My Vision: A Forgotten History

Engelbart’s vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a shared intellectual space. His entire system was designed around that intent.

However, Kay believes that most people in the world are still living in the previous paradigm, and that most people are still using computers to simulate old media and create old representations on them. A PDF is an analog of paper, a movie player is an analog of television, and a music player is an analog of a record player. We use the new medium ... See more

Kay argues that the last time there was a qualitative change in the thinking of human society was during the Printing Revolution. The great works of science, philosophy, and literature were made possible by printing, which allows everyone to think and learn using paper as a medium. Now we have a new medium, the computer, which will lead to another ... See more

What kind of tools can we build to help human society evolve new rules, such that the new tools and the new rules can have this synergy that augments the collective intelligence of mankind?

Nelson’s vision was to use computer technology to create a hypertext-based digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing that is open to all humanity and to which anyone can contribute new content. You are free to use any content in this digital repository to create your work, paying only a small fee to its original author. You can... See more

What Alan Kay has been emphasizing, and which is now at the heart of Bret Victor’s design philosophy, is that the computer is a “dynamic medium.” The essence of a computer is not the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen. It’s computational and responsive capabilities that don’t exist in a static medium like paper. We should use this dynamic medium t... See more

Engelbart finally came up with his answer: We need to create Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKRs), a new kind of tool that can integrate and update the latest knowledge held by a group of people and allows others to use it anytime, anywhere. Such tools would not have been possible in the printing era because paper, as a static physical medium, has... See more