Doing with Images Makes Symbols (1987)

welcome to the distinguished lecture series I'm Karin Matthews of university

video communications our program is designed to enrich graduate and upper-division curricula with academic

presentations by top computer scientists from industry its speakers and topics

were nominated by computer science faculty of more than 50 universities

this presentation is sponsored by the higher education Marketing Group at

Apple Computer dr. Alan Kay a pioneer in computer human interaction received his

PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in 1969 he joined the

artificial intelligence project at Stanford and in 1970 became a founding

principal of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he remained for 10

years after Xerox he was chief scientist of Atari since 1984 Alan has been an

Apple fellow with the charity to explore new ideas for Apple's future his talk

today is doing with images make symbols communicating with computers it's our

pleasure to introduce dr. Alan Kay Allen

thank you this is a talk about the only computer most of us ever see the one

that's acted out on the stage of the screen called the user interface design

user interface in many ways is a second

stage of development after the operating system because the operating system as

we all know was a layering of software that tried to turn a sometimes poor

designed machine into one that was more

fruitful for the software environment the user interface tries to do the same

thing it tries to design a special kind of machine that's very understandable

very efficient for the person who uses it without removing any of the things

that the machine can actually do this talk is too short to include all of the

people that can contribute it to user interface over the years I'm just going

to pick out a few that particularly struck me along the way and illustrated

by means of examples so in order to get started let's go back 25 years to the

what must seem like the pleistocene age for most people in universities today to

the dawn of some very important idea and first was the very first personal

computer which you see on the slide here this is a machine called the link it was

designed at Lincoln labs in 1962 by Wes Clark and it's my vote for the first

personal computer ever done you see it has a display and a keyboard and has

some funny little things that look like deck tapes but were actually originally designed for this machine and one of the

design criteria for this machine was it was supposed to be small enough on the

desk so that a person could see over it so one of the ideas that this machine

should not be intimidating and about 2,000 of these were built in the 60s

mostly for biomedical technicians who didn't have a mainframe to at their

disposal and didn't want to hire programmers to use it they wanted something that they could build set up

experiments themselves do their own programming and remarkably at a very

large number of the original 2,000 are still in use today 25 years later the

reason is is that among other things nervous systems of animals haven't sped

up in those years and so a computer that worked very well back then for doing

neurological experiments works very well today something else was happening at

Lincoln labs in 1962 and that was the invention of computer graphics Ivan

Sutherlands sketchpad probably the most significant single thesis ever done

remarkable program in many ways even today as we'll see by looking at this

tape this tape is from the very first

movie

from the very first movie of sketchpad

taken in the summer of 1962 so this is 25 years old rubber bands you're

familiar with but look at what he's doing he's pointing at the edges and saying I want them to be all mutually

perpendicular and sketchpad just figured out how to do that

sketch pad is the first system to ever have a window he's actually drawing on a

virtual sheet of paper about 1/3 of a mile on a side and again to get

something he wants he simply sketches it in roughly and then gives rules like be parallel and perpendicular and sketchpad

figures out and solves the problems here the rule is collinearity so that the

dashes lie directly over the guidelines below the sketch pad was able to solve

very complicated problems in real time

involving both linear and nonlinear systems of constraints so it was the

first non procedural programming system and considerably more powerful in the

spreadsheets of today so he's made a hole in the flange continuously zooms

back now he wants to make a rivet and

again we see why it's called sketch pad he just draws a rough shape uses the

center of the cross bar there as the

center of the arc and then points to the

edges and says I want these to be mutually perpendicular again solving

that forces the cross bar to change which forces the arc to change which

gives you a perfectly symmetrical rivet

Annie shows that how no matter how you distort it when he turns the

problem-solver on it will come up with a symmetrical solution and he could have

made it more complicated he could have constrained the side lengths to be ratios of each other or tied to some

other drawing in the in the environment

now another important idea seen here for practically the first time is that of

master drawings and instances he was working on a master drawing and what he

has here now is an instance of that the

instance can be rotated and scaled and positioned so he's going to insert the

rivet in the hole by the way the sketchpad was the first system in which

it was definitely discovered that the light pen is a very bad input device the

blood runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds and leaves it numb and in spite

of that it's been reinvented at least 90 times in the last 25 years

here's another instance of the rivet another one display is jumping around

like that because this they didn't even really have computer displays back then

the tx2 is putting up every dot by brute

force he didn't like the crosspieces so he goes to the master drawing makes them

transparent lo and behold we see dynamically that the rivets the instance

rivets have felt that change so sketchpad is also the first

object-oriented software system I once asked Ivan Sutherland how could you

possibly have done the first interactive

graphics program the first non procedural programming language the

first object-oriented software system all in one year he said well I didn't

know it was hard it's nothing like this before and here he's showing that every

instance that you make of something

every master can create instances so he's making a bunch of copies of the

whole in the in the flange I'd like to

tell you where you could go to buy a system as good as sketchpad but I don't

know where because there isn't anything like it even on the market today 25

years later it was a one-of-a-kind thing it ran on a machine much larger than the

studio that I'm recording the talk on that was the last computer large enough

to have its own roof the United States that mammoth machine had all of 460 K

bytes and executed about one hundred thousand instructions per second which meant that this machine the

supercomputer of 25 years ago was about the size of a 512 K Macintosh so what

you saw there on the screen could be done on any of the desktop computers

today but nobody is doing it something we should think about just why now

moving ahead just a couple of years we see another pioneer Douglas Engelbart

the fellow who invented the mouse the black-on-white display and the first

person to successfully implement hypertext something that everybody is

talking about today and he did something else that was almost obscene even by

today's standards he actually went and studied his users so he would poke

around in people's offices and see the way people actually worked in offices

and he discovered something funny that even after 16 years of schooling that

people wouldn't sit hunched over their desks the way they've been taught think of it a tremendous failure in American

education 16 years of being taught to sit hunched over a desk and people would

still scoot around in their office chairs and put their feet up on their desk and and so forth an ankle Bart said

well why the heck should we make people hunched over their desks to use their personal computers why not build

something into the in this case it's a lap board that's built into the arm of

the chair that so as the person moves around the room and does all the things

they're used to doing with their chair he is able to also use his computer

navigation equipment here's an example of angle Bart's system as of about 20

years ago in a live demonstration from San Francisco he is sitting in San

Francisco in an auditorium with about 3,000 people and his group and the

machines and the rest of the paraphernalia are in Menlo Park about 35

miles away program that I'm going to

describe to you is quickly characterisible by saying

if in your office you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer

display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day

and was instantly responsible responsive

infini responsive to every action you had how much value could you drive from

that well this basically characterizes what we've been pursuing for many years

in what we call the Augmented human intellect Research Center at Stanford Research Institute so look what else we

can do in here I've got this file that's structured if I want to see what's in

there I can walk down [Music]

the hierarchy levels in C or return but

there's another thing I can do there's a route I said I got here

[Music]

that's a

[Music]

I've already seen

too much and so we have this teacher structure on

material they articulate in the move around when we get a hierarchy

[Music] such as I can show you here

I can do things that might work we'll just say I'd like to interchange the

argument and materials and go and

they're all numbered right I care too low interchanging them very quickly

cancer gonna get interchange the part of us

that do it and all gets renumber so i've

ways of studying over making different views moving around going to specified

points and modifying the structure at

the same time I seem that I have a repertoire of different entities my

character replace a character make that

P so I have entities of all sorts that I

can say I want to do operations on and the space a structure I can move over and study and get about very quickly so

that is the essence No

that's the essence of the tool you have a lot of details and that's why good

feedback here our characters have show me the different viewing by them there's

a few specs they get bars at times it looks I can put single strokes to change

those new parameters and each of those

means something to me and they're being larger particular times tells me I can

give a very quick abbreviation for changing the view so I can say I'd like

to go to produce but I'd like to go to

produce they get big I'd like to say one branch only and let me look just that

low when I see it oh I can say I'd like

to see one line only I can see so these

ways I move around the way I get feedback up here the way I use both

hands to coordinate and tell the computer what come in and watch short

literals I want carefully designed to go

together to make the repertoire I like the link to go and I don't know

what his terminal is right now so I have to ask for somebody connect me to him

audibly audio Lee so girl will you come

in through this intercom I I need to

know what terminal you're on though 13 okay I like a few texts and so this is

the thing if I label 13 will switch switch over just like he sees my well

exited and sure enough does what's that running on well he's looking at text he

flag has something to say about it so we put on marker sparkly control so he's

sitting in a no-parking at this text and he write to it but we've carefully

reserved from either right to crawl on operate on us so my blog is more power

than yours but we can have argument yeah

so so in case you've been listening

we're going through lots of samples and setup and collaboration here so we can

go on international fuel and we set up now audio company and we're both looking

at the same delay and that we've handy to work we talk to each other and maybe later I hand you the talk on

this before like saying you control the latest mode and added a feature

hardware-wise available to kind of decide we have item to see you working

on it so before I can do that I have to set up my play in a certain way

set it up so I see it over like that leaves a corner up there I say now cuter

good the mag switching to bring in a camera picture the camera mounted on his

caudal such a camera mounted on - hi bill that's great now we're connected

audio you can see my work you can point out it and I can see your face and we

can talk so let's do some collaborating

so Engelbart had a complete vision of what this was going to be like years

before all of the rest of us the vision included not just some of the ideas

about how people were going to react and interact with the machine but also that

since people aren't natural born Hermits in fact we're all really communications

junkies Engelbart realized that any kind of a Doozer interface design must

include person-to-person collaboration through the medium of the machine and so

as the very first set of ideas that they had it wasn't just how you organized

your information and forms of n-dimensional hypertext but how you could share it how you could do

something much more than electronic mail but be able to do direct contact sharing

the information be able to point being able to talk to each other and being able to see each other we might compare

that with a very fragmentary vision of the current day micro industry which is

just struggling over decades to try and reach the vision that Engelbart had

almost in a complete form as early as 1962 another thing that's interesting if

we look at the the set up here of the mouse in one hand regular keyboard in

the center and a five finger keyboard on the left hand we see something that was

a very good idea and we may have noticed

something that was also a bad idea the very good idea angle Bart realized that

you really didn't want to spend most of your time going back and forth between

the regular keyboard and the mouse because you have to find the mouse you

have to find the keyboard and so forth stay at Engelbart wanted to set it up so

that you would spend a relatively long period of time in either of those two

ways of doing things either you'd be typing a paragraph of text or you

be doing lots of navigation and fixing single character errors and stuff and so

the Fivefinger keyboard working with the three button mouse is a way of doing all

the things that you could do with the keyboard so you could stay for a very long time and never touch the regular

keyboard and then the thing that they missed and they partially missed it

because of the inaccuracy of the analog mouse was the the what we call modeless

interaction where you indicate the object first and then give the command

because the mouse was inaccurate what they would do in the command instead of

just hitting something like a word or a character or a paragraph and then saying

something like move or going to some drag icon they would have to go and say

move word then wait for a mouse click to

indicate which word and by what you said to move like move word move character

move paragraph the program would know how fine to try and interpret the mouse

coordinates of got then after it had picked the object you then had to do a

command except so in order to move something you had to do four separate

actions which is quite inefficient even though we'd already set up a more

inefficient scheme than we use today for actually using the tools kind of an

interesting paradox that's sort of the way it way it goes now a few years later

1967 time period this is the first

personal computer that I worked on called the Flex machine did it with edy

Cheadle and this is a picture of it on its own display so by that time we'd

realized that we could build a desktop computer and of course this was a desktop computer for only very special

kinds of desks like those made out of steel so it weighed well over a hundred

pounds and it had two characteristics that were very noticeable one of them

was it was a tremendous coffee warmer you know these little black dual inline

packages that hold silicon the Macintosh

has about 50 of them or so that makes up a Macintosh back then you're lucky if

you could get eight or sixteen gates in one of these dip packages and so this

had about 700 of those and generated an enormous amount of heat and had a fan

that was likened to a 747 taking off the

other thing that was very noticeable about the machine is that the user-interface

tend to repel most of the people that we tried it on I was a designer of that

interface and I was really crestfallen that people regarded somewhat the way he

would if he lifted the lid on a garbage can and saw something moist and fuzzy

down inside very puzzled is how could we put all this work in the machine the had

a very powerful interactive object-oriented language that I had derived from similar graphic very high

quality graphics back it had one of the very first gadgets called the clipping

divider done at the same time as Ivan Sutherland in in Harvard and then

brought later brought out to Utah had a very large virtual screen that you could

map on to the physical screen it had

multiple windowing not overlapping windowing because it was a calligraphic

display lots of good stuff and yet it didn't fly with the people that we tried

it with and one of the insights as to

why this was and what to do about it came from early contact in 1968 with

seymour papert's logo work at Bridge school in Lexington Mass the whole idea

of children being able to program on a device that up to now had been in what

is called the glass house in industry it's that big room with air conditioning

and raised floor and so forth whole idea that this could be extended down at the

world of a child just changed my whole conception about what it was I went from

thinking of it as did anger Bart as some sort of super vehicle something akin to

a car as compared to IBM's Pennsylvania Railroad when from thinking of it as

that to something much simpler I thought of it now as media because cars we

withhold from children until they're 18 though I don't know why that's when they're most dangerous but we still

nonetheless think of until they're 18 media we never think

that way paper and pencil we want children to start using from the time they can grab

a crayon and so this work of PAP rates was critical in our understanding of

what was going on another thing that was

going on at Lincoln Labs was the first iconic programming it was done at RAND

Corporation the people who did the wonderful interactive programming

language Joss was done for economists

and other non computer specialists at Rand who had to compute and one of their

complaints about there aren't really they're only complained about Joss was

they said hey none of us can type can't you do something about that so that led

to the in invention of the first data

tablets called the ran tablet back then and this system from about 1968 called

Grail for graphical input language

this list of processes takes us back to the topmost level where we may start to

edit the flow table keyboard whatsoever first we erase a Chloe arrow then move

the connector out of the way so that we may draw a box in its place recognize he

wants that one in a box and made one the press recognising is and running

commentary only in this case the box is slightly too long change the size of the

window here's where Macintosh window control came from literally then draw

flow from the connector to the box

attach a decision element to the box enjoy flow from it to scan notice that

every command is not just iconic but also analogic new area and by that I

mean that it looks like the thing that you want so if you want to scrub

something out you scrub it out you want to draw a box you just draw a box it

recognizes he wants one makes one the same size but chop off a corner and

label it can you want characters you just make characters and it recognizes

those there no menus to reach to you're always looking directly at where you're working now notice it missed the end at

the end of sub scan there he saw and he hesitated but it's the world's first

modeless system so I was able to just go and change it without issuing any more

commands so that you see every command that's actually being issued and they're all in the form of direct action the

diagram from scan pose what a remarkable

system that was and when I saw that I

felt and used it for a half an hour in 1968 I felt like I was sticking my hands

right through the display and actually touching the information structures

directly those are the first system I'd ever used and practically the only one

since that I'd call truly intimate and it was this degree of intimacy that was

so important in a user interface I used to show this movie to my group at Xerox

PARC every three months or so so we wouldn't forget what we're trying to do another

thing that we saw in 1968 was tiny one

inch square first flat panel display done at the University of Illinois we

realized it was only gonna be a matter of years until you could put all of the electronics that we had in the Flex

machine on the back of a flat panel display you'd have something like this

which I later came to call a diner book back in 1968 when I made this cardboard

model I just thought of it as the machine of the future and started

thinking about what would it be like for millions of people to have one of these machines and so the metaphor became the

pencil what would it be like to have something like this as extant in the

world as a pencil and paper could people actually use it and the answer in 1968

and the early 1970s was no so one of the

ways I started thinking about answering the question is since we had failed at designing for adults and I remembered a

wonderful phrase of Marshall McLuhan's he said the I don't know who discovered

water but it wasn't a fish the idea is if you're immersed in a context you

can't even see it so we decided to follow seymour papert's lead and instead

of trying to diet designed for adults we would try and see what this Dynabook of

the future would be like for children and then maybe hope that some of it

might spill over into the adult world so children were an absolutely critical

factor here and the first stuff I did in

my notebook in 1970 he was called Kitty Comp and here's what it first looked

like it's gonna be built out of a sony tummy trying to Tron and then Xerox PARC

came along with some wonderful almost open charter funding and a very

interesting culture these are the bean bags that were so famous at Parc and one

of the reasons we use them we discovered that it was impossible to leap to your feet to denounce somebody once you sat

in a beanbag chair because you tended to sink into it further and further so it

had a way of relaxing people I was very good for design and then we started

experimenting so he built this machine which was a very very high resolution

way of displaying video images and the

first fruits of that was this font editor the first font editor done by Ben

laws and all of a sudden you could get

images like this that it was quite

possible to mimic the high quality printing images on a bitmap display we

got very interested in that trying some of these ideas out on children we

discovered they didn't always like there you might zoom in on that they didn't

always like to have their rough drafts look like they've been printed by the

New York Times so some of the children said well what we really would like to have for rough drafts is our own

handwriting so they use this font editor and put it in their own handwriting and

that was a way of instantly telling when

you looked at a document just how finished it was intended to be and the

bitmap display also allowed us to do sketching and drawing as well as Chris

computer graphics and again one of the things that had not been possible before

is doing real design on a computer before people always design in the back

of an envelope and then brought the back of the envelope to the computer as a way

to render it but here what we'd hope for is that people would actually stay with

the computer for the better part of the day and we put a lot of effort into making this display be something you

could look at for 6 or 7 hours without ice drain next envisionment of this was

a little system we called mini-com and this was the summer of 1971 and we went

consistent to a considerable direction in thinking about making this

and then we also did some dynamic

animation as we'll see in a minute space war had a very important part in the

design of things because it was a conceptually simple precursor of all the

videogames we know today it should be something that a child could write for

himself now we started working on small

talk-- an object-oriented language based on Simula but also with a lot of look

back to what sketchpad then all of this led to the alto computer built mostly by

Chuck Thacker at Xerox PARC the first

workstation and led to all of the subsequent workstations and also led

directly to the Lisa and the Macintosh at Apple we used a improved version of

Engelbart's Mouse and in its early

stages we call it the interim Dynabook

we brought lots of children into Park to work on these machines and then we took

the machines down into the Palo Alto schools working with several hundred children in all here we are at Jordan

Junior High School around 1976 now let's

take a look at animated versions of some of the things that ran on this machine

and some of the things that the children did

so here's the famous Dynabook model and back then we wanted it to be like the

hewlett-packard calculator except to be a real live computer this is the

inspiration for all that we are thinking about is what it was going to be like here's been laws font editor being used

to make an A and Lydian cursive

most of these are taken from home movies

we shot with a 16 millimeter bollocks

here's the painting program this is something I designed in the summer of

1972 and Steve Purcell implemented it

here you see some hand character recognition it recognized the letter C

for as a command for drawing circles that was put in by John shock we were

experimenting with this at the time here's an L for drawing lines well the nice things about hand

character recognition is that you don't have to move very far to hit something

here's a d4 drawing which fires up the

painting program and I think you can see it has most of the features of the

well-known Mac paint on the on the Macintosh

the idea of actually being able to fashion your brushes right in the the

the combination of canvas and pallet itself was something that Purcell

thought up I think the idea of having

charcoal and airbrush effects was something that was also added at the

very beginning of this this program putting in specular reflections here's

an example of making a little brush a bunch of different dots pick it up and

you get some charcoal effects here's

some experiments for the very first experiments with windows dragging them

around by one corner opening their size at the other corner just like on the Mac

today making another one by going up to

the upper right hand corner typing something in it clipping the

stuff that's inside I think this is the very first actual test although we you

know of course we knew Windows we're going to work because there had been examples of Windows before this is the

very first test of them on a bitmap display and some experiments with the

user interface what they might be like to just manipulate them

here is one of the very first group of kids I can tell that because the there

aren't even display covers on the display we had to put in old cardboard

boxes to keep the kids from getting electrocuted this is a group of I think

sixth graders fifth or sixth graders and this is Adele Goldberg who later went on

to head the group after I left park and she was responsible for many of the

ideas in teaching the children we first

did logo like things in small talk such as this program and we also experimented

with with animated windows here's the very first test of an animated window

which we later abandoned because the machine wasn't quite fast enough but I

still think it's a nicer way of doing it we're instead of getting a just an open

frame that moves you actually animate all the text itself and have it have it

include the window so this is the alto

screen in early 1973 not long after the

alto had first started to work the alto

is actually a very powerful computer if

you could get to its microcode directly we could and the alto is able to animate

about 120 square inches of graphics in

multiple planes so you could do very complex two-and-a-half d animation

effects and this is something done by Purcell I think around the end of 1973

and that was really the machine we thought we had was a machine that you

could animate everything on it tying all

that stuff together with small talk we got a number of interesting things with

the kids here's one of the second level classes this was a 13 year old teaching

12 year olds and Marion had done one of the very first tools in small talk the

year before when she had learned it and she was a very outgoing ebullient young lady and

she wanted to teach a class and so we brought in we had five machines at the

time so he's had five children and we videotaped all of the 100 hours of it

and here's an example this is from 1975

of a program that looks very much like Mack draw it's an object-oriented

graphics illustrator you can select by

means of selection handles you can

change colors you can change the size so

the menu is being used on the lower right hand there and the the feedback is

coming in the window and the in the center the only thing that's really

interesting about this program is besides that it was done in 1975 which

is before you could buy it in a store as it was actually conceived designed and

implemented by a twelve-year-old girl after only a few months of programming

and small talk it took her about two weeks to do this and the size of the

program in small talk 72 was about a page long so part of our aim here was

not just to get people to be able to access things by means of the windows

but also to be able to do the equivalent of writing short essays and having them

take have great effect and one of the

things that is disturbingly true about most novices on computers is that about

two pages of program is the maximum they can handle they like to be able to spread it out use their visual field as

an extension of their short-term memory here's another example a 15 year old boy

again after a few months of programming in small talk 72 he was interested in

ham radio but really had gotten bored

with the tedium of drawing radio diagrams so he decided to make himself a

ham radio illustrator and has

quite sophisticated features you see here a pop up menu with often used

things like open and closed dots and he has a more extensive menu of iconic

shapes for the circuits down below so he can pick up a a battery symbol and

rotate it and put it in this is also done in in 1975 and it's one of my

favorite programs done by a child because less than ten years before this

a PhD had been awarded for a system that wasn't as good this program is about 80

lines of code long in Smalltalk 72 next

we have a program done by adults but for

the most part who had never programmed before they were professional animators that came to park in the summer of 74

and the thing that animators would like

to do is to see whether their animator animations are going to work before they have to go to film so that summer they

devised a variety of systems and this is

what every animator would like to do is draw the picture reach over into the

movie window grab the thing you've just drawn show it what to do have it

playback now of course it's not

squishing when it hits so it doesn't look quite real so he wants he goes to the steps there in the iconic menu and

when it gets down to the bottom here what he's going to do is replace that with a fresh drawing that's going to

come from another transparent cell that he overlays in the drawing windows on

the right hand side so the drawing windows can have several transparent

cells overlaid each other he uses the old one for registration purposes so

he's now drawing on an on another cell and that drawing will be inserted into

the animation as the animation goes and now the animator can see how much detail

he has to put into that squash drawing before we see it as actually squashing

any obviously has to at least put in the specular reflection on the ball there he

goes now we see it as a deformation even though it's a one frame change a program

was about five pages long which is longer than children can actually do but

here's a twelve-year-old girl that was

very interested in horses and so she

spent some time getting the correct gait and animating a horse across the screen

but then she wanted to feature that the adult animators hadn't put in and that

was to be able to combine two animations into a single one so she has the horse

animation going over there and here she has a jockey animation and she wants to

be able to pick it up and the in the act of actually combining she wants them now

to fuse into one drawing this is a feature that she was able to put in herself because even though she wasn't

capable of writing a 5 page program like the adults she was quite capable of

reading it in making a change in it and

here's the finished animation

now what we've just seen are some things that are familiar to us now in this day

of the micro computer we've also seen some things that people aren't yet doing

people don't usually sit down and do for themselves a complete tool like an

illustrator they go to the school store and spend several hundreds of dollars and yet here we see twelve-year-old

children coming up with the idea and being able to implement it and not only being able to implement it but being

able to implement it in a very compact form now why is that and why is this

such an important part of computer literacy now I think literacy has three

important parts to it there's an access part and in the print medium we call

that reading somebody else makes up the material and we have the skills to

penetrate that material and understand it access literacy second one is

creative literacy we don't think a person is literally if all I can do is

read we think they should be able to write and the English language is

powerful enough in its in its metaphor that we can do very strong expressions

of our own intent in just a page or two can start a revolution with two pages of

well couched prose programming languages just haven't been strong enough and easy

enough to understand but if we're ever to have computer literacy it is going to

have to have those two things as first order attributes and then the third

thing in computer literacy is that for anything that we can be literate in

there is a literature so when we read

Shakespeare we have to read Shakespeare with a completely different approach to

the genre of the Elizabethan age than we do from reading Mickey Spillane so

throughout the many centuries in which the English language has existed there are different genre that we have to be

able to adapt to that's the third form of literacy is genre literacy

and then the third thing in computer literacy is that for anything that we

can be literate in there is a literature so when we read Shakespeare we have to

read Shakespeare with a completely different approach to the genre of the

Elizabethan age than we do from reading Mickey Spillane so throughout the many

centuries in which the English language has existed there are different genre

that we have to be able to adapt to that's the third form of literacy is

genre literacy I'm gonna in this talk I'm concentrating mostly on the first

two and now I want to go and focus on why this stuff works and how we came to

some of these design decisions of course some of it was just haphazard and random

some of it we rationalized after the fact but some of it we actually thought

it through and were able to use stuff that had been done before so give you an

idea of how difficult it is to understand how the mind works let's take a look at this slide and see if we can

see what's wrong with it if you look at it for a while you'll see that the mouth

is is somehow upside down and maybe the

eyes something wrong with the eyes maybe they're upside down too and if I were

teaching in a school and trying to teach you about what had been done with this

slide I would say in English sentence like the following I'd say well here

we've taken a slide of a young girl extracted her eyes and mouth and put

them back in with an air brush and then turned the entire slide upside down

that's an English sentence and now that I've said that you can understand

everything about what it looks like when I turn it right-side up now given this

talk many times and I'm gonna have to move it backward because I've discovered nobody will listen to me when that slide

is on and from the many times I've given

the talk I know that there are gasps in the classroom when you saw that picture

because you weren't prepared for it even though I told you everything about what

had been done to it now perceptual psychologists really love when something

like this happens because it means that information going in through one channel the auditory channel to your

language processing centers elicited one kind of response to my sentence and when

you saw the actual picture through your visual channel it elicited a completely

different response and this is actually understood physiologically as well as

psychologically on the under right-hand side of your brain where you do face

recognition there are two pieces of brain tissue about an inch apart one of

them is an expert at faces it's a thing that allows you to see faces and clouds

the thing that scares children and Twilight they see menacing shadows and

it's reporting right now I see an upside down face like thing then about an inch

away is another piece of brain tissue there's an expert in eyes and mouth and

eyes and mouth only and it's saying well that's a good-looking mouth and those

are okay eyes there's very little dissonance between the reports of these

two separate pieces of brain tissue now when I go to this right-side up version

of the thing the face recognition guy is saying well that's a right-side up face

like thing and the eyes and mouth guy is saying something is terribly wrong here

and you can imagine why nature might have arranged for you to be startled

seeing a face like this up close might mean you're going to die in the next ten

seconds and effect it is built into all mammals something that we don't learn

but is in the mammalian nervous system so if you try this on a dog I suggest

you pick a small one so the basic idea

here is that we don't what we think of

as the unitary eye the unitary eyeness

of I myself and me is really a multiple set of different mentalities that

apparently came about during different evolutionary periods the mentalities

think differently they don't communicate very well with each other they're often

in conflict and only a few of them talk so we're only aware of a few of them in

our what we call our consciousness most of what the other mentalities do we call

our subconscious but relegating everything they think to the subconscious is almost akin to mysticism

and in fact there's a lot more to be learned about this area and we got

interested in three these mentalities first from the work of Jean Piaget and Piaget said that the he

thought children and adults have a unitary mentality that goes through

stages as the child matures so Piaget said first there is a doing stage where

the whole is to dig it and an object is to grab it thinking his action in that

stage a child doesn't think ahead he doesn't imagine the consequences of

his action he just does later on is the

image stage child of five or six or seven who for instance when given a

squat glass poured into a tall thin glass we'll say there's more water in

the tall thin glass I think everybody is familiar with the with that experiment

of PJs and it's because the child is being dominated by the visual image the

looks like there's more water there and so the visual logic says that there is

then around 11 or 12 PA says that the

child goes to a facts and logic stage away from the immediacy of the visual

environment or at least in Swiss French children who 11 and 12 there are less

less evidence that American children ever get into the facts and logic stage

now when we looked at PJs theory it was

interesting what it seemed to say is that if the child is below the age of

five say you should only do muscular things and if the child is in this age between say roughly five and eleven that

you should do mostly visual things and then above that you should do sort of

symbolic things so it just didn't come through with any ideas for us but while

reading about Piaget we had found the work of Bruner

who was the American psychologist who was one of the persons to Byng Piaget to

the American public's attention and Bruner had a more interesting theory and

it came about from experiments that he did to confirm what Piaget was talking

about so Bruni did the experiment took the water in the squat class and poured it into the tall

thin one the child said yes there's more water in the tall thin glass then

Brenner did something that Piaget hadn't thought to do Bruner then covered up the

glass and the child said oh but wait there must be the same amount of water

because where would it go and then Bruner revealed the tall thin glass and

the child said oh wait no look there's more water better cover it up again and

the child said oh there must be the same amount of water because where would it

go so if you have any nine year olds

you'd like to torment this is a good way to do it because what Brenner was doing

was jumping the child not from this mentality back to a previous stage but

he was showing as he did in many experiments the existence of multiple mentalities so the child was normally

visually dominant here but if you occluded the visual field then this

fledgling symbolic mentality that was really going to meet switched-on in a

stronger way later on could actually work and from this we got a lot of ideas

it suggested that there are ways of using some of these other mentalities

and we got some confirmation from some interesting work in the literature of

creativity one of them was by jacques

hadamard the famous french mathematician who in the late stages of his life

decided to pull his 99 buddy's the other

who made up together the 100 great mathematicians and physicists on the

earth and he asked them how do you do your thing and they were all personal

friends of his so they wrote back depositions and only a few out of the hundred claimed to use mathematical

symbology at all there's quite a surprise all of them said they did it

mostly in imagery or figurative terms and an amazing 30 percent or so

including Einstein were down here in the mud pies Einstein's definition said I

have sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type Einstein could feel the

the abstract spaces he was dealing with in the muscles of his arms and his

fingers so one way of interpreting Hadamard diagram here is

the genius is the ability to recap your childhood it will that's sort of the PIA

jetting and way of looking at it but a stronger way is to look at it through Brunner's eyes and see that what is

actually going on is that these very creative people are somehow able to be

in contact with other mentalities that are going on all the time now this is a

better way of thinking about this then simply splitting things up into conscious and subconscious or right

brain and left brain this notion that there are each one of these things

evolved for a different reason and can do different kinds of logics is very

important and we'll see why in a second now I'm going to give you a the most

graphic demonstration I know of this

principle in action of what it means to actually be able to teach directly to

the mentality that's going to learn rather than trying to teach through an inappropriate channel you see the sad

part of had a marriage diagram is that every child in the United States is

taught math and physics through this channel the channel that know almost no

adult creative mathematician and physicists used to uses to do it and

that is really a shame they use this channel to communicate but not to do

their thing and much of our education is

founded on those principles that just because we can talk about something there's a naive belief that we can teach

through talking and listening now this example I'm going to show is taken from

a television show in 1975 on Harry

reasoner's great television show in on

ABC and he had read a book that apparently upset him called the inner

game of tennis which basically said almost anybody can learn to play a

decent game of tennis in just a single afternoon if you don't try too hard and

that had made him wonder because he'd been trying to play tennis for many

years and so he sent a an ABC News squad

out to California to expose the charlatans and what they did was to

round up a number of people and get them to sign

legal affidavits saying that they had

that they had never played tennis before they took them all out in the court and

picked the worst one who happened to be a 55 year old lady 40 pounds overweight

5 foot 2 and a moo-moo and she had the muumuu because her deposition said that

not only had she never played tennis but she's not even exercised in 20 years so

taking the ball on the court turning on the live TV cameras they set a clock and

said to Tim Galway you have 20 minutes to teach her how to play tennis now let's look at this from the standpoint

of user interface design because in every way Tim Galway is the user

interface of this interactive teaching

situation we have and let's see what he

actually does and there's a ball fly

through the air I want you just to watch it the very instant the ball hits the

court I want you to say bounce and the

very instant the ball hits the racket I want you to say hit you just be saying

bounce hip all you need to do is watch the ball okay the key of all the exercises in the

inner game is to focus their minds attention somewhere where it will not

interfere with the body's ability to hit

the ball automatically you stand here and Tim will throw you a couple and you

just continue doing the same thing China Haiti not at first at first just say

bounce with the ball bounces and hit when you would hit it but don't hit then

after you feel like I didn't go ahead and hit it okay now you might watch her

right on here yeah something's trying to hit that ball she

was told that she didn't have to now she actually tries she misses he's also out

of the corner of his eye watching me hit the ball so even though he's not trying

to see how I hit it the image of me hitting it is going right into his

memory enjoying himself yeah it's really the cardinal principle

in any book written on tennis about you tennis is to watch the ball no tennis

player really sees the ball no the

reason is they get bored so I've tried to give them something to see in the

ball that's interesting so we watch the trajectory of the ball

the gracefulness of the line made by the balls that fly through the air how is it

the same put the mind somewhere work and stay calm and not get you up tight but

relaxed and interested then the body does so beautifully so beautiful I might

start listening to the ball ball listen to how it sounds on your racquet hear

that yes that sound like very dull it

was like wood that would sound people

listening oh you'll hear this town that you like pretty soon just listen to her

okay now listen on this side

No be aware that racket is part of your arm I just feel it so hard every time I

did start to think things went wrong they just stopped thinking the body

seems to know what to do can you feel when your left hand where

it is how'd it go just wait in the back there feel it

we're gonna do one other stroke now and this one's called the serve and the

service just like a dance you just like a dance we'll come back here no I'll

show you how to do a dance call the sir okay and I've done this

dance a little bit so I'll just do it okay in fact you can start humming if

you want the rhythm like this okay now I

want you to stand there shut your eyes shut your eyes and imagine yourself

doing that same dance you might start humming a little bit as you're doing it

yeah okay now about to do there's no

thinking just go do it quick just no thinking just go serve yeah sir don't

worry about missing keep serving keeps their own thing go dududu quick that's

it fine again don't worry about hitting it let's hear it out loud there you go I

get them to hum the rhythm of my serve

so they're not thinking oh this is what are you doing with his elbow this is what he's doing his hands out loud down

there you go I get them to hum the rhythm of my serve

so they're not thinking oh this is what he's doing with his elbow this is what he's doing his hands they're not trying

to remember all that they start humming and they see themselves doing very

similar things muscular movements to what I did but they're not thinking

about it so it just comes out naturally and fluently so that didn't take long

that's called serving

out

don't miss it okay okay that's the first

point kind of 15 no need for you to miss

all of a sudden everything became effortless just I was just sort of like

floating along you know in doing what came naturally let me know and I said

I'm playing tennis yeah it's really really beautiful I have a clearer idea

of what you want then let it happen don't try too hard I'm gonna try to make

you miss Marri cuz it's going on too long so all just get a little bit harder

you just keep watching the ball

don't be distracted keep on that ball

[Music] [Applause]

[Music] well when I saw that I said something

akin to holy cow so I just seen something that I wouldn't

have believed possible and I realized that it applied very strongly to user

interface design that something really important had been was going on here so

I got Tim Galway's book the inner game of tennis and I read it and a number of

things that he said really stuck in my mind first one was almost a cliche

he said learning happens when attention is focused but he was able to get

something out of that because if you don't have a good theory of learning

then you can still get it to happen by just helping the person focus one of the

ways you can help a person focus is by removing interference a lot of what you

saw in that tape was a way of holding

focus of the mentality that actually had to learn to play the tennis and removing

interference from the mentality the that likes to talk and make comments

another thing that Tim said that's particularly stuck in my mind was said

the problem with most theories of teaching is that the parts of the body

you want to have learn don't understand English so the part of your mentality that

understands English doesn't play tennis and can't play tennis can't do

mathematics it can't do music you can what it can do is talk and comment and

so in general for learning most things it is good to find a way of

short-circuiting that mentality that we think of as the eye that always tries to

take over and finally Tim made a very

interesting observation and that is that the problem with being a beginner is

that you get a lot of practice in staying a beginner so a beginning tennis

player most of the time is does chase the ball you got to be really good at

chasing the ball but all other forms of tennis involved hitting the so it's very important for Tim to find a

way of catapulting anybody learning tennis like Molly they're out of the

chaser ball stage and instantly get into hitting the ball stage so he had to find

a way of getting a person who had never picked up a tennis racket before to be

able to hit the ball 98 percent of the time they swung at it we realized that

was an incredibly important principle for user interface design why spend two

weeks trying to read an ms-dos manual to see how to copy a file or open up an

application why do any of those things what is it what do you get from it much better to

find a way of designing the user interface so that the person who uses it

acts like an intermediate from the very first time that they sit down and then

they get into a process that is rewarding in itself now these ideas work

beautifully for music and they also apply in cognitive areas very strongly

here's a an example of a programming

problem and that is let's take the logo turtle and write a program to draw a

circle and we'll do it with three ages

of people a five year old a 10 year old and a 15 year old as representatives

from these three mental mentality

dominant areas the body the visual and the symbolic now the way you do a get a

five-year-old to to do a picture to do a

circle that's something that's Seymour Papert learned long ago and that is you tell the five-year-old close your eyes

and make a circle with your body if

they've gone part way around you say well what were you doing and the

five-year-old says well I was going a little and turning a little over and over again if you type that into logo

you get a perfect circle and that's

because the five-year-old nose differential equations because the

circle is particularly simple thing in differential geometry which is only discovered about 150 years ago by Carl

Gauss so a circle is that thing that has constant curvature so the change in

curvature is zero and the trials body

mentality doing mentality understands

that kind of geometry so the five-year-old comes up with a very

simple program that produces an elegant circle the ten-year-old has a harder

time because a ten-year-old is visual and really wants to look at things he

doesn't want to do things with his body so much anymore and so he wants to draw

a circles with a compass and after a while he will see that the by drawing

lots of circles you'll see that the main thing about drawing circles with a compass is that the points on the rim

were always the same distance from the center so his turtle program picks the

pin up starting in the center jumps out to the rim goes 100 there puts the pen

down makes a mark picks the pan up backs to the center turns one degree and does

that over and over again so it's chug-a-chug-a chug-a-chug-a chug-a-chug-a chug-a-chug-a chug-a-chug-a circle much harder way of

doing it but still a good circle and of course I wouldn't be telling this story if the fifteen-year-old were able to get

a circle at all because like most adults he's in the facts and logic stage and he

knows the most horrible fact thought up by the mind of man which is x squared

plus y squared equals R squared a very bad coordinate system and even if it

were a good coordinate system it has very little operational significance so

here we see an example of just concentrating on different mentalities

in people's skulls getting vastly different results in doing the program

and surprisingly the the the age levels

that are supposed to do less will actually do better and this led to a

slogan I made up which is the point of view is worth 80 IQ points so in other

words if you're in 60 BC and Rome trying to multiply two numbers together you had

to be a genius to be able to remember all the partial products that no Roman

numeral is generated if you're in 1380 wondering where Mars is going to go you

had to be a genius to be able to figure out all of the Ptolemaic epicycles so

it's not logic that is powerful logic is

actually a weak method because depends on fragile chains of inference

and people have used logic throughout history but mostly in inappropriate

context there is nothing illogical about

the way the alchemists or the Babylonians did things it was that they were in a context in which their logic

couldn't do much so there's this notion that the context is powerful

and if you want to be able to be good at solving problem and acting much smarter

than you are then you have to find a context that is going to do most of the thinking for you most computer

scientists know this because it goes under another heading of call choose the

appropriate data structure before you start tinkering around with the algorithm do the right data structure it

will have most of the result computed almost automatically as part of its

inherent structure and all that reminds

me of Edward de Bono's famous comment

about American business and I think it probably applies to American

universities also he said the problem with American business is when it gets in trouble it redoubles its efforts and

he likened this to if you have a bunch

of people digging for gold in a certain spot they get down 5 feet and they don't

find any go one of the the the ways they could do to resolve their problem is to

dig twice as hard and of course if gold is 20 feet over to the side then they

can dig all the way to China without finding it out and the important idea here is that problem solving all of

these things have more than one dimension and a lot of the important

dimensions for doing thinking lie along the lines of these different mentalities

and that led to a another slogan which

said well gee we don't know how to choose between these brain area mentalities the kinesthetic one is very

valuable knows where things are the image one is tremendously valuable

because it'll gives you a way of picking things out of a conglomeration very

easily it's quite a bit more efficient to pick an image from a bulletin board

than to pick an item out of a out of a linear list of symbols and the symbolic

one of course is very powerful given the right context because it can do inferencing that is not open to these

other mentalities so we thought that the right slogan would be

well gee why can't we find some way of tying these together the way we did it

was to say well one way of involving the

kinesthetic mentality is to give you something to point with so we have the

mouse they are not just because it's good to point to the screen occasionally

but because it involves the kinesthetic sense and the kinesthetic sense is the

one that knows where you are it's the one that locates you in space not your eyes your eyes are an extension of that

sense the image one there is for recognition here's a good experiment you

can try sometime get a friend to manipulate cable television movie

channels go to a random movie and see how many frames it takes before you can

say whether you've seen it before I think what that means you may not have seen this movie for 12 or 15 years and

yet after just a few seconds for most people you can identify that you've seen

this movie and usually be able to remember what comes next famous experiment by hartmann some years

ago took 25 or 30 people showed them 10,000 images spaced 10 seconds apart so

it took hours and hours to show them all these random photographs of things and even after 30 days all of the people in

the experiment had better than 90 percent recall on all of the images so

they could say with an image was one of the set with 90 percent probability they

could identify occluded portions in the image an unbelievable feat is performed

by this mentality tremendous for creativity in lots of different ways and

then this one is the one that allows you to abstract what you've done concretely

there so all of those things should go together and that was what we tried to

do at Parc so here's one of the first

versions of this interface and this is done by Dan Ingalls who after I had

invented small talk was the person who did most of the small talk

implementation and then became the major designer of small talk and this was a

crystallization of a lot of the ideas that we had all had culminating around

nineteen late 1975 around 1976 or so

this is what the small talk user interface looked like we see collapsed windows up here that

when you clicked on them would open back up again clock multiple applications and

so forth Larry Tesler who's now at Apple

had this idea this is called galley editor that documents should be able to

have different paragraph types so you might have a paragraph type of text you

might have a paragraph type that's a picture and that when you put the mouse into the paragraph it invoked the editor

for what's there and this is a metaphor that I think is going to overtake the

cut and paste metaphor that people are used to today because it's much better

in general to always work in the context of the results you're trying to get we

call it results mode interaction here's

a later version of this principle done by Bob flagel multiple views into the

same structure were first done in at

Xerox PARC by trig veer in scag a visiting professor from Norway in our

group and he was particularly interested in scheduling so here is a schedule

versus a Gantt chart for looking at the same thing and you see you selected

something here and it's the selection shows up here and it also shows up on

this list and it also shows up down here's a list of names of things so this

idea that what you're actually looking at are different views seen through

different filters is something we originally got from Engelbart but redone

in this new form in the multiple window user interface and here's the way the

interface looks today in small talk and

here's just a brief look at what that interface looked like about ten years

ago

so what he's doing is actually entering into sort of like a hyperspace window

using a pop-up menu there to get a

workspace window scrolling is on the

opposite side from what you're used to on the Macintosh and you can see that

the scroll area arrow is position sensitive the elevator Scrolls you

through the text

and small talk anything that you type can also be executed so if you just type

three plus four in the editing window or pick up something else you can say do it

and small talk will go off and do it

here's the state of the painting program

as it was almost ten years ago there's a

radio buttons that you could actually control your own features

and one of the wonderful things about giving this talk today is that we're almost at the point where I never have

to show this movie again because most of the things that we had done at Park in

this system can now are now available on

powerful micros like the Apple Macintosh - I think the final thing I'll show here

is this is a browser a structure in

invented by Larry Tesler in which when

you point to a category area it retrieves a bunch of related things so

we're looking at all the different kinds of things that we can do arithmetic on

picked integer they're looking at the

arithmetic part of things you can do two integers and looking at the operation

plus and here is the code in small talk to do integer plus and here is an

example of the debugger in the system we'll type in some nonsense we'll try

and add three to a piece of text a piece

of text says this is a string so as we

say do it to that instead of crashing the system what we'll do get as a

notification here that the string

couldn't transform itself into an integer and here we can look and see

what was going on at that time so all of the processing that was being done and

that threat of control was set aside in small talk in fact once people looked on

the disk and found 1,700 suspended processes that were just left there

during the debugging of the system now

by expanding that debugging window we got a picture of things that were

happening in that process quite

independently of the processes in small talk that are operating the Windows system and the

debugging system so here's the code that was executing here's the attempt of the

string to make itself into an integer that failed I couldn't do that because

it couldn't find any new numeric characters to transform and here are the

parameters there's the argument self is

the thing that got the message so that's three and so we got to see all of the

things we could single step it if we wished we can restart it if we wished

and so forth so the whole idea of what

we're trying to do here is comes back to

this question that I asked in the very beginning and that is what what a

computer be if it were like a pencil can

it be used by children well yes it can can it be used by adults yes it can how

low can we go to childhood can we go

into much much much lower than grade

school here's an answer to that question

it's a tape I got from the woman who's

my accountant this is her daughter age

twenty two months two months shy of her

second birthday and she's never lived in

a world that wasn't densely populated with Macintosh's because both your

mother and father worked at home and both of her mother and father had their own Mac and in fact when I found out the

little girl was interested in computers I gave her an Apple to which she rejected she wanted to Macintosh just

like her folks and she literally learned to use it by sitting on her mother's lap

while their mother was working so for this child the Macintosh is not a piece

of technology but simply more material in the Vartan environment to manipulate

though I don't believe in user surveys the one I did do with this very young

user is I discovered that she vastly preferred Macintosh with installed hard disks now given that

she can use the mouse and some people are surprised that she can without

having to look at it but in fact it's something that everybody can use it's

not too surprising that she can hit visible menu commands in Mac Paint so

when I saw this I was intrigued I'd never seen a child this young interacting with a computer before but

it I wasn't too overwhelmed until I saw what she did next she wants a fresh

sheet of paper so she hits the closed bar in the window she saves her old

drawing using the pop-up and then she uses the pulldown to get herself a fresh

sheet and she's off and running again in fact we discovered that she was about

70% literate about 70% of the generic

window commands that are found in any Macintosh application she is able to use

not just in an a visual program like Mac

Paint so

the answer is is that this stuff is for all of us and the reason it works is not

because the goodness of computer science in it although there is something there

the main reason it works is because the for some reason we decide to study human

beings and involve lots of human beings called children in our experiment and

try and stay closely coupled to them for the for a number of years and out of

that came a bunch of ideas that could not have sprung just from technology

alone so if it weren't for the multiple mentality ideas of Brynner and the

catalysis of tim Galway's inner game of tennis and a host of other sources like

Suzuki's way of teaching children violin and others too numerous to mention we

never would have thought of these ideas and implemented them the way we did I

think a good way of ending this talk is with a Winston Churchill joke which you

know all Winston Churchill jokes he's at a party after a certain number of

whiskeys and no matter what happens he's always in perfect command of the of the

English language and this joke it's rather early in the in the evening and

he's over in the corner drinking his scotch and the hostess of the party

comes over him terribly distraught and says mr. Churchill I'm really upset I

just saw a famous Earl over here steal one of my silver salt shakers what am I

to do and Churchill thought for a minute and suck his cigar in his mouth and went

over to the Earl and on the way picked up a silver salt shaker and put it in his pocket we got over to the Earl he

took it out and said I think we've been noticed perhaps we should put these back

so the moral that besides that being the reason we won World War two the moral of

that story is if you want people to go along with you you have to involve them

in the same conspiracy and user interface design is a conspiracy that I

hope more of you will get interested in thank you very much I'm Judith Lemon and

our first question is from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Allen what do you feel about attempts to protect legally fundamental ideas and

graphics especially Apple's attempt to protect the neck the Mac interface

Sutherlands patenting of clipping algorithms well I think that the basic

idea of protecting inventions is something that's been around for a long time and it has done people who have

taken the energy to invent things a fair

amount of good I would like to have a tenth of a cent for every window that

opens on the screen for the next five years but I think that even in patent

law there is enormous confusion between what's an idea and what's an invention

patent law doesn't allow you to patent an idea even though nowadays ideas are

important as inventions that have been made concrete in some fashion also

there's a lot of confusion still in what it means to copyright something when I

was at Atari the earliest statutes that they used as precedent work things that

had to do a copywriting of player piano rolls back in the early 1900s so it's a

very complicated issue I think that a sort of a first principle in it is if a

company spends a lot of money paying people to invent an idea and then comes

out with that idea they should have some protection for it for a while there's I don't see any reason why we should

condone having those things ripped off if some company is paying millions of dollars other company shouldn't just get

it for free I think beyond that the situation is pretty much confused this

question Allen comes from the University of Utah where will powerful micros take

us first in five years and then in ten years well I think the simple answer is

probably not far enough the basic

industry is very conservative Wall Street wants people to stay with the 86

and 68000 architectures which i think is a big mistake there are lots more interesting things

on the horizon and the amount of computer cycles we actually need to do

things particularly that involve interaction is always grossly underestimated

so I think that the the one answer is

that the next five years and especially the next 10 years could be incredibly

interesting certainly in the 10-year horizon is the possibility of doing

real-time 3d graphics at the flight

simulator level on a desktop I believe that could be done within five years if

companies took a great interest in it so we're at a very interesting stage now

where the cost performance as I think

everybody realized it doesn't go on a steady player if it goes in jumps and

fits because the the major cost in a computer is in the packaging and every

time you can get the number of transistors up by a factor of 10 you

have an enormous change in whether you can put a thing on a board or whether it

requires a rack or an entire case ok for

again from the University of Utah computers have not been a big success in

direct teaching for example computer-aided instruction why is this

so and what can be done to improve it well I think I think I'm pretty much

after the experience I've had with working with both children and adults

with computers and at least dabbling in the areas of learning and education I

think that the the one of the best ways of thinking of a computer is very

similar to thinking of what a piano means in teaching music and the piano

have can amplify musical impulse we can only sing with with one voice if we want

to play a four part view we have to use some something mechanical like a piano

to do it and it can be done very beautifully but for most people the

piano has been the biggest thing to turn millions of people away from music for

the rest of their lives and I think the way to sum it up is just to say that all

musicians know that the music isn't in the piano if it were we'd have to let it vote and because of that that says in

any situation where education and learning is involved that you first have to develop a curriculum based on ideas

not on media the media can be amplifiers of those

ideas but you have to have the ideas first and I think the reason computers

have failed is that almost everybody no matter which way they try and use

computers have wanted the computer to be some sort of magic ointment over the super ating wound of bad concepts and I

think as soon as people get with what we saw is an amazing learning experience in

the Tim Galway tennis experience and that is something that can extend and be

amplified by machines and especially computers but first we have to have the

ideas another University of Utah

question my old alma mater yes coming through what new developments to see

coming for the disabled well there I think that's a particularly interest of

mine because my father was a prosthetics prosthetist and something I've been interested in

for many years and I just wish more people were working on it the technology

is there to do an enormous amount for

the 10 million of Fay's --ax as an example there I think there are 20

million people in the United States right now I've had strokes 10 million of them suffer a fair amount

of speech impairment is quite possible to do technology that they can carry

around that allow them to carry on normal conversations about things just

an enormous set of areas and I think for people who are interested in user

interface it is another area that gets you out of the McLuhan fishbowl and into

a context where you have to go back to first principles and re-examine things so I think it's I think the future there

is very bright but we need more people working in it Ellen whatever happened to

Molly Molly yes well it's a wonderful

story because after that experience with

Tim Galway she came up this is a 1975 she came up to him afterwards and said

hey does this stuff work for weight control and Tim said well gee I don't

know let's see if we can figure out something so they figured out something

and Molly over the next year took off

all of her weight and became a very good

Media tennis player and for the last number of years has run an inner game

weight control clinic in Los Angeles is a business she set up herself to apply

the principles that she'd used to take off all that weight so this whole

experience completely transformed her life part of it she had never thought of

herself as being a physical person she never really thought of herself as

having a body and this experience got her in touch with that whole body

mentality she'd never been in touch with before and that's part of the secret of

controlling your weight okay and the

final questions two parts first of all in terms of increasing human potential

what do you see as the most important challenges for students today well I

think the I mean I see going well I felt

like when I was in college elementary school all the way through except for graduate school I always felt

like a gorilla warrior where the major task I had was to retain any sense of

myself and my own ideas while I was going through this incredible mill of

different hurdles other people had set up and so I think that I think that's

number one number two I think is for any students who are interested in going

into science and the engineering they have to realize that both of those are art forms and that the both of them are

sterile exercises without an aesthetic feeling and that the liberal arts are

the best place to develop your aesthetic feeling so I am pretty much even against

having strong concentrations in engineering computer science and those

things at the undergraduate level I think people should try and get a really

solid liberal arts background hmm but I mean solid I mean of the kind

that they would call solid on the continent not in the US and then use

that as an endless well for ideas and

metaphors that you can use when you're doing science and engineering I think

anybody who's ever read about famous scientists knows that the strongest

connection they have or there work is not technical a bit aesthetic and so finding the aesthetic and

yourself and developing aesthetic in yourself I think is the biggest challenge and the last part of the

question is what are you setting as your next challenge well I think for somebody

in their 40s in a field that's only 40

years old or so has has the challenge of

the basic challenge I think that we all have but especially as we get older is

the challenge of renewal renewal I think is a very special word and I I like to

use it instead of education the education has strong connotations but I

think renewal is what it's all about renewal means always being able to sidle

up to a new problem and try and see it

from a fresh point of view I find as I get older it is harder and harder to see

things from a fresh point of view and so for me the kinds of things I need to do

are to for instance be able to do more

music I used to be a professional musician and still very interested in it

and I find the now that when I have a fair amount of contact with music during

the week that my ideas are fresher in the computer science domain otherwise

there's a tendency to just keep on thinking old thoughts and old pathways

thank you very very much and thank you

for joining us today we invite your comments and questions on this

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