[Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hello,

  I'm Yoshiki Ohshima, working with Alan for a few years.  I happened
to be the only person who enjoyed the full show of Alan's keynote *in
person*, so I guess I can clarify a few questions^^;

Guido wrote:
> Well, for a start I'd like to see what Alan Kay used in his keynote.
> I'm guessing that's Logowiki.

  What Alan used in the talk was a slight variation of Squeakland
Squeak.  Virtually all code he used in the demo was available in the
Squeak image downloadable at http://squeakland.org.  Most of the
content, including graphics, paintings, and "scripts" written in the
tile-script are not there (only in Alan's image), but some eToys
examples are available at the site, too.

  The dynamic interaction, full control of the graphics rendering,
object manipulation with decent performance you saw in the demo is way
beyond what today's JavaScript in a browser could deal with.  The demo
ain't Logowiki.

  The remote collaboration tool Alan used is called "Nebraska"; a
low-tech screen sharing system in Squeak.  Squeak running on a
computer at CERN was sending the encoded drawing command to another
computer in LA, and the user-events by Alan was again encoded and sent
to the computer at CERN.  (Nebraska is in the Squeakland image, too.)

  BTW, we are working on an eToys-like environment that is capable of
server-based content authoring (asynchronous collaboration like wiki)
as well as real-time collaboration based on a "better theory of
collaboration".

  In regards to the "is the web good?" discussion.  Sure, the web is
good, but it could have been much better.  For an historical account,
the idea of "objects that talk to each other bi-directionally over the
network" weren't new by the time HTTP was created.  In fact, when the
word "hypertext" was invented, Ted Nelson surely wanted the things on
the net connected bi-directionally.  (And ACM Hypertext conference
predates HTTP, etc., etc.)

  Today's JavaScript in a browser is not exactly a great way of doing
stuff, but the fast computers now let us do reasonably interesting
stuff.  However, if we would have started with a "language for the
Web", which were as dynamic as JavaScript, and its execution engine
properly incoporated known implementation techniques by the time, we
would have been a few steps further.  (HotJava in JavaScript on a well
written execution engine?)

  Of course, hindsight is 20/20.  I couldn't have done it if I were
there, but to think of a possible better and fun world that we might
have missed, I feel that learning from the history helps a lot.  And,
it gives good insights on the directions from "here".

-- Yoshiki

  Microsoft Windows helped to create this world where reasonably cheap
computers are abundant, and "everybody" gets the access to the net.
But there could be a better world, right?