On Jul 24, 2011, at 2:39 PM, Marcel Weiher wrote:
There was one question I had on the scaling issue that would not
have fitted in the Q&A: while praising the design of the Internet,
you spoke less well of the World Wide Web, which surprised me a
bit. Can you elaborate?
Marcel
Marcel,
Dr Alan Kay addressed the World Wide Web design a number of times in
writing, lectures and keynotes. Here are three:
On May 26, 2011, at 2:06 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
The main features of the Alto were a terrific combination of speed,
parsimony, and architecture.
-- Speed came from bipolar transistors. It had a 150ns
microinstruction time.
-- Parsimony allowed these to be economic enough for a 1972 personal
computer/workstation (we eventually built almost 2000 of these).
-- Architecture allowed it to be very flexible without sacrificing
speed. To just mention one great idea: it had 16 "zero-overhead"
program counters and separate logic to decide which one would be
used for the next microinstruction -- this allowed bottom level
"virtual multicore" multitasking for system functions (running the
display, disk, handling I/O, painting the screen, emulating VHLLs,
etc. (The Lincoln Labs TX-2 on which Sketchpad was done, also had
multiple program counters, etc.)
So an Alto-2 exercise should try to think through the issues of
speed, parsimony and architecture in today's world of possibilities!
Cheers,
Alan
[1] Alan Kay, How Complex is "Personal Computing"?". Normal"
Considered Harmful. October 22, 2009, Computer Science department at
UIUC.
http://media.cs.uiuc.edu/seminars/StateFarm-Kay-2009-10-22b.asx
(also see http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ )
[2] Alan Kay, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", October
7, 1997, OOPSLA'97 Keynote.
Transcript
http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet.html
Video
http://ftp.squeak.org/Media/AlanKay/Alan%20Kay%20at%20OOPSLA%201997%20-%20The%20computer%20revolution%20hasnt%20happened%20yet.avi
(also see http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ )
Merik Voswinkel
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