The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN regards it as a must-watch that gives a very different perspective on software and the web, and its title is widely riffed on.
What it is
Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec gjvc · 2020-12 · on “The web is 30 years old today”
"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video [1]from 1997 below... [this video] ...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here: [LINK] It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new. [1] if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.
Cites NotPavlovsDog · 2021-04 · on “William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World (2019)”
It might all still go the way of the TV [0]. We've been seeing the demise of general computing in real time. The current generation may be the last that got to pop the hood on the internal workings of the Internet, from inspecting HTML source of a web-page to disassembly of whatever was running it, if source code was not available (or at least port scanning and possible stack bashing). With corporations doing their best to remove that ability, and consumers gladly buying curated experience boxes, it all might culminate with an encapsulated silo park selling all you can eat broadcasting (think one-way directed stream, with consumer only getting to send back analytics). So in a way, Gibson got
Cites gjvc · 2021-09 · on “We deserve better than Confluence and Notion”
The depressing irony of all this is that despite the massive advances in technology in software and hardware, this kind of tooling, specifically document/content/knowledge/issue management has remained stuck in its containing medium, be that word documents on a shared drive, or textareas on a web page (as I am typing in right now!) It seems that smalltalk-like systems, and derivatives such as the lively kernel contain clues as to what a unified meta-interface to an individual's or organisation's content might look like (and how it might behave). Integration and user adoption is a difficult problem (in general) though -- probably the best example of this is the poor (and in some circles, pret
Cites justin66 · 2026-03 · on “Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away”
> Kay was probably riffing off of that. You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it. [this video]