Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ENCORE.COM!bzs
From: bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: desktop of the future
Message-ID: <8901100246.AA14221@multimax.encore.com>
Date: 10 Jan 89 02:46:43 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Dan Franklin raises a good point.

The current wisdom seems to be the metaphor, specifically the desktop
metaphor or office metaphor. There's a lot of common sense to this,
obviously seeing familiar objects being used in familiar ways has its
appeal.

However, computers also tear down the metaphors, we do things we
wouldn't think of doing with more physical objects like edit them
mercilessly and search thru millions of items every several seconds
trying to locate something.

Someone on another list asked a wonderful question, what part of my
office/desktop is a "menu"? There it is, perhaps the most salient
feature of this desktop metaphor and it has absolutely no counterpart
(other than those chinese and italian takeout menus you have tacked to
your wall.)

Maybe we're kidding ourselves.

Sure, steamshovels are big shovels and locomotives are sort of fast,
never-tiring mule trains but at some point quantitative changes become
qualitative changes, especially in technology.

The ability to do something inconceivable (dig a huge hole in hard
earth, carry hundreds of tons of goods cross-country in a day) creates
changes which can't be described as mere extensions of the past,
something fundamental has truly changed (build skyscrapers, feed an
entire country on produce grown thousands of miles away.)

This is the thing that fascinates me far more than a better desktop
metaphor, I want to know what we will be doing with these new tools
which we never conceived of before. I don't want a better way to
shuffle a zillion pieces of paper, I want to finally face the fact
that all that paper-shuffling is wrong!

Seriously, isn't it quaint to look back and think of the folks who saw
the first automobiles and remarked "oh, horseless carraiges!", and
reflect on how truly limited their vision was?

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||