Some notes from Howard Rheingold's: "Tools for thought"
1. Mentally adding two 8-digit numbers is hard for the human brain. But given a paper and a pen, it doesn't take more than half a minute. Arithmetic, language, computing, anything that arguments thinking is a tool for thought.
2. Turing machines were a tool for Turing to solve the "Entschidigung" (decision) problem.
3. Godel Numbering that is encoding symbols of any formal system as natural numbers was a tool to construct the proof of incompleteness theorems.
4. About 100 years before Turing Babbage's Analytic engine could perform simple computations. But the project was never finished.
5. Ada Lovelace was an early adopter of Babbage's mechanical computers. Tinkering with them led her to invent the "looping" and "branching" constructs that are now central to every programming language.
6. Boole, while attempting to formalize logic, invented the boolean algebra. His work was forgotten until Shannon resurfaced it as a tool to deal with the complexities of electrical circuit design.
7. Dots were connected for the digital computer when people realized that "memory" can be simulated using arithmetic and logical operations of boolean algebra and can be implemented using electrical circuits.
8. Licklider believed making computing accessible and interactive will enable people to build more creative software. Via ARPA he funded groups in SRI, UTAH and MIT and let them run wild.
9. After ARPA's funding ran out Xerox funded research in PARC. Alan kay, Bob Metcalfe and others, while working there, invented Smalltalk, GUI, Ethernet etc. Xerox failed to productize this research. Later Apple and Microsoft brought some of these ideas to the market.
10. The ability to manipulate symbols is central to any tool that can augment thinking. Be it a computer or Hindu-Arabic numerals.
LOGO the children's programming language was designed to teach symbol manipulation.
11. LOGO embodied the belief that "teaching" is not necessarily required for "learning". A tool that gives immediate feedback replaces fear of being wrong by the habit of discovering powerful ideas on your own.
12. Some symbolic languages are more equal than others because the context a language provide makes a certain type of concepts easier to think about than others.
13. The cognitive load of working with the command line overwhelmed most people. It was like "telling a hammer to hit the nail instead of just pounding the nail". Good tools ought to disappear from consciousness.
14. Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "as we may think" about designing tools to handle the information overload influenced both Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson.
15. Engelbart invented the mouse, the point and click interface and gave the inspirational "mother of all demos" in 1968. But his knowledge management vision still is largely unadopted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY …
16. Ted Nelson's Xanadu introduced powerful ideas like bi-directional linking, transclusion, micropayments for royalties etc. but the way web evolved these ideas never made it to the mainstream.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVbPhJIBGns …
originally published as an X thread (July 2020): https://twitter.com/_avichalp_/status/1282772174764494851