Doing something that's true invention is far more difficult, and the results are far less impressive in the short to mid term. As an example, you probably won't find Objective-Smalltalk [1] very impressive, I would say that a good part of the reason for this is that it is really trying to invent something new. This is slow/difficult because you must eschew the easy/obvious answers. It is difficult to communicate for the same reasons: everything is subtly strange.
Rust? I'm sure there are many other counter examples too.
Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money.
Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Also a reason (among many others) why the market didn't adopt their technologies.
Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
Eh, if they'd put Altos in serial production instead of small batches at a time adding up to 2,000 units it wouldn't have been vastly more expensive. There was nothing both exotic and wildly expensive about them compared to contemporary PDP-11s + a graphics console. The extras were a mouse, chord keyboard, network adapter, and more memory per person than normal for a PDP-11.
If you have a problem, you write code that solves the problem and give it to others to use. Software should be at least minimally usable to be adopted. It should work with other software.
Look at the software in Alan Kay's VPRI: http://www.vpri.org/ They don't write software for you to use. They build software to use as platform to test ideas. If some of those ideas is good, someone may rewrite the whole thing to fit into current software infrastructure.
Time.
I'm working on a Ruby ahead-of-time compiler. I started in 2008. I slowed myself down a lot by all the blog articles I've written about it, but yet, at this point it's only now getting close to being able to compile itself.
The reasons it's been so slow going, is that in those years, I've only put in the equivalent of a few months of fully time work on it - it's not my only project, and working on my side projects have to compete with spending time on my son and other leisure activities.
It takes a lot more people to get the equivalent output of a lab of fulltime staff. Even more so because this slows down interaction and communication as well.
The landscape is very different from what it was in 70s. They were working on a clean slate before half of the human population had computer terminals in front of them. Their battle was to get the terminal in front of people, but I'd argue that the biggest accelerator to adoption has been social media, not the way GUIs behave or programming languages function. The web is now the legacy software we're stuck with if we want any impact at this scale.
Say for example, if you had a completely new idea for a general purpose operating system which simplified things greatly, but was unlike Unix, and it had no web browser. Now what? People aren't interested - they want their web browser.
Most innovation is coming directly from the OS community: hardware, software, systems, etc.
> Exploring odd things isn’t likely to help SAP attract more cloud customers in the short term, says Bill Hostmann, an analyst at researcher Gartner. “What SAP really needs is more execution,” he says. “A lot of people took inspiration from PARC. Did Xerox directly benefit from that? Not really.”
Bill Hostmann has no clue. Xerox got the laser printer out of PARC, which ended up as a multibillion dollar business for them.
This is a company whose products are almost the complete antithesis of good UI design (they're also the antithesis of software integration you don't customize their software for your organization, you customize your organization for their software). If there's one corporate software experience I've had that was worse than Lotus Notes, it's being forced to use SAP (and at the time I was also being forced to use Perforce for a marketing website).
I guess this is a sign SAP (or someone at SAP) at least recognizes they're got a real problem, but I doubt they'll be able to turn that boat around.
Except that in the late 90's they did exactly that. They brought in Frog and what they produced was quite exceptional given the state of native UI at the time.
Not saying SAP is the paragon of innovation, just that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Xerox didn't realize the potential of what they had--it took time to realize their vision, by which time it was too late for Xerox. They failed to capitalize on their entire portfolio.
Xerox, AT&T, and to a lesser extent Google are strong examples of competitive markets being bad for innovation. Bell Labs didn't survive the AT&T breakup in the same form, and I doubt Google would be able to screw around with self-driving cars and wearable computing if they didn't have network effects protecting them from competition.
I got to tour PARC in 1975, years before Steve Jobs did, when I took a summer course in computer architecture taught by William McKeeman. He was the architect of a generation of Burroughs CPUs, and knew everybody in CPU design. So I met Alan Kay before anybody had heard of him. He had a vision, but it wasn't quite what most people think it was. He said the big advantage they had was that they were funded heavily enough to build the single-user computers of the future now. The Alto was over $20K (some said $50K) per unit, which was insanely expensive for a single user computer. It took another decade to get the cost down. Kay's group saw as their job to get the software ready for when the hardware came down in price.
Kay was thinking that the killer app for personal computers was going to be simulations. He later had a demo graphical hospital simulation, which was a discrite-event simulator where patients came in with a complaint ("I am a victim of Bowlerthumb"), and went through Admitting, Examination, Surgery, etc. out to Discharge. Smalltalk is based on Simula, an Algol-derived simulation language, and was originally intended for discrite-event simulation. Document preparation and mail were a sideline.[1]
Kay was operating in an empty world. Almost nobody else was throwing money at what software should look like a decade or two hence, for a class of machines that didn't exist yet. That was a huge advantage. Anything good that was done there advanced the state of the art.
Kay's group was only a small part of PARC. There were other people in the large building working on copier technology and the physics behind xerography. (Unfortunately for Xerox, they didn't invent organic photoconductors, which made xerography machines much smaller and cheaper. IBM did.) Kay's group had considerable engineering resources to draw upon, machine shops and electronics shops and chemistry labs that could make things. They were able to have their own CRT tubes made for the Alto. It's a lot easier to invent when you have that kind of substantial engineering backup. That's why they were able to build a laser printer - they were in an engineering facility that could build both a CRT and a copier. Kay's group just did the software and some of the electronics.
That's hard to reproduce - all that engineering backup. It's only available within a big business that makes real stuff. Today, Samsung and Fujitsu have labs like that, but few US companies, at least in the electronics/computer sector, do. There are a few military operations with such capabilities - China Lake Naval Weapons Center is one; they can design, build, and flight-test something in-house.
So that's why it's hard to reproduce PARC - you need an empty field of research, and heavy engineering backup.
[1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf
That is about $89K in 2015 dollars, for those curious. If it really was $50K, then it was closer to $222K in 2015 dollars.
If I had the discretionary income of a multi-billionaire, then the hell with conspicuous displays of wealth, give me a dedicated team and lab making one-off, custom hardware and software for me to augment my intelligence and knowledge.
Has the cost of that come down to where it's feasible at smaller scale?
I worked for a while in one of these companies. It was really nice having Alan Kay around, and some of the other geniuses he was working with at the time.
But, there was also massive amounts of money at stake, and far too much heavy shit going down on a daily basis for any of the more weird guys (like me) to get very far. Although, i did make a ton of money for that company (me and one of the other weirdos), when it came time for the rest of the developers to join in it was like "what the fk is this ?" haha. good times.
Weird guys: hairy, randomly communicative, oddly passionate.
And that at SAP of all places. I worked with SAP software and consultants and probably as many here who worked with SAP as well will probably agree; that is a far shout from this invent lab...
Keeping smart people on basic income with no obligations sounds like unprofessional. Like something we do with children, not with adults. Adults need to have deadlines. Their goals should be related to how their company will make money. Everything not related to company making money is not important and should not be done at worktime. -- It's because bullshit like this we don't get much real innovation. Companies, and even whole societies, don't feel like subsidizing a playground for smart adults, that occasionally spawns ideas, which usually can't be monetized directly or entirely.
But we need that because real inventions happen in context of a problem, whether real or invented, or sometimes after the fact. The problem needs to be a terminal value for this to work. That is, "Solving X" is a good problem, "Making money by solving X" is a very bad problem. And if you put "Making money" as an input to the invention process, you get shit like obnoxious ads, disguised Ponzi schemes and growth hacking.
Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems...
Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.
There's no real incentive to market programming tools that have a higher standard for usability, because there's no ecosystem of sensible "there is consensus that this should be a a thing and this is a sane way to do it" programming tools, so you can't work at that level anyway. Someday there will be a market again for sane development environments but right now everyone just powers through the learning process until they get to the level of "my mind is warped enough that I can comprehend a build file this evil" level because that's where the money is at anyway. It's a chicken and egg problem. No ecosystem no market.
It's just an accident of history that such a thing ever existed in the first place. A waypoint on the way to the era of industrial mindfuck programming.
What did he do to recreate Xerox PARC's "magic" while at these places?
I went out to dinner at SIGGRAPH in the early 90's with some people from Xerox PARC and some people from Interval Research. When one of the Interval people quipped "We're the Xerox PARC of the 90's", one of the Xerox PARC people took issue with that and corrected them: "Actually, we consider ourselves to be the Xerox PARC of the 90's."
Department of Simulation Research
and:
Department of Research Simulation
