Re:Jef Raskin's cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane comp...
by theamk on Monday September 15, 2025 @01:09PM
(#45252285)
A lot of those "visionary" voices are simply envisioning something that is completely impractical to implement.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu is a great example - it's core idea was that information is never deleted. This was literally baked into design - the main data storage is "append only". So sounds good on paper, but how was this supposed to be practical, especially with the high cost of storage back then?
Or that "unified document" with a workspace - sounds great on paper, until you start to think about more general use cases. A friend gives you few dozens of files on floppy (or you download from BBS), and you want to pass them to next friend. How do you do this easily without concept of "files"?
So there is no surprise that industry ignores "visionaries". It's easy to make a prototype and show it on presentation, but it's hard to make something actually usable.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu is a great example - it's core idea was that information is never deleted. This was literally baked into design - the main data storage is "append only". So sounds good on paper, but how was this supposed to be practical, especially with the high cost of storage back then?
Or that "unified document" with a workspace - sounds great on paper, until you start to think about more general use cases. A friend gives you few dozens of files on floppy (or you download from BBS), and you want to pass them to next friend. How do you do this easily without concept of "files"?
So there is no surprise that industry ignores "visionaries". It's easy to make a prototype and show it on presentation, but it's hard to make something actually usable.