[olpc-software] AbiWord, HIG

[Alan Kay]

Hi Mike --

At 05:05 PM 3/15/2006, Mike Hearn wrote:
>On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 16:34 -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> > It's worth pondering just why large portions of the computer community
> > didn't build on the best designs (and still don't) ... This wouldn't be
> > tolerated in any real science or engineering discipline ...
>
>Well, ignoring that 'best design' is subjective, the industry is still
>pretty young and has a short memory.

It's about the same age as Molecular Biology ~ 50+ years. `Plenty long 
enough. Why a short memory? Ironic, don't you think?

>  The X11 protocol was designed at
>about the same time I was learning to talk :)

So Engelbart did his stuff before you were born, but so did Newton. The 
physicists understand why paying attention to the best stuff is important 
(good ideas are hard to come by). This is why Tim was somewhat sheepish -- 
as a physicist he would not have ignored prior art in Physics, nor would 
the field have let him, he just made the wrong assumption that there was no 
prior art in computing that needed to be heeded.

The Mosaic stuff is more problematical since it was done in the context of 
decades of personal computing, all of which preserved the symmetry between 
consumption and authoring. How could they have missed what was important here?


>How old was JWZ when he started work on Netscape I wonder?

What does it matter? How old was Einstein when he started trying to 
understand the lack of symmetry in Maxwell's equations?

Cheers,

Alan