meltedmuppet Richard Toibin
Jaikus from meltedmuppet
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Friday, 2 November 2007
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
-
The Dynabook concept is special as it focuses on the idea of a computer as a medium for self-expression within a communication network..
Monday, 8 October 2007
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Thursday, 4 October 2007
-
I think Englebarts work with digital text editing was his greatest development. This gives the user a high speed, creative work method that is endlessly open to manipulation, This enables the ideas to flow without hinderence from the processess that were previously required when writing a document. It is the perfect example of his H-LAM/T in operation.
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
-
It is Vannevar Bush's thinking regarding why such machine/systems as his Memex should exist that attract my attention. If one reads into the lives of people like Ted Nelson (Hyper Text), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web) and Doug Engelbart (the Mouse, the Arpanet) you will find they all say they were greatly inspired by Bush's visions. You could trace most electronic developments back to Bush and his followers. However Bush talked about the amplification of the human mind, this was his reasoning for the Memex. Brewster Kahle (Alexa Internet Company) says "Bush's great insight was realising that there's more value in the connections between the data than in the data itself". Bush's memex would record intimate thoughts,or "associative trails, as he called them. "The personal machine," Bush wrote in 1965, will deliver "a new form of inheritance, not merely of genes, but of intimate thought processes. The son will inherit from his father the trails his father followed as his thoughts matured, with his father's comments and criticisms along the way. The son will select those that are fruitful, exchange with his colleagues, and further refine for the next generation. No longer, when a person is old, will he forget." This would be the ultimate diary. For decades Bush's predictions were ignored by the computer priesthood (well in to the 1980s) who hardly cared about individuals who had to deal with information, people were expected to mold their behaviour to the systems demands. That priesthood came under atttack during the 1960s. The new generation of computer scientists wanted to build computers that served people not the other way around. They embraced Bush as a figure who could validate their approach and picked up on his trail. Doug Englbart openly described Bush as his patron saint. The developments that we've seen were shaped by Bush's thinking for why we should develop the Memex. The inspiration appears to be the idea that we can develop human nature to higher ideals. To this ends it appears as if scientist are trying to develop technology that will record a persons complete existance,(Everything seen (Digital Cameras), heard (Digital Recording Devices), thought (Digital Recording of Neuron Activity in the brain) etc...). "For what reason do we need so much information? Could it be that in the future it might be possible to use a device that will allow one to experience what it is like to be another, to experience another mind - amplification of the human mind by the joining of minds?
Monday, 24 September 2007
-
The thing I found most interesting at Lecture 19.09.07 was Alan Kays comment that "The best way to perdict the future was to invent it".
Jaikus from meltedmuppet