The Fantasy is Not in the Computer
Time.com has an interview with Alan Kay, and I enjoyed this analogy about how educational institutions focus on the presence of computers rather than their qualities:
"I’ve used the analogy of what would happen if you put a piano in every classroom. If there is no other context, you will get a “chopsticks” culture, and maybe even a pop culture. And this is pretty much what is happening."
In other words, “the music is not in the piano”.
Ultimately, though I take issue with much of what he said, simply because he is comparing (and, admittedly, is being asked to compare) a futuristic imagining with actual products.
It's easy for something imaginary to be better than something real, simply because it's unconstrained. This results in comparisons that I don't find particularly useful, such as comparing:
- real and imaginary operating system security
- academic GUIs to real GUIs
Operating Systems & Security
Is it possible that the security issues in modern operating systems (and mobile ones) are the result of the practices of the companies that build them, and that you could have a secure operating system that allows you to peer-to-peer share content creations without needing controls over distribution? Sure. Is there a good example of that? No.
So when Apple makes the argument that security requires controls, I have a hard time hand-waving that away as easily as Kay does:
Apple’s reasons for this are mostly bogus, and to the extent that security is an issue, what is insecure are the OSes supplied by the vendors (and the insecurities are the result of their own bad practices — they are not necessary).
If anything, the alternatives support the point that reducing controls increases security risk. That may be a trade-off worth making, but it does seem to be the trade-off available right now.
Modern GUIs and the iPad
Comparing the Graphical User Interfaces at PARC to modern GUIs:
In addition, there have been backslidings — for example, even though multitouch is a good idea (pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte’s ARCH-MAC group [a predecessor of MIT's Media Lab] in the late ’70s), much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways.
The PARC GUI was clearly a big deal in computing. It influenced a lot of people who then went out and built real products. It is of seminal importance in that regard. But PARC didn't build and sell computers, or a graphical operating system. They didn't popularize or even really produce any of the technology they imagined.
Were there some interesting ideas in the PARC GUI that aren't in modern graphical operating systems? Sure, that seems likely. But those features were also not features that saw the light of day, and we don't know at this point whether or not they would really have been workable.
Want to prove me wrong? Build those features into a real operating system, either an existing one or a new one, and get real people to adopt those features. Then we're comparing a real operating system with a real one. Otherwise it's just fantasy.
There are some elements of the PARC-style GUI that are likely to stick around even if undergoing a few facelifts. For example, we generally want to view and edit more than one kind of scene at the same time — this could be as simple as combining pictures and text in the same glimpse, or to deal with more than one kind of task, or to compare different perspectives of the same model.
One of the things that I appreciate about iOS is that it was willing to sacrifice some of the common beliefs about what was necessary for a computing device, like managing multiple windows. (This wasn't an Apple invention, by any means, Palm OS is another operating system that followed this path.) Only having one 'view' at at a time definitely has some limitations, but it has some advantages as well, particularly on mobile devices with reduced real estate.