Inventing the Future

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1. AlbertCoryJun 2022
   First published in 1985?

   For more reading:

   Fumbling the Future: not all that good; reads like a B-school case study

   Dealers of Lightning: excellent history

   Inventing the Future (by me!): what it was actually like to be there in the trenches. Fictionalized, but all facts are accurate. Foreword by David C. Smith, the guy who invented icons. That's his son on the cover, playing MazeWar on an Alto.

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2. yarrelMar 2019
   Read "Inventing The Future" by Srnicek & Williams.

   Please.

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3. yarrelSep 2017
   We don't need thought experiments to analyse UBI. There's data on trials of it going back half a century.

   The book "Inventing The Future" by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams gives a detailed explanation of how to use UBI to move beyond neoliberalism.

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4. AlbertCoryJan 2024
   this is the standard air-brushed Hollywood tale, where PARC had this great stuff (true), then Jobs came and stole it and made the Macintosh. It's called the "Prometheus myth." (In fact, Jobs didn't "orchestrate" the visit; he was almost dragged to it.)

   Largely a myth, although the research that brought the GUI into being is mostly correct. In fact, Xerox WAS commercializing it, and Wikipedia has the story:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

   Star was introduced in Chicago in May, 1981. I was there, and Jobs himself came to see it. At the time, the Lisa was Apple's main GUI effort.

   Dave Smith, who appears to be talking about his icon research (it doesn't sound like his voice, though) was one of the architects of the Star. That's his son on the cover of my book, Inventing the Future. It's a novel and no hindsight is allowed, i.e. the characters don't know how it ends.

   Jerry Morrison and I wrote a paper

   https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

   where we ask what went wrong and what Xerox should have done.

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5. AlbertCoryJul 2023
   > the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI

   I wrote a whole book about it: Inventing the Future (starts end of 1976)

   The PARC people already had several independent efforts (Bravo, Markup, Draw) and Smalltalk to build them with. Our task was to unify all the functionality into a single GUI.

   (and by the way, Jobs and his minions didn't sneak in and steal it, contrary to what you've read.)

   Not everyone was sold on it, a fact which some people would love to forget now. "We'll just slap a GUI on all this great functionality" was something marketing-droids actually did say.

   The book is written with a strict "no hindsight" rule, but a friend and I did reconsider it all, with hindsight definitely allowed:

   https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

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6. AlbertCoryNov 2022
   The AMD 2900 was, in fact, how the Xerox Star was built. You'll find quite a bit about that choice in Inventing the Future but certainly not gate-level circuit design. As you implied, they made that decision just before decent microprocessors came along in quantity. Even at the time, there were questions about whether it was the right decision.

   Mesa was a virtual machine as well as a language, and its opcodes were selected after seeing what Mesa source code was actually written. The goal was to minimize the code size, and then implement the opcodes in microcode.

   After the book came out, my friend Jerry and I wrote a lengthy piece [1] about what Xerox should have done, and this time hindsight is allowed.

   [1] https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

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