Enjoyed hearing about vi and the other editors, but the last few paragraphs were fun. Joy shares his thoughts on the latest tech of the day, and a little about the future. Good quotes:
"The trouble is that UNIX is not accessible, not transparent in the way that Interleaf is, where you sit down and start poking around in the menu and explore the whole system. Someone I know sat down with a Macintosh and a Lisa and was disappointed because, in a half hour, he explored the whole system and there wasn't as much as he thought. That's true, but the point is in half an hour, almost without a manual you can know which button to push and you can find nearly everything. Things don't get lost. I think that's the key."
"When can that stuff go portable? You don't really want to have a telephone in the office or be tied to an office. You'd like to have the office with you and the phone with you. I want to be able to turn the phone off, thank you. I think that's going to require very different technology."
"I don't think you need to have a disk with you. There are so many people who believe that you need to have a disk that you'll be able to have one because they'll make it cheap."
"The trouble is that UNIX is not accessible, not transparent in the way that Interleaf is, where you sit down and start poking around in the menu and explore the whole system. Someone I know sat down with a Macintosh and a Lisa and was disappointed because, in a half hour, he explored the whole system and there wasn't as much as he thought. That's true, but the point is in half an hour, almost without a manual you can know which button to push and you can find nearly everything. Things don't get lost. I think that's the key."
"When can that stuff go portable? You don't really want to have a telephone in the office or be tied to an office. You'd like to have the office with you and the phone with you. I want to be able to turn the phone off, thank you. I think that's going to require very different technology."
"I don't think you need to have a disk with you. There are so many people who believe that you need to have a disk that you'll be able to have one because they'll make it cheap."