This class is going to take a look at some of the original visions of the people who worked on some of the first digital technologies. Starting from there, we will trace the history of information technologies until today.

What did they envision as they were just scratching the surface of what computers could do? How does this vision carry today? Can we, and should we try to change the direction in which these technologies are going?

The second part of the class will be a review of HTML and introducing additional CSS concepts.

J.C.R. Licklider was the director of DARPA, the research and development branch of the U.S. military. At the time, he was overseeing the ARPANet, which would eventually become the Internet ( The Computer as a Communication Device ). Licklider selected and directed most of the people who worked on the ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet. Working on psychoacoustics, he realized that most of his time was taken up by monotonous, repetitive tasks, which could be automated by a computer. In this piece of writing, he anticipates that the computer will be of great use to humans, by getting rid of the annoying and superfluous tasks.

What is an annoying and superfluous task remains debated, though. Talking about augmenting human capabilities, it's important to remember that computers can be—as Licklider wrote— a means to save us time from the mechanical tasks that take up most of our attention. The following question, then, is what do we do with the time we've gained?.

For example, searching through datasets in a library can result in more time dedicated to actual thinking about how those resources relate to us. Automatic formatting on a word processor allows us to take more time to think about the content.

In the end, taking care of formal details actually helps us narrow down what it is that we're doing, and even asking why we're going it.

To do that, he says computers would need to have better speed, better storage, better input, and better language.

Due to Moore's law, which observes that computers double in speed and storage every two years (see the graph here ), storage and speed are no longer a problem.

With our contemporary screens, keyboards, mouses and interfaces, input systems are no longer a problem.

Still, remains the problem of the language, of expressing what we want the computer to do.

This particular reading is interesting in how he lists out the practical obstacles of reaching such a collaboration (speed, language, and Input/Output). Out of those three obstacles, two of them have been overcome a long time ago. It's only the language part that is the problem. So now that we are close to having gotten rid of big technical hurdles, what are the non-technical hurdles left?

David Rokeby is a digital artist, known for very nervous system , one of the first interactive computer installations.

His argument is that using a computer to do non-computer things (sensing a human dancing, for instance) forces us to really think about what is this thing that we are trying to represent.

Turns out, it might seem a bit tricky at first, but one might be able to get close!

Licklider approaches the problem in terms of cooperation: what is it that we want to do? Do we want to solve math formulas, to pick a movie to watch, to invest money in different funds or to learn about a particular topic?

In order to answer these questions, he compares the strengths of humans and the strengths of machines and extrapolates on how they could work together. This working together, this collaboration, implies that the answer to the problem is not yet known. There is no clear information that needs to be delivered, but rather information that needs to be pieced together in order for the investigator (i.e. the learner) to create their own knowledge. Such an approach is in line with a pedagogical theory called constructivism, which we will talk more about in the week about and education.

Standardization is a form of abstraction: you only keep the parts of something that fits the standard. The rest is discarded.

So in order to make the computer work with something that matters to us (generally, things we want to remember), then we first need to remove some parts that might be meaningful, and then we need to represent this data such that sense can be made from it when we (re-)access it via the computer.

In the beginning of computing, it was pretty easy: mathematics mean what they are. We're less sure about the creation of meaning than about the way differential equations work, so in a lot of computer-aided applications, the problem is still to formulate exactly what the problem is. But then problems got a different kind of complex. "I would like to see all that is relevant to the current task at hand" is too vague of a query for a computer to fulfill, and is a field that is still currently being worked on, particularly in the realm of personal assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa, etc.). It's therefore still the task of the designer and developer to try to anticipate, accomodate, and encourage anything that their user might think about or attempt to do.

One of the people Licklider influenced was on Doug Engelbart, a Stanford researcher who founded the Augmented Research Center, particularly well known for presenting the mother of all demos ( video ). Engelbart was also influenced by another thinker, Vanevar Bush, who wrote As We May Think .

While Sutherland is focused on the wonderland of mathematics, it is interesting to see how he considers the display: not just as a means to show information, but also as a means to manipulate it. By using computer processing power, we don't need to type in every single command as written text, it should be possible to imagine a system in which the interaction is as intuitive as possible, while interacting with objects that are not, at first, intuitive at all (e.g. the Catmull spline).

As visual appendices, displays are also means to expand the range of our interactions. While the first means of interaction was purely mechanically written (i.e. typographical), having a spatial display now allows us to organize information in a non-linear fashion. Similarly to how Sutherland talks about kinesthetic displays, we could potentially think of olfactive displays, or kinetic displays—essentially vibrating smartphones and game controllers.

Slightly tangentially, there is some evidence that a "visual-first approach" is actually somewhat dependent on the fact that Western linguistic cultures are visual cultures, moreso than non-Western linguistic cultures which, such as Farsi or Cantonese, have a richer vocabulary when it comes to tasting things. Additionally, visual cues are not as good as olfactive cues (smells) when it comes to helping memory.

Displays allow us to:

• see-through matter: seeing two things at the same time
• involve all human senses
• • scent as an archive, like a journal/spotify
• • smell as mood: meditation app with different smells
• • ordering ingredients from the markets (smell and taste)
• • smell as accessibility: trash
• • smell as work mood

In the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee came up with a way to exchange documents across the Internet. These documents became webpages, made up of hypertext, connected by hyperlinks and viewed via web browsers.

The keyword is hyper:

• hypertext markup language (html)
• hypertext transfer protocol (http)
• hyperreference link

That webpage was essentially describing itself.

the earliest and most popular of which was Netscape Navigator.

Netscape was a browser that allowed you to display images and click on links, which made the web a lot more accessible for the broader audience. It also introduce the JavaScript language.

This is very useful when you want to adapt things to a smartphone screen, for instance! This modular approach to webdesign is called "media queries".

One thing we often change is width of the main container (content on a phone usually takes the whole width, but not on laptops).

You can read about it more on w3schools .