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.

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