Re:“The Home Information Terminal – A 1970 View” by John McC...
by mindcrime on Sunday October 11, 2015 @10:19PM
(#10372175)
Two things never cease to amaze me:
A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960's and 1970's (or perhaps, further back than that) were. John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc... all of these folks saw so much of today's technology landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or, before it was practical / cheap / readily available).
B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960's / 1970's visions. For all we've accomplished, there are still things that Engelbart, McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don't have yet. Of course, some of that is down to political / economic issues, and not just technological ones. For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still isn't fully realized for a combination of reasons: technological, economic, political, etc.
The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on. Heck, there's probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other luminaries of that era.
A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960's and 1970's (or perhaps, further back than that) were. John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc... all of these folks saw so much of today's technology landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or, before it was practical / cheap / readily available).
B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960's / 1970's visions. For all we've accomplished, there are still things that Engelbart, McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don't have yet. Of course, some of that is down to political / economic issues, and not just technological ones. For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still isn't fully realized for a combination of reasons: technological, economic, political, etc.
The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on. Heck, there's probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other luminaries of that era.