Monday, September 15, 2003

Stewart Brand writes about Alan Kay in 1972!

"Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.
That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It's way off the track of the 'Computers - Threat or menace? school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.
The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight
phenomenon known as Spacewar.


And this quote is ...

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).

WTF? ... I mean, perhaps this is a fake. A kind of urban myth?

SPACEWAR - by Stewart Brand - Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

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