TV vs. Reading et al

[David Casseres]

I wrote
>> On the other hand it's extremely important to note, as you do, that
>> Xerox is to this day a company whose main interest is in putting marks
>> on pieces of paper.  The fundamental idiocy (look out, here comes my
>> rant) of the first 10-15 years of personal computing was the notion that
>> what the user is trying to produce is a piece of paper with marks on it.

Matthew Wiener sez
>This is not a "fundamental idiocy" on Xerox's part.

It's a fundamental idiocy on the part of the whole industry, Apple 
particularly included.

Once I attended a talk (at Apple) by Ted Nelson, the most articulate 
advocate of hypertext. Among many other provocative things, he said, or 
rather thundered, "WYSIWYG is an abomination and the creed of slaves!"  
Afterward I told him if he'd say that again for me I'd buy his book.  So 
he did, and I did. 

>Those who tried to
>be clever and make a new media out of the PC lost heavily.

No one actually tried in any serious way.  Massive amounts of 
ground-breaking work that had already been done, notably by Doug 
Engelbart, were discarded.

>It's easy
>for those who can hack the could-have-been cutting edge to complain, but
>we were always a tiny minority.  Xerox was going after what would indeed
>sell.

No crime in that.  The crime was in setting things up so that any 
transition from what would actually sell in the early 80's to what might 
actually be useful in the 90's has been much harder than it should have 
been.

Sorry, no Pynchon relevance.  I'll shut up now.


Cheers,
David