The foundations of hypertext and multimedia computing go back to a paper published by an atomic scientist in 1945
Raphael Needleman
I began this column on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No ordinary coffeehouse, this is the Cybersmith Cafe, one of the strange keyboard-and-coffeehouses that are springing up around the world. I came to have lunch and check out the emerging cyberscene. I also got in a few rounds of the addictive virtual-reality game Virtuality.
Who could have predicted this fantastic world, a world in which you can connect to a worldwide hive-mind from a coffeehouse or play a game that places your eyes and ears in a completely synthetic but convincing universe? As it turns out, there was such a man, Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Franklin
Roosevelt. In 1945, he published an article in the
Atlantic Monthly
called "As We May Think." In this work, Bush foresaw a lot of technology we take for granted today: Hypertext and multimedia are the most important, but there were also pen-based computing, microcameras, and high-density optical storage.
Bush's broad vision was amazingly astute, but he got the details wrong. None of his predictions were based on digital technology, for example. Bush, the inventor of an analog differential-equation solver, saw a technological future made up of microfilm-based hypertext and mechanical retrieval engines.
Isn't it interesting how easy it is to predict the far future -- and how difficult it is to get the details even close to correct? The way things are going, can you imagine a future 10 to 20 years from now where we'll type on computers instead of speak to them or use archaic glass tubes as display devices?
But what of the next six months? Or the next year?
Big parts of the fu
ture are obvious. It's the details that stymie us -- and that make our jobs so interesting. Every small decision a company makes to invest in one technology over another can influence the future in a small way or a big way. It's the butterfly effect of technology. For example, early windowing interfaces were not the simple one-click wonders we use today. Instead, they were complicated marvels of efficiency, and they contained hyperlinks between windows to keep information references alive. The Mac and Windows systems we use today are, in fact, descendants of a simplified windowing system based on an experiment Alan Kay designed to make computers easier for children to use. His educational experiment helped the windowed interface find the level that got it the acceptance it has today.
In broad strokes, everybody seems to be convinced that the convergence of telecommunications and computing will change our lives and our businesses dramatically. No one is quite sure about the details, though. Exactly when
will the changes happen? And how? Where are the seeds of the next important technologies? Where is the next student whose simple vision will change the world? Those are the important details, the answers to which make some graduate students billionaires or push a global corporation into bankruptcy.
The fiftieth anniversary of Bush's vision was celebrated in October at an MIT symposium. Speaking there, and showing us their visions of the future and their visions' linkages back to Bush, were several architects of the computer revolution: Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, and others.
Space won't permit me to list all the current technologies that can be traced back to Bush's visions. But you might be interested to know that several technologies you might have thought of as completely fictional are, in fact, close to reality. At the symposium, Raj Reddy, dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, showed demonstrations of speaker-independent continuous-speech voic
e recognition, as well as technology that can create models of the 3-D physical world the same way we humans do: from visual input.
I'm pretty sure that technology in the next 50 years is going to progress at the same breakneck pace it has in the past 50. It may even accelerate. But I have absolutely no idea which of today's technologies will be the building blocks of tomorrow and which will become merely quaint. Do you?
Raphael Needleman, Editor in Chief, (
rafe@well.com
)
The Butterfly Effect
