************
I think that the prototypes over the last year have been helpful in giving me a vague idea of what the system might look like. But the current system is nowhere near good enough for exclusive use, or to compete with laptops. I need to start over, get a team together, and get this right next year.
On Dec 2, 2015, at 5:31 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Bret
Various members of CDG (especially including you) -- and elsewhere -- occasionally put out "authorings" -- usually as a web page -- that use nice combinations of media: excellent rhetoric employing text, images, animations, interactive objects, and sometimes actual opportunities for "readers" to "understand by writing" to add programmatic explorations of their own.
But there is no real authoring system for potential *writers*. This seems way out of sorts for 2015 given that there are actually more than enough resources in the standard browsers to make a good authoring system. And it's also out of sorts with regard to the "living lab" benefits for CDG. In any past era -- RAND, Engelbart, Parc, etc. -- such a group of talents would band together to make an authoring tool both for research purposes but also one robust enough to be used for day to day work and progress.
This is a "smaller" project than a new programming language for "everything" -- it addresses the kind of active media that has already found a nice balance in the world of expressing ideas. It does require a programming language to be invented, and the design could be a nice first pass at a more comprehensive design effort.
To pick two top talents that could be combined to do the main design on one hand and the main implementation on the other, I would offer up the names -- Bret Victor and Alex Warth ... And there are others in CDG who would be good to include as well.
What do you think? (It could also be a good topic for the Jan 9th "advance"!)
Cheers
Alan