Defining Perspective, INEL Computing Symposium (1991)

[Applause] of course the the main thing about

technologists is that we're good at understanding easy things like science

and electronics and other kinds of engineering and we generally hate

complicated things reason we're able to

do our business is because the things we study are pretty easy complicated things

like ecology and human psychology are

things we usually try and factor out but in fact a lot of what the next 10 years

is going to be about and some of what this last decade has been about is that

human interaction human psychology the

fact that humans don't change anywhere near as fast as the technology does

there's no real evidence to say that we've changed much in the last 30 or 40

thousand years what has changed is our

our ways of representing the world we

got smarter by coming up with better representations but we have to deal with

those reputations using the same old brain that we had when we're out hunting

animals in the forest and as Nesbitt

once said the higher the technology gets the higher the Touch has to go high-tech

high-touch and a lot about what has been happening

in the last 10 or 15 years of dealing

with computers is that most of the successes that have actually been made have not been technological ones they

the technological ones were predicted very well in a paper by Gordon Moore in

the late 60s he was he later became a founder of Intel and his paper he was a

physicist decided to take a particular silicon technology he happened to pick a

really good one MOS and decided to see where it could go if you took it to its

limits so he sat down and calculated how

many electrons what is the minimal number of electrons you could actually

store in an MOS transistor it's about 5,000 I think his

answer was that he decided how big that transistor would be and determined that

it could be made and then he got interested in what kind of improvement

could we make about where we were in the late 60s to get to this minimal MOS

transistor they came up with a formulation which is now called Moore's

law and it was basically that the rate of progress could be a doubling in cost

performance every couple of years and

interestingly enough I don't know how many people have followed Moore's law

but as of last year Gordon Moore's prediction was only off

by 5% in fact he was too conservative so

there's an interesting example of thinking about the future not in an

extrapolated fashion because he wasn't reasoning by trends that were happening

in the 60s what he did was to take an image of a desirable future and then try

and understand what the rate of progress could be towards that desirable future I

think that characterizes how one turns visions into reality part of it is

getting a vision the most dangerous visions are extrapolate or ones because

they assume that the present is going to be carried very strongly into the future

and of course it is for the uninteresting future all the unde interesting things are going on right

now we're hot items 20 30 40 50 years

ago but the surprising ones are the ones that we really are interested in the

unpredictable or the unexplored future I

remember I was I was assist systems programmer at the National Center for

Atmospheric Research in the early 60s

and we were working on the heavy iron of

the day we were just just spent six months at Seymour Cray his lab in

Chippewa Falls helping to debug the 6600 we were going to get model numbers zero

of that machine and one day I asked the

meteorologist what the weather is going to be like today and he went and looked out the

window I said what's going on we're

spending millions of dollars of government and hence taxpayers money

we're simulating weather patterns all over the globe on the hottest computers

of the day and you go and look out the window and he said Allen you don't understand the the weather isn't like

other things if some farmer went out today and plowed a field this morning

that difference in reflectivity could be

easily enough in Colorado here to start some updrafts and those could lead to

forming a thundercloud and we could be having a storm in fact an oak tree is

often enough in one place and not another - cause that instability and I

was just looking out the window to see whether one of those was forming

of course our grand weather simulations were using 9000 points of data for the

entire northern hemisphere of the earth so the the grain was a little bit coarse

compared to ploughed fields and oak trees I took that I took that to heart

because it occurred to me that of course

the interesting future is also depends on physical principles there's nothing

mystical about it there's cause and effect operating but it operates in this

realm of extreme instability where little pushes here and there will change large things in the community and one of

the tricks in predicting the future is to homed in on those I'm actually

working still working scientists they haven't put me out to pasture yeah I run

a couple of multi-million dollar research projects at Apple but I got

into this business because of some

things that happened to me almost 20 years ago now and if we could start the

slides there my friendly agent so in

1973 we in 1972-73 we invented this

machine had a bitmap screen with 500,000

pixels on it had six MIPS of computing power and was both the forerunner of the

Macintosh and the first workstations most of the computing technology that we

use today that is called user-friendly came out at the development of this

machine and the user interface on it

looks something like this of course we projected it the right way

around but it included an included desktop

publishing it included icons and

included objects overlapping windows all

the things that we're kind of used to today and we had a pledge when we

started up the Palo Alto Research Center that we were tired of all of the bubble

gum technology that we had put together in the 60s which could barely be

demonstrated by the inventor I'm sure you have a few of those here and we said

at Parc fresh start new money new sponsor this time we're never going to

we're not going to do anything here that isn't engineered to work for a hundred

people so if we do a time-sharing system here it has to be able to run a hundred

users we do a programming language it has to be able to be learned by a

hundred people outside the group that developed it if we do a personal

computer it has we have to make at least a hundred of them so when we started off

on this we basically were adapting crazier ideas that we had in the in the

60s and trying to bring it to earth and we set up a production line and we

started building these machines and after a couple of years we had put

desktop publishing on it the same year we did this machine we invented the

ethernet and another guy Gary

Starkweather invented the laser printer to go along with it he didn't know how

fast to make it so he made it a page a second it was partly because the most

convenient Xerox machine he could find move paper to page a second and proved

impossible to slow it down so

he didn't know what resolution to make it so he made it 500 to the inch so the

very first laser printer that ever worked moved paper to page a second and

imaged it 500 dots of the inch just like this machine is still more powerful than

most desk computers because we didn't we sort of overshot because we weren't sure

exactly what to do so the the the point

of this story is that by 1976 we had

built some 700 of these machines we built so many that every person at Parc

had one and every secretary had one and we had been using them for some years

and we did desktop publishing and many of the kinds of things that you are used

to today and what happened is is in August 1976 Xerox decided not to take

this to product we were surprised because they didn't turn down a paper

design they didn't turn down a prototype they were turning down a system that at

all are even working for three years well we thought this is typical of

corporate stupidity so we went on

inventing other things we continued building these we actually built about

2,000 of these machines during the decade of the seventies two years later

I met the person who had made the big decision at Xerox to turn this machine

down as a product and I was shocked to discover that he was rather intelligent

even for a Xerox executive and that was

when I really felt bad because then I realized that this is not a question of

stupidity because stupidity of course could always be better informed this was

a paradigm problem this was a context

problem we were like Copernican x' at park who

had wandered into a ptolemaeus convention we shared similar words like

we used the word orbit but we meant completely different things about them

and so what was happening was the worst thing that can ever happen when you have

vision and it's happened many times this century is that the vision can sometimes

be so strong as to change the context and when it changes the context

it destroys communication has happened

many times in science you think scientists would be better at it but Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called the

structure of scientific revolution pointed out that most scientific

revolutions in the last 300 years have taken at least 25 years to happen and

the main reason was that you had to let the old physicists die off

he said it in a nicer way so the problem

here I think is number one how do you predict the unexpected future because we

know the interesting things about the future are going to be unexpected in that they aren't going to flow in a

simple way out of what we're doing now number two those interesting things are

likely to set up their own paradigms their own ways of doing things and one

of the things that is characterized for instance the paradigm shift from mainframes to desktop computing is that

almost nobody in the mainframe world as far as professional programmers and

managers and so forth made the shift most of the programming on the desktop

machines have been done by a new set of programmers and as I like to tell my

friends in the computer industry there's a yet a third shift coming along and

that is going to be done very likely by a whole new set of people and the reason

is that we just are set up I think even biologically set up to want to do the

rest of our life what we've learned as a teenager and in our early 20s when we

get competent we have a goal of competence that we should really get

confident when we got confident we tend to sit on the competence and try and

blend all new things to fit with the old confidence that doesn't work I don't

think it ever worked but it only if it did it only work in a very uninteresting

world in our world the biggest problem

with dealing with computers as I hope to show you in the next few minutes is not

being able to sit down and switch them on and stick a disc into the disc drive and fiddle around with the operating

system those things that are often called computer literacy that's not the

problem at all that's not computer literacy any more than literacy in the

printing world meant being familiar with the Bible because that was what was

first printed no literacy has is a much larger idea and one of the things it

means is fluency of course but even more

important I think is a willingness to try and find

out what the new medium of expression can actually do and instead of

automating old processes into the new medium which is something we always do

and we start off to try and find out what new processes the new medium

actually makes possible now this has happened many many times in especially

in the 20th century Edison invented the movie camera in 1895 and his his thought

was that people would not stand actually talked about anticipating the future his

thought was that people would not stand for things much longer than a couple of

minutes which happened to be the size of the reels that they had back then his

idea of an evenings worth of entertainment was to paste two or three of these reels together so you would get

six-minute films well I was a perfect anticipation of the age of television

but in fact what happened

is that for 20 years people thought of the movie camera as a stand-in for a

person in the audience like you looking up on a stage like here from a fixed

point of view and so they didn't move the camera it was a simulated theatre

it wasn't until 1915 and DW Griffith did Birth of a Nation that modern film

language was invented which involved he realized you could move the camera you

could zoom you could do tracking shots you could do montages and all of those

things were what constitutes the modern language of film we learn it without realizing it because we grow up in it

but when they first did a zoom a

tracking shot into a train approaching

people screamed in the audience because their brains were set up to anticipate

anything getting larger as meaning it was coming towards them and they had not

learned to relativize that according to

a screen we don't realize that because we relativize it at an age where we

don't remember that we've that we've done it so each medium has its own

language and its own literacy and a lot

of our survival in the next 10 to 20 years will depend on not having these

20-year lags in which we simply take old obsolete practice and try and implement

it in the new media of course the computer is one of the worst of these because of its ability to simulate every

other medium that we've had it's a wonderful thing about computers but it also has led to us sitting on the paper

document for many many years beyond its

merits and one of the things is going to be hardest for the world in the next 10

years is to get out of the paper document and I'll try and show you why

that's that's necessary so

let me try and make a point here how do

we think about the future one of the

ways of doing it that's not extrapolate Ori is to try and understand how we

extend ourselves into our environment we're the naked animal we're the ones

that have to have intermediaries between us in the world I'm using one right now

which is language we of course think of tools as one of the ways we extend

sometimes we don't think of mental tools like language and mathematics as as

being tools and to me all of these are extensions of the gesture language and

mathematics are ways of capturing difficult things you can talk about an

elephant without having to drag an elephant along with you and point at it

you can make a little noise that signifies elephant and you can take that

noise with you and our brains are set up to be able to make that substitution

sometimes too well but in any case the M

word for tools is manipulation capture

things use something like our hands move them around now another way we have

extending ourselves that we think of less often is we extend ourselves

through agents agents are entities that can take on our goal structure so a

simple agent is to get somebody to manipulate the tools for us usually it's

a human being sometimes we can train animals to do it and we can go to Hawaii

or go to sleep on the hammock while we've somehow convinced this person to

do our our goals for us I think that's really powerful about agents is that

they can deal with other agents so if you come up with a set of goals that are

very understandable and attractive and give it to some agents they can spend

these goals all around the world and

because of this the M word here is not manipulation but management we

manipulate tools we manage agents tools with thumbs something that we look at

and we manipulate agents are things that look at us and we manage

them or try to now of course when the mainframe came along it wasn't either a

tool or an agent it was something outside of human scale like a factory or

a railroad and of course we have

mechanisms in our brain for dealing with things that are outside of human scale namely religion so immediately when you

deal with something this is true with government it's outside of human scale

mainframe computers immediately start winding up with ritual people in special

costumes special places where things are done and all of the things that have to

do with now of course we don't realize that because we don't realize most of

the actions that we do are motivated by deeper things in our head but the in

fact are so the interest people had who

realized this when the mainframe came along was immediately to try and find ways to reduce at the human scale and

the two strongest ways of doing it are one to try and turn it into something

like a tool and the second is to try and turn it into something like an agent the

tool is easier and so we were more successful at that in the last 20 or 30

years and the next decade is going to be the decade of the agent now one of the

ways of predicting the future and evaluating some new piece of technology

you see is to try and understand how well it fits into the context we have of

using tools and the context we have of using agents if it fits well you can

make a very good choice let me give you an example here Xerox the story I told

you about Xerox is ironic in a very strong sense because not too many years

before Xerox turned down a 10-year lead in personal computing they had it happen

to them they were a small company in the 50s in Rochester called Haloid

they got enamored of dry copying they brought up all of the patents for

xerography and every other patent they could find they invented dry copying

once but it wasn't too successful so they just went out and called it offset

printing then they went back and took another pass

and after many years of work they had formulated a machine which they called

the 914 the first xerox copier but

they'd done something that I wish more companies would do and that is they'd spent so much on research that they

didn't have any money left to build factories or to market it most companies

do the opposite what they do is they spend lots of money on marketing and

factories to build obsolete and sell obsolete things whereas the Xerox people

did a better job they came up with something really great and simply forgot

one little detail and they didn't know

what to do with it so they decided well let's take it down the road to IBM in

Poughkeepsie back then and so I took at

the IBM and they said die BM take this machine we loved it so much we just want

to see it get out we'll just charge you a small royalty build factories sell the

damn thing you know we'll be just glad to see it get out there they put six years of their life into this of course

IBM did what every large company does when they don't know what to do that as they went out and hired some consultants

the consultant is a person who knows a hundred ways to make love but doesn't

have a girlfriend

so of course all consulting firms are also named Arthur for some historical

reason the the one that IBM chose is called Arthur D little in Cambridge

Massachusetts and they went out and did the typical extrapolate or E market

survey that he learned in b-school and a

year dragged by eighty months later they came to IBM with six inches of paper

having spent a lot of money and gone out and talked to a lot of people and their

conclusion was that there was no market for a plain paper copying period their

two main reasons one is that there was no copy volume to speak of in the United

States so if you extrapolate zero

and the other was that the nine 14 was

about 10 times as expensive to run it cost about five cents to make a plain

paper copy on the thing and they said nobody's gonna spend 10 times as much as

they do for a mimeograph e right now so

IBM said okay well we'll turn it down so

they turned it down this is around 1958-59 it's all

explained by the way in a book by a Xerox executive called my years with

Xerox the billions nobody wanted

by jaundice our here interests as the classic story he tells it in great

detail this turndown action after the

long wait so enraged the Xerox people that they went out and got their board

convinced to let them use their own life insurance as security for the first loans for the first factory for the 1914

as I say that happened around nineteen fifty-eight fifty-nine less than 10

years after IBM had turned down this device Xerox was held to be in restraint

of trade by the Federal Trade Commission for being too successful remember that

1967 they were forced to share their

patents of this thing that only they were willing to take the risk on now

how could I be M have done this world's

largest computer corporation lots of smart people and just like the smart

people in Xerox 15 20 years later how could they have done it well the answer

was that they thought they were a computer company they could not imagine that they existed in any larger context

for example in the 1920s and 1930s not

one railroad in the United States of America invested one cent in any kind of

airline or airplane building their

entire conception of what it meant to have improvement was to have better

welded rails and faster locomotives they could not imagine for a million years

that they're in the transportation business they thought they were in the

railroading business IBM could not imagine they were in the

communications business their only image of themselves was what their current

products were and this is one of the reasons why the Japanese are likely to

roll over us in a big tide this decade because most American companies take

their image from what they're selling now and have no image to rely on when

they start looking further into the future Japanese are completely the

opposite Yamaha makes really great pianos and they make really great

motorcycles and the corporate management of Yamaha has absolutely no image

problems no conflict of identity because what do they focus on not the

noun not whether it's a piano or a motorcycle they focus on the word great

their whole focus is on their process whatever we do let's make it great and

have fun doing it that opens up the world enormous Li it allows multiple

points of view to be used and multiple points of view are the way you get out

from under this single-minded notion of what we're doing right now is the

defining thing for our world my friend Marvin Minsky who is one of the

inventors of artificial intelligence likes to say you don't understand

anything if you only understand it one way understanding something one way is

one of the worst things that can ever happen to a person because it becomes exalted to something that is almost

impossible to change heretics used to be burned at the stake and the reason they

were burned at the stake is because what they said were regarded as lies nowadays

we don't burn people who say what we regard as lies at the stake but we have

other ways of centering them but consider this

almost everything that we have today was a lie 20 30 40 50 years ago somebody comes

along in a less enlightened age and we're talking about this kind of

technology that kind of technology they would have been branded as complete liars when Galileo discovered the four

moons of Jupiter could see four the four brightest moons and Jupiter in his

telescope and he took the telescope to Rome to show the Cardinals of the church

they would not look in the telescope because because of their worldview there

could be nothing in there to see because

their worldview said that there could be only one Center of motion and any moons

revolving around a planet was another center of motion that could not possibly be so they didn't look and that is the

way we generally are about dealing with these new things which basically come to

us as lies lies lies damned lies and statistics as Mark Twain used to say and

in fact real question about these lies is whether there can be true in another

context if they can be true in another context that's when you have to watch out because that context may be ready to

burst upon us so what we need to do is

find some way of taming this guy and

people started a long time ago so one of

the one of the rules are particularly the future is elevate your context whatever it is that you think you're

doing right now almost certainly can't be definer of what you are visionaries

try and find a way of defining the goals of a group in such a way that allows

them to do other things a few years from now now another way of predicting the

future which is a little bit more mundane but works awfully well it's also

not extrapolated is to realize that because of the stodgy nough society and

because of the bubble gum and bailing

wire nature of most inventions most of the technologies that are going to

affect us in the next ten years have already been in somebody's lab for ten

years in other words it takes 10 15 20

years to get these technologies out of the labs and they're sitting there for

anybody to see when I give these talks I always ask the businessmen in the crowd

if they have anybody on their staff just

one person in a multi-billion dollar company whose job it is to simply go

around and visit research labs around the world there are only 40 or 50 good

ones one person can cover them every 18

months or so not a single company I've

talked to has it even one person to do this to just know what the developing

technologies are going to be and because of this every time one comes along

they're surprised they had no reason to

be surprised it takes a long long time now how about how about here does ine L

have anybody whose job it is to just go around and visit mmm

so that's enough that's one way of understanding early warning now let me

show you a couple of examples now one of the things I can predict for sure in the

future I hope is that we will be going

from analog to digital I speak with

reference to our video system here which is extremely analog when we were trying

it out it tends to drop frames and stuff so I hope you won't be bothered by that

but just consider when you ever you see a dropped frame that there's absolutely no reason for that frame to be dropped

or for anything that rope remotely resembles noise of any kind in the

transmission of information around I've always believed that it was a moral duty

of any company that made anything having to do with television to build in a

small hand grenade with a 15 year timer

the job of after 15 years is up especially in universities which never

get rid of these things is that this little thermal bomb will simply melt the

thing down then they'll be forced to go out and get it get a new one so let me

show you a couple of trips into the past the first one goes a long ways back all

the way back to 1966

yeah let me pause this and see if we get an image there actually let me ask the

crowd here because this is a group of fairly technical people how many people in their office have 19 inch

high-resolution monitors for their computer systems ok still a smaller

percentage so might find it interesting with this guy who's there with his hand

on a mouse in 1966 had a high-resolution

2 page monitor in front of him and a mouse and a hypertext system this guy

was Doug Engelbart who if anybody was the father of what we call personal

computing today I think he was let me give you an example of what his system

looked like if it doesn't jump around too much

so I can say I'd like to go to produce but I liked go travelers they get big I

like to say one branch only and let me

look just that low and I see it oh I can say I'd like to see one line only I can

see what does the very thing that I can do doesn't work nice that I have here

so here I'm afraid I'll need a different pictures of you so here's what I'll do

with a picture drawing capability or so slight lamp if I start from work and here's of you guys seem to have to go to

pick up all the materials and that's my plan for getting home tonight but if I

want to I can say the library what am I supposed to check up there I can just

point to that you know I see overdue books ago there was a staying at that

name supposed to pick up the drugstore

mmm-hmm I see those thing alright can do

things if I will just say I'd like to interchange the Protestant and materials

bingo interchanging them very quickly

cancer and get interchange with partners they

do it all gets renumber yeah so that was the the first hypertext

system actually hypermedia as you can see because he used diagrams as well

work really well it's very fast that little segment was from a demonstration

he gave to three thousand people in San Francisco in 1968 and I showed this

about a year and a half ago to the four Western Regional Bell companies they

were having a conference because they just discovered they had a network

they work themselves up to a fevered pitch most of the papers in this

conference were how they could send data over this network and so I got up and

showed Engle Bart in is more to the

video that shows conferencing with video cutouts and a whole bunch of things that

are just still dreams today and they say yes that's it that's what we want to do

I said well it's very funny because Engle Bart in the early 70s took all of

this to ATT AT&T and tried to give it to them and they threw him out on his ear

because they didn't have any understanding what it was that he was he

was doing back then unfortunately now he is still alive and is getting some of

the recognition he deserves he wrote about this system in his first grant

he'd been thinking about it actually in the 50s and his first grant for this

system the first official document was in 1962

and it scribes most of the details of what we would like to have on our

computers today I managed to get some money from ARPA and get some people to

build it and a lot of the technology we have today is the way it is because of

this system not because he was able to convince anybody in business that they

should do it but because he convinced us who are the next generation graduate

students and we said yes we want to have something like that actually my first

slice please my first

my first attempt at this was to say well

gee Engelbart system really doesn't work very well it's on a time-sharing system

that's really a pain to program a time-sharing system together every user

the cycles when they actually need them and so I thought well well we should

have something that uses the silicon technology we just got from the space

program so another guy and I built this machine not the first personal computer

very early one a desktop computer for very special desks namely ones made out

of steel this thing weighed about 350

pounds and had a fan that was likened to a 747 taking on problem was you can only

get like maybe 16 or 32 gates and one of

these little dual inline packages back then and this whereas your desktop

computer may have 50 little black boxes on the PC board this one had some 725 in

multi-layer boards and it was a mess but in fact it looks surprisingly like

the machines that we we have today and we built one of these and tried it out

and discovered to our horror that only graduate students liked it

that's because graduate students like most engineers delight in the the

puberty right of passage of proving that they can memorize 500 stupid commands of

a poorly design system [Laughter]

admit it that's why graduate students and

engineers like UNIX so much well that

was a shock to discover that and while I

was trying to figure out why what was

wrong with this machine because it had one of the earliest object-oriented languages on it had multiple windows a

head pointing it had a few things that even looked a little bit like the

Macintosh on it the package together did

not gel in any way with the people we were trying it on who are non computer

users at the time while I was conjuring

this in 1968 I happen to see this system

at RAND Corporation one without a keyboard at all first we erased a flow

arrow out of the way so that we may draw a box in its place now it's easy T wants

to draw a box and makes one for him now it's recognizing his handwriting the

printing in the box is being used as commentary only in this case the box is

slightly too large so when we change its size this is where modern-day window

control came from literally from the connector to the box attached a decision

element to the box and draw a flow from it to scan we then erase the flowers

attached to the process post new area and move the box to a new position

this allows us to draw a new box

well that system made a tremendous impression I mean it only would stay up

for 15 or 20 minutes at a time he's implemented on a computer system that

was the size of this room slightly less

powerful than an IBM XT but this is for

a single user the I'm just just an aside

these tablets were invented at RAND Corporation the same year that the mouse

was invented 1964 and they manufacture them and sold them in small amounts to

people who are doing experiments just to give you a perspective for some of the

younger people in the audience we bought one of those tablets to play with it at

Utah around 1967 or so the tablet cost

$18,000 not the computer the tab the

computers cost millions of dollars to do these things on but just the i/o gear

this is not the display this is just the tablet it was 18,000 of pre-vietnam war

type money so you can think today to buy

think of using an input device today experimental input device today that

cost something like sixty five thousand dollars without attaching a computer to

it one of the reasons we haven't seen a lot of advances in the last few years is

that people are not building input devices that cost sixty five thousand dollars they're trying to make do with

the ones that cost a few hundred dollars and progress is not being made well

I'd called what angle Bart did personal computing and I'd called my little

desktop machine a personal computer but this was completely different this felt

like you're sinking your fingers right through the glass of the display and

touching the structures directly so I made up the term intimate and I made a

cardboard model back in 1968 wondering

what an in an intimate computer could big could obviously not

a desktop computer and it couldn't even be a suitcase computer 0.5 variations

per block is not portability so I define

portability as something as portable if you can carry other things - there's

always other things you're lugging around we actually loaded this up with

lead pellets to see how heavy you could

make it before people would not want to use it and so forth this this device was

not science fiction it was based on Gordon Moore's paper because it was very

easy if you believe the physics of Gordon Moore's paper that I referred to you could calculate just when in time

you could build one of those machines and the answer was sometime in the late

70s and the or the early 80s if you really wanted to you really pushed it

and in fact I went to Xerox PARC to design and build this machine I called

this an intimate computer and it still

stands there as something that is about to happen in in the next decade now of

course the reason it didn't happen in the 1980s the way it should have is because of this extra 10 years of people

being completely misled by the IBM PC

but if you've been if you've been reading the papers you may have noticed

that even IBM has now seen the light that worries me tremendously because

when IBM decides to endorse something it means it's at least five years obsolete

so when they when they started building large object oriented programming groups

at IBM I was fearful okay so this is a

paradigm part of this talk another way of predicting the future is to try and

understand whether this thing actually fits into a set of rules it makes up

itself there's three ways to invent something the the dumbest way is by

brainstorming that's when you get a bunch of people in the room and you try and have ideas very popular in

businesses and other organizations I'm told Robert Heinlein said a committee is

the only form of life with ten bellies and no brain

basically you can't think strong thoughts in that kind of a meeting so

any meeting that's set up to try and come up with ideas and press for a conclusion distrust it tremendously

because you won't get what you want stronger way is to be goal-oriented so

they teach in college and Business School find a need and fill it and the

problem with finding a need and filling it is that it is extremely difficult to

get people out there that you're talking to to articulate what their actual needs

are what they articulate are their wants and their wants are not the same as

their needs nobody wanted the Xerox machine but they needed it nobody wanted

the personal computer but they but they needed it and so the Japanese do not do

market surveys at all what they do is build come up with the best ideas they

can they build five or ten variations of them put them out in quantities of 5,000

and 10,000 and see when they put it in directly into a person's hand whether

they actually understand what it is this

is the problem with goal oriented behavior goal oriented behavior assumes

that you know something that you're trying to go towards now of course the

strongest way of doing things is to pick directions and learn as you go that's

not the same thing as a goal find something because you don't know enough

to know what your goals are until you actually get fairly close to them this is something that's very difficult to

explain to people and it's also very difficult to explain this third way of

invention third way of inventing is to invent something that creates its own

need all the big hitters in the 20th

century are things that the very existence of them created their own need

because they change the context in which people live personal computer created

its own need the Xerox machine created its own need pocket calculator

hewlett-packard had a wonderful

marketing survey done that showed that nobody would use pocket calculators of

course the same kind of reasons for this arts machine nobody was using them

wonderful story by the way I knew the guy who did the pocket

calculator hewlett-packard and he told me this that the whole thing happened

because Bill Hewlett wanted one and boy does that help and Bill Hewlett in a

meeting one day took off his shirt and gave it to his engineers and said make

it fit in this the pocket of this shirt

so right so Tom Osborne and the others

went off and they worked and worked and worked in they got this awfully good

thing called the HP 35 wouldn't fit in the pocket of Bill's shirt so of course

they went to a tailor

this tailor did such a great job that bill Hewlett never noticed that the

pocket had been enlarged

see what I mean about the human factor so when we look at when we think about

computing most people tend to think of it as a relatively continuous thing

desktop computers are smaller mainframe

computers and the tendency is is to try and do the same kinds of things on the

mainframes do but what I want to claim here is that that's not so at all in

fact we've had already two major

paradigms you can even think of three if you include batch in there so you can

think of the biggest shifts in computing have been the shift from batch to time

sharing the shift from time sharing to personal computing and the next one

that's coming hard on the heels of this one we're only halfway through the personal computer revolution when I say

halfway through she mentioned that two and a half years ago personal computer

gross worldwide revenues past all of the

multi-user mainframe and many never to

rejoin them so in fact just two and a

half years after the revenues were passed at about something like 38

million 38 billion per year the worldwide revenues in 91 are likely

to be somewhere in the 80 billions of dollars and in fact the difference

between if the if you take the next five

years of worldwide revenues the difference between the worldwide

revenues and desktop computing and in mainframe computing over a five year

period is approximately 650 billion dollars that is a lot of money and yet

even as this is happening a new revolution is taking place and this is

this intimate computer revolution fueled not so much by the integrated circuit

which is the forcing function of the personal computer revolution but fueled

by pervasive networks not just pervasive

networks but pervasive to the extent that many of them will be Wireless of

various kinds the

people who do estimates of this kind of thing wait do estimates of this is you

wonder who are going to be the users you don't worry about asking people whether they want one or not because they don't

know but the real question is to ask can this thing be something that will

amplify this kind of person and the estimates about what the personal

computer was going to do depended greatly on the kinds of user interface

that it had the estimates on the intimate computer have to do with

similar concerns and with the kinds of applications that can actually be put on

the things - whether the thing is going to be appealing or not the belief is is that the saturation of intimate

computers intimate computers are the kind of ones that you would have in a in

a pouch like this or stuck in your hip pocket maybe you have a pair of glasses

for the display continuously connected

in by if we're in this room it'd be connected using some sort of infrared

transponders and out in your car would be hooked into the cellular system

people are starting that I know of seven firms including one large Japanese one

there are heavy at work on these and will start seeing the first versions of

these in just a couple of years the estimate is that somewhere between 1997

in the year 2000 the worldwide revenues for these kind of computers will pass

personal computers will pass desktop computers that is not that far off

people are investing literally billions and billions of dollars into trying to

do something about the desktop many of it is fruitless stuff like trying to hook them up to the mainframe

now the mainframe if that's a temporary

measure maybe remember whenever you try and orbit around a large thing with

gravitational field you wind up doing what it is gravitational field wants you

to do the in order to actually make use of your desktop computers you have to go

to distributed servers in order to get the kinds of throughput and processing

that you need outside of your desktop if you stay with the mainframes for some

reasons of compatibility for some reasons of holding on to old databases

as though they're assets rather than liability here's one of here's one of

the incredible things about the government they don't allow people to depreciate their code all right we can

depreciate Hardware because everybody can see that it deteriorates but because code on magnetic disks is

relatively eternal the government does not think of this as depreciating but in

fact most of the code in the US has been obsolete for more than ten years I once

visited a steel company and looked at

one of their billing systems and I could see the punched card a counting machine

layout that they use back in the 40s in

this program it had never been actually redesigned it actually been

reimplemented on many different kinds of machines and you could see the way they

were passing information around this thing you could see where the 4:07

printer was in the shop where the 101

card calculating punches were located in a thing and every time we do that we

lose enormous Lee because we're spending maybe 80 90 percent of our energies just

keeping the the old dinosaur alive we don't get let the mammals get out there

and start competing in a reasonable way well let me just go through these three paradigms without belaboring the point

performance you measure on what is called path length I

that's the millions of instructions that are executed by the mainframe before you

get a response back at the terminal I wants to ask 4000 Macintosh developers

if they'd ever heard the expression path line could number had because you don't worry about

millions of instructions executed before you get back to the terminal you are the terminal so we have MIPS on

personal computers it's like those great old dodges from the 1950s you could lay

a 450-horsepower you could lay a stripper rubber a block long turns out

completely irrelevant because the MIPS is actually an exponential change will

have some 50 to 100 mitts in the standard IBM and Apple machines by 1995

and astoundingly will have an excess of a thousand MIPS by the year 2000 they

won't be architected quite the same way that they are now but the the myths will

be there we will be able to use every single one of them by the way there are

never enough MIPS and even giving us something like 500 times as many MIPS as

we have now on a desktop we'll easily use it up just in making the user interface better no because the issue in

the future in the next 10 years is not going to be MIPS or pathlength it's

going to be access we're going to be networked up now the question becomes on

this worldwide network that I can hook up to almost every node for people who

are publishing tools and data they might need what is the probability number one

I can find those things that will really help me because I know they're out there

- what is the probability that I can get

it sent to me 3 what is the probability that I can use this thing once it comes

to me those are the issues of the 90s they don't have anything to do with

hardware compatibility or anything else anybody worries about hardware protocols

about things they're dealing in the wrong layer because the kinds of things

that you want to worry about our communications protocols and making

those the same across machines types of

data I thought green and white print out

sheets were gone forever I can tell from

the Snickers that you probably have some but I actually discovered my dentist a

couple of months ago was still using these things and needless to say I

changed dentists immediately I was wondering what what other old

tools he might be using personal

computers of the Macintosh or Windows type extend into fonts and graphics and

in the next five years we'll be simulating all of the media we've ever

used on earth including those like hyper media which can't directly exist in the

physical universe interesting thing if you drop Gone with the Wind the book

gone with the wind to the floor the ink and the paper feel the gravity and the

impact but scart Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler don't write they're

actually in a different universe a descriptive universe you drop a computer

to the floor the silicon in it feels the gravity and the impact but the

simulations in it don't the simulations do not have to have anything to do with

our physical universe and some of the more interesting ones like hypermedia don't the computer is that thing which

given in dimensions of data to deal with

can give us one more dimension and that one more dimension allows us to make all

interesting things appear at the same place in hyperspace almost not used at

all yep today integration painfully with

files I discovered to my horror year or so ago that only in the US only half the

databases in the country are relational databases and this is after 20 years a

relational base stuff so half the database in the country are still flat

files from the 1960s maybe 1950s and

relational databases were obsolete the day they were born because they in fact do not extend in

any strong way and people are struggling and struggling with relational databases they're very poor way of doing things as

we'll see later cut and paste in personal computers from any application

into any application and in the next few

years ActiveX components that you can take any component cut it out as an object and

move it to any other place and have it work in a reasonable way how do you

print big printers

personal laser printers it's interesting we it was one of the strongest things

that happen at Apple was that Steve Jobs

happened to be very important in getting certain products out the marketing

people decided not to sell the laser printer at Apple back in 1984 is just

when I first got to Apple now of course we knew they said it was too expensive

nobody would buy it same kind of thing and of course we knew

that people would buy it like mad because we had done desktop publishing ten years before but they didn't know

that so Steve instead of trying to reason with them simply went and

threatened each one of them personally and he had eleven point nine million

shares of Apple stock and was chairman of the board and boy it just worked

wonderfully well they all the people who were against this sort of melted away

into the woodwork and in less than a week there was a plan for selling the

laser printers now of course the bombshell here and people have been

predicting it for many years and it hasn't happened is that printing is going to go away a printing isn't going to go away

because of any ecological sound reason it isn't going to go away because people

want to get rid of printing it's going to go away because increasingly we're

gonna have two kinds of models that don't print out how many people here use

spreadsheets for doing forecasting instead of just accounting anybody here

a couple people do you print your spreadsheets out for that no why because

how many different spreadsheets do you have to print out all right the interest

is in all of the different cases that are generated when you change assumptions in them and that is just the

smallest part of being able to use simulation models for things instead of

using databases once you go to a simulation model the interest in the

simulation model are the kinds of things that can tell you dynamically and you don't want to print them anymore and

once you go to hypermedia where you have a hundred dimensions of

data connected with and one dimensions of interconnect that

allow all interesting things to be at the same places you're not going to want to print those out because printing them

out destroys them so right at the time when this crisis is approaching these

little machines that can handle these dynamic and multi-dimensional models

will come along and they will be the printers they will be the repositories

for all of this information how do you give commands remember and type on the

mainframe and of course in ms-dos which is a mainframe one of these things like

the people who didn't realize they could move the camera for 20 years because of

course if you have your own machine you can supply a lot more cycles to the user

to help them remember the Mac and Windows you can see in point and in the

future because this future system is going to be much more agent like taking

on our goals it's going to be ask and gesture kind of software one purpose

custom applications are the typical things on the mainframes that usually train a few thousand people to run them

generic tools on personal computers and the reason the tools are generic is

because you cannot anticipate what a million people need and you can't train

a million people so you have to come up with things like spreadsheets and

desktop publishing systems and other software that the end users can tailor

to their needs and that is going to change in an even bigger way when we

move from millions of people using computers to billions of people using computers people will actually be

placing together their own tools and a lot of that is going to constitute what

computer literacy is in the future computer literacy if you make any kind

of

ich ins built for you by others so you

have to be able to have some sort of understanding of perhaps a visual

language like the Macintosh that allows you to deal with the thousands of things that other people are doing but you also

have to be able to write and writing doesn't mean writing in a word processor

that's an imitation of the old meeting medium writing means being able to make

some of those tools yourself to be able to make things that are like the things

you buy an egghead software and get banded over networks that is a real

challenge so if I any L is going to be computer literate in the next five years

what that means is all of the end users who have machines on their desks she'll

be able to fashion tools of a certain kind for them in a morally required

professional programmers just as writing formally required professional scribe

that's the challenge

these things are paradigms are programmed in completely different ways

mainframes are programmed in data structure and procedure languages like

Fortran and COBOL they don't case tools

are very big over in this left hand side

of the screen and the reason is that case tools are an orthotic race for a

hopelessly crippled patient I have this image of Fortran on a

hospital bed with many tubes running out of it because people would rather keep

it alive than to to learn anything new

in fact much of personal computing is object-oriented which is a very

different way of programming and there's

yet another way of programming that's coming along for the 90s that is required when we go to pervasive

networks one of the ways to think of this is if you move the distance between

a and B is a thousand miles and you move

something like a piece of data a thousand miles to somebody else just to

ask yourself the question what else do I have to move with it in many cases you

have to move a programmer at least you have to move manuals of various kinds

because there are all of these things that happen what happens if the format's

change in the source of where you move the thing do you then have to go around

and find all the data in the old format yes you do there's a rule that says you

never find all of them nor do you find all the procedures that do the old way

of doing things so it's a very fragile it generates lightning bolts objects are

much nicer because when you move one of them a thousand miles it takes everything important along with it

automatically all of the procedures that deal with its intimate representations

so objects factor out the desires you have to use them from the way they use

to represent themselves internally but

they still require a little bit of understanding at point B at least at the protocol level and our belief is that in

the next 10 years we have to move to a kind of module that we can send around

networks that does not require any human hands to touch it when you receive it

the active Ries it's like moving a shoulder muscle cell from your shoulder

and putting it down in your thigh you shouldn't have to reprogram the thigh muscles down there to accept it

that cell has enough knowledge about what it wants from the environment so

it's able to reconfigure itself after the journey and it's that automatic

reconfiguration that that in its knowledge of what it's about and what

it's trying to do that characterizes this as an agent or anyway of sign might mention that agent

oriented programming by the way is now ten years old object-oriented

programming is now more than twenty five years old so it must it should be on its

way here any minute now

how big is a big program this is why you should be interested in this I don't

believe that people should change programming languages just because of fads or styles but a big program in the

Fortran COBOL arena is a million lines of code maybe more equivalent kind of

thing in an object-oriented program it's about a hundred thousand lines about a factor of ten less and quite remarkably

the similar program in the agent oriented style which is kind of a

rule-based expert system way of doing things is much much smaller than that

often a factor of eight or ten and this

change is like thinking about architectures we're using the same old

bricks on the computer but we're using them in different ways the Greeks were

smart but they built rather small temples made out of posts and lintels

because they didn't know of any other ways of organizing the bricks quite

remarkably if you want to build a Gothic cathedral that's mostly windows in

mostly empty space inside it doesn't

require any more bricks than an average Greek temple does it requires a different architecture for organizing

these things this is like object-oriented programming and in fact you can go even further you can turn a

corner as Buckminster Fuller did even

though it had been known for a hundred years or so that some hundred fifty two

hundred years ago people suddenly realized with a shock that structures

most structures that we build things out of our much stronger when you pull on

them rather than when you push one if anybody here actually knows why any

sense you know when you push on things the remember they're all this heat there

at room temperature so the molecules are vibrating down there what happens when

you push them closer together they get hot in fact when you push steel together

it will start flowing long before it if you start pulling on it which makes

it cold and you give the molecular bonds a chance to do something for you so

fuller was the one who really fully realized that if you could build

structures in which most of the structure was pulling rather than

pushing you could build something that for instance that would go although would cover all of the Gothic cathedrals

on earth and out of about the same

amount of material cubic material as the Gothic cathedrals or the postable

entails this is one way of saying point of view is worth ad IQ points right our

whole ethic in this country is to work harder when we're in trouble but in fact

all of human progress has come not from working harder but from working smarter

every time we change the context in which we choose to solve problems in

we're made much stronger because we have no way of making our IQs any any

stronger so so technology is easy to

predict all at aw shucks I think this

will work this is our right angled right

angle view if you ask somebody for a screwdriver and they gave you this you'd

be upset because you say no I I want the

user interface because it's only the user interface plus the function that

gives me the tool and when I was making

this slide it got me to think about the screwdriver in a new way I thought God

that is a terrible design for a screwdriver just think of it the

mechanical advantage is the ratio of the diameter of the handle to the diameter

of the shaft that's small leads down pressure if you try and manipulate it

like this so you get a lot of friction on it it will slide off if you

manipulate it like this to get down pressure you don't get much purchase on it this is a terrible design for a

screwdriver this is the ms-dos of screwdriver designs

now my hobby is building musical

instruments I have a book published before the French Revolution more than

200 years ago that shows the tools that they used for musical instruments back

then and in there is a beautiful engraving of a screwdriver that looks just like that so this is a tool that

has been used almost uncritically for more than 200 years probably 500 years

back to the time when they invented screws that it's not been thought about

now what should the screwdriver look like well it should have a as wide a diameter in the handle as possible

you're going to use it from the top you need as much friction as possible so

what should it look like it should look like a ball is anybody seen a screwdriver it looks

like that yeah in fact since I started giving this this part of the talk I've

received some thirty eight ball handles screwdrivers most of them most of them

of different design which is really great but apparently tracing it back it

was about eight or nine years ago that somebody went through the same process and said you know that is a terrible

design for a screwdriver should actually look like the person's hand so the moral

of this story is you need to not only need you need a user interface but it

has to fit into something that the human has so if you want to communicate

instead of just manipulate you have to fit to something that the primate has

we're primates and we have to have something to do with how the mind works

now the problem with how the mind works is that we don't actually understand it

in a very strong way we think of ourselves as a seamless fabric of

eyeness there's AI me and myself and

we're all the same person and I can remember back when I was a kid and all that stuff but in fact the whole

situation is much more complicated than that give you an example here take a

look at this take a look at this upside down face here and see if you can see if

there's anything wrong with it what what about the teeth

upside down okay what anything anything else about this picture smile hole smile

what else no fear turning your head I'm watching you okay so guys okay good

so let me tell you let's pretend we're

at one of your training centers or in almost any school in the United States

most of these places believe knowledge is a fluid that can be moved drop by

drop from the full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel most of that

knowledge is encoded into language and the idea is if I tell you something that's true you're supposed to

immediately learn it and understand it so let's test that out

I'll give you an English sentence about this picture what we've done here is

we've taken a picture of a young girl her eyes and math ID down put them back

into the picture then turned the entire picture upside down that sound right

okay so having said that it should be quite prepared for what it looks like

right side up

I'm gonna turn this back because I've discovered nobody will listen to me when

it's on the other way

it's great to come up here to Idaho where nobody has seen this before I've

been showing this for 10 years and I've never found a better one and some of my

audiences and other places are getting tired of it but I like to throw it in it

because a couple of things to realize from this one is that even though I gave

you no additional information of any kind when I showed you the picture your reaction was completely different and

the reason is it was processed in a completely different part of your brain there's no seamless fabric of I myself

and me going on here instead we actually have modular mentalities when I gave you

the English sentence that went in through your ears and went over to the left-hand side of the brain where

languages processed turned into a proposition and you agreed that that was

probably the case they had a high probability of being true so everybody

just sat there when I went to the image that image went in through your eyes to

the back part of your brain and under the right-hand side of your brain where you Pupp sorry listen you might wonder

why am I looking that at it when he puts it on the screen the answer is that it

is biologically encoded into most mammals brains so if you try this

experiment out on a dog I suggest you pick a small one [Laughter]

this is not this is not a learned response it's actually built it's

actually built in there so when the

image comes in it is processed in a different part of your brain and your

whole psyche your whole consciousness comes to a completely different

conclusion which is startle met and so forth this is why McDonald's hamburgers

does not run print ads saying if you eat a McDonald's hamburger you'll become a

better-looking person right because it's

absurd in English but instead what they do is through run ads that show really

good-looking people eating McDonald's hamburgers and that information is processed in a completely different part

of your brain and you come to a completely different conclusion it's a weaker conclusion than you do with

language but it's inclusion that works extremely well for advertisers in fact

we have a part of our brain that thinks

things are more true if they rhyme so

our order to say to you a Big Mac and fries will slender your thighs

[Laughter]

you'll remember that - anybody have an

idea of why you might think things are more true if they rhyme and remember

them more easily any speculations

well association but why why why should

we be good at remembering rhymes patterns why should we be good at me see

the thing well we've only had writing for about maybe 10,000 years at the most

and for most of human existence we've

had to remember what the previous culture knew in terms of stories and

those stories were in given in terms of rhythmic schemes and rhyme schemes and

in fact I think that the survivors of

all of this namely us are here partly because we're able to remember things

well in terms of stories and in terms of rhymes and we seem to have that built in

from the from our earliest birth but the

point of this thing is that what we have as a mind is kind of a patchwork quilt

children deal with the world in very

comprehensive ways but different ways as they get older they learn about things

by grabbing them and eating them early

on they go into a visually centered stage often when they're in elementary

school where if you pour water from a squat glass into a tall thin glass

they'll say there's more water in the tall glass later on around 10 to 14 they

go to a symbolic stage where they say oh there can't be more water because where would it go they use reasoning or at

least in Swiss French children of that age is not as not a lot of evidence that

American children ages 10 to 14 ever get into this stage

we built a barrier they are called television

American psychologist Bruner did an

experiment with the kids in the water pouring and after the kid had given the answer there's more water in the tall

glass he put a cardboard covering up the tall glass and asked the kid again into

his amazement the kid changed his answer he said oh no there can't be more Bruner

took the cardboard away the kid changed back Bruner took put the cardboard in

the kid changed once more so if you have any six-year-olds you'd like to torment

so Bruner's idea was that instead of

there being stages of development like going from a caterpillar to a butterfly

that instead we appear to have multiple mentalities you saw two of the

mentalities operating between the visual and the symbolic in the thing I did with

the upside-down faces we have another one that's body centered it's the one

that allows us to touch our nose when we haven't been drinking too much touch our fingers behind our back it in fact is

the one that makes us feel that we are in the world it's far less of a trauma

to be blinded and still feel that you're in the world to know that your body is

here then they have a brain lesion that leaves us limb physically on your body

but subtracts it it's like when you have a stroke people often think of the limbs

that are left as being somebody else's limbs because they can't be theirs they can't feel that they're there and so

each of these ways of knowing the world and these aren't all of them make up a

kind of a patchwork quilt in the way we deal with things and this is why it is so difficult to teach people things is

because often we try and teach through the symbolic and in fact the parts of

the mind that we want to have learn can't understand English we have to

learn different you want to learn physics the way you do it is not by teaching mathematics I think how many

people here know physics or physicist types okay how much of physics

problem-solving is intuitive before you

do the math give me a percentage

yeah yeah I would say it's I would say it's like 75 80 percent for me I

remember when I was in school doing physics and I once asked the graduate

student TA said how do you solve these damn things it says it's easy to just

guess the answer and that will tell you how to do the math

yeah well that was that was the heck that the heck of it was that he was

right because I realized that the next year I took a differential equations

course and I realized immediately the differential equations was entirely

about guessing the answer by using some form of intuition an intuition is likely

to be these other mentalities that don't talk so much but are other ways of

knowing the world and other ways of coming to conclusions what is the import of that when we deal

with technology we have to appeal to what's actually going on in the human

brain we have to take these three mentalities and apply them somehow so

here's what we did when we dealt with the problem of making millions and

millions of computers that were going to sit on people's desks first we have to

put the person into this world in some way the way we do it is by giving them a

way not just a pointing at things but to move things around in it user

friendliness in these graphical user interfaces is not because of the

graphics but because of your ability to pick up things and drag them around it

connects you at a very deep level with this world it makes it less alienating

why do we use icons and images and

windows if I put up pictures of a hundred animals on the wall you could

find the elephant picture four times faster than you could find the word

elephant if the words were place where the pictures are the reason is that

search for the image is done four times faster than you can search for the

symbols the other thing is is that your

visual system is set up to remember a hundred different things roughly in your

environment without you being aware of it and then as a third thing how many

people have cable television here okay

I'm I don't think anybody's record if they're recording we can destroy the

tape but I will admit that I flipped channels anybody

there should be a 12-point program for people who flip channels but I love it

how many people here have flipped channels into a movie they haven't seen

for 20 years how long did it take you to

recognize that you'd seen that movie before few seconds a few seconds right

think about what that means in the context of your entire life 20 years ago

you went to this movie probably with a significant other that you were paying

more attention to you did not know you're going to be tested on this movie 20 years later and yet after seeing

somewhere between 30 and 90 frames of this movie in the middle without any

preparation you can recognize that you see it before think about what that

means in the context of your entire life and in fact our visual system is even

better than that even better than that can anybody imagine why our visual

system should be that good at remembering totally random things

survival why

yeah most of the psychologists nowadays think it has to do with me having to

recognize that you've been in the same place in something like a jungle that's

mostly green okay and what it means is

that you the everything is almost random it's almost the same color and yet you

want to remember that you've been there before so in fact what what seems to happen is that almost every image that

every scene changes that you've ever seen has been encoded in some way so

that you can retrieve them when you see similar ones and compare them it's quite

remarkable it's led to something that McLuhan predicted thirty years ago about

television that as he said television is eventually going to wind up resembling

it's commercials and he predicted that

the shot lengths for instance shot the length of it of a shot in a movie thirty

years ago is about 15 to 20 seconds before they would change the camera

angle or something and he predicted the shot lengths would get shorter and

shorter and of course there are people who have been measuring that every year last year I can tell you that for an

hour of network television the average shot length was two-and-a-half seconds

now compared to the typical primetime

commercial which is one point six eight seconds average shot length in other

words what television is doing is being interesting to us in a visual sense not

having to have any content whatsoever

people will watch snow on television because the visual system is interested

in changing or watch the fire or watch fish swimming around an aquarium because

the visual system is interested in changing scenes and so we take advantage

of that incredible visual memory to offload some of the short-term memory

problems of dealing with computing system and finally you need a symbolic

underpinning we use the language called small talk a long time ago nowadays on

systems like the Mac there's hyper card on the IBM PC there's a system called

plus that's quite good and what these are are kind of a symbolic render

rendering there's a symbolic layer underneath the images and the things that you can move with your hand that

allow you to use symbolic processing and dealing with all of these things the

result is a system that is much easier to use a system that is now taking over

it not just the Apple world but the IBM PC

world as well so what does it mean to take visions into reality

well first you have to have a really good vision and the goodness of the

vision has to be in its persistence not just its details so I invented the

overlapping window idea more than 20 years ago and in order for it not to

have gotten completely barnacled up it had to have something that made it

distinguished from the other ways of thinking about doing those things but

the most important things about the visions are they have to hook up to the human psychology and even harder they

have to hook up to a whole bunch of people with money

who think in the old way so you know

Winston Churchill was an incredible

ad-libber and he was once at a party

the hostess came up to him and said mr. Churchill I just saw a famous Duke steal

some of my silver salt shakers what am I to do Churchill thought for a minute he stuck

his cigar in his mouth he said I know

what to do madam he went over to the earl on the way he took a silver salt

shaker and put it into his pocket when he got over to the Earl he took it out

and he said I think we've been noticed perhaps we should put these back to the

bottom line I'm turning vision into reality is you must make the people

you're dealing with part of the same conspiracy thank you

[Applause]