Inventing the Future
by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams · first published 2015
40% recommend40% neutral20% critical
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First published in 1985? For more reading: Fumbling the Future: not all that good; reads like a B-school case study Dealers of Lightning: excellent history Inventing the Future (by me!): what it was actually like to be there in the trenches. Fictionalized, but all facts are accurate. Foreword by David C. Smith, the guy who invented icons. That's his son on the cover, playing…
on “Xerox PARC’s engineers on how they invented the future and Xerox lost it (1985)” ↗Read "Inventing The Future" by Srnicek & Williams. Please.
on “The colossal problem with universal basic income [video]” ↗We don't need thought experiments to analyse UBI. There's data on trials of it going back half a century. The book "Inventing The Future" by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams gives a detailed explanation of how to use UBI to move beyond neoliberalism.
on “Basic Income Research Proposal” ↗…universal human truths, I thought that the subjective experience of living through the graphical UI revolution was worth capturing. No one's done that, and honestly, since I'm retired I just felt like it. Inventing the Future isn't exactly "identity" but I doubt people will be reading it in 300 years, any more than they're reading Balzac now. I'd love to write a timeless novel but I don't think I'm up to it. I think you're…
on “The Death of Literary Culture” ↗…blogged about her. She's now become quite expensive, and you get what you pay for. She's certainly been a "developmental editor" as well as "copy editor" -- she's the guardian of the character of Janet in Inventing the Future [1], for one thing, and doesn't hesitate to tell me when a chapter needs work. And yes, I do pay out of my own pocket.) Secondly, I also noticed that Kernighan book on the web, and my first thought was…
on “I wish I'd self-published sooner” ↗Trying to read the entrails into another poster's personality in response to a not very inflammatory comment is just plain gross. A pity, I was interested in reading Inventing the Future, but this sort of classless rude behavior has changed my mind.
on “Revolutionaries at the Workplace” ↗…used 1.5x. Any faster sounded like a cartoon character and I might miss nuances in the dialog, among other things. Someone else mentioned code samples. Fortunately I only had a couple Mesa samples in Inventing the Future and I actually gave him some audio for the way to read them. My guideline was "how would a CS professor read this in class?" There IS a "pronouncing Mesa" epilogue to the manual, which helped. But a…
on “Art Garfunkel's Library” ↗See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future. Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.
on “Art Garfunkel's Library” ↗Related: Srnicek and Williams on "folk politics." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventing_the_Future:_Postcapi...
on “Protests and Power” ↗The AMD 2900 was, in fact, how the Xerox Star was built. You'll find quite a bit about that choice in Inventing the Future but certainly not gate-level circuit design. As you implied, they made that decision just before decent microprocessors came along in quantity. Even at the time, there were questions about whether it…
on “Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder” ↗> the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI I wrote a whole book about it: Inventing the Future (starts end of 1976) The PARC people already had several independent efforts (Bravo, Markup, Draw) and Smalltalk to build them with. Our task was to unify all the functionality into a single GUI. (and…
on “Designing the First Apple Macintosh: The Engineers’ Story” ↗…main GUI effort. Dave Smith, who appears to be talking about his icon research (it doesn't sound like his voice, though) was one of the architects of the Star. That's his son on the cover of my book, Inventing the Future. It's a novel and no hindsight is allowed, i.e. the characters don't know how it ends. Jerry Morrison and I wrote a paper https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight where we ask what went wrong…
on “History of the Graphical User Interface (GUI): A Wonderful Curse [video]” ↗