My Vision: A Forgotten History

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we ... See more

The history of physical computers is a list of increasingly capable “bicycles for the mind” as Jobs put it. But my list of 10 conceptual advances above, along with their instrumental realizations (involving physical computers as well as other technologies), is more like a list of “telescopes for the soul.” Ways to peer into the computational heart ... See more