This is an old article, and I'm tired of seeing Alan Kay talk about the past. That said, it's true. I'm also baffled that we have no collective memory as an industry. The rush for the almighty Euro has left us reinventing the wheel, the axle, fire... We keep writing the same code over and over, often in different contexts, and jumping up and down at the novelty. It's so funny to hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992. Honestly. We have no sense of history and we have lost our way.
Gmail is the best web client. My favorite email client is actually a newsreader: Forte Inc's Agent, a second best is Eudora. Thunderbird is what I use now, it's OK.
It doesn't go down easily the modern OSs we use are either a GUI-based desktop OS that wouldn't be serious and compete with OS/2 with a billion patches applied or some rehash of 70's Unix.
Really... Why is that Smalltalk/80 and Lisp'56 still make Java'2009 seem primitive?
Even the Smalltalk/80 environment makes Windows'2009 look primitive (colorful, translucent and primitive).
I just finished reading an og copy of the smalltalk/80 language manual/specification and seriously - how did things go so backward? I bought the book to get a better feel for what sort of object hierarchy to use in my pet language and found far more than that. I wasn't planning on caring about the graphical side of things but even that was insanely cool!
I think they are a YC company so I think we'll be seeing more of them.
But I've mentioned here before that I would PAY for a website which would do the oposite of scribd, turn Docs and PDFs and Flash and what not into plain HTML. Fast, no plugins required - awesome.
Shouldn't that be [pdf] in the title, with a second [scribd version] link? If nothing else, it would've gotten me to visit the link sooner that way -- I hate scribd.
