If we compare with Printing Revolution, and Modern Science and Engineering in the Physical World, then we have to conclude that the computer versions of these haven't happened yet. The printing revolution was not the hardware technology that allowed the automation of hand written texts such as bibles, but a much longer learning curve that brought about ways to think and argue, culminating in the 17th century with ways to understand the physical and political universes in which humans live. This created our modern world. By contrast we are still generally automating bibles with computers and the new ways to think and argue are still being invented and haven't reached most computer users. Similarly, if we compare the state of building against modern - such as the building of the Empire State Building in New York City from scratch in less than one year with less than 3000 coordinated workers - then we can hardly claim software engineering to be much past ancient Egyptian pyramid building: millions of lines of code-bricks piled on top of each other with little coordination or discernable architecture.A is generally about finding better models about structures in the universe. As Simon pointed out, ours is a science of the artificial like a science of bridges. We first have to make structures and then study them to create better theories. We might claim that McCarthy's LISP-in-itself as a kind of Maxwell's Equations, but we still lack the equivalent Special Theory that includes the handling of time in a reasonable and useful way. The immense commercialization of computing that happened in the 80s and 90s disrupted much of the progress in each of these areas, especially in the US. It's now time to ask again what these three ideas should mean, and then get back to the real work of advancing our field and making the real computer revolution happen.

The printing press was invented in the middle of the 15th century, yet it took 100 years before a book was considered dangerous enough to be banned. 150 years before science was invented, almost 200 years before a new kind of political essay was invented, and more than 300 hundred years before a country with an invented political system (the US) could be argued into existence via the press and a citizenry that could understand the arguments. Schooling and general literacy were also fruits of the press, and also took many centuries to become established. The commercial computer is now about 50 years old and is still imitating the paper culture that came before it, just as the printing press did with the manuscript culture it gradually replaced. No media revolution can be said to have happened without a general establishment of “literacy”: fluent “reading” and “writing” at the highest level of ideas that the medium can represent. With computers, we are so far from that fluent literacy — or even understanding what that literacy should resemble — that we could claim that the computer revolution hasn't even started. This talk will try to put a shape to the real computer revolution to come.

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to. debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk-mutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk.

Over forty years ago, Vannevar Bush articulated his vision of a “Memex” machine: “associative indexing, … whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” [Bush 45]. In the sixties, Engelbart [Engelbart, English 68] built collaborative systems to provide idea structuring and sharing. Nelson [Nelson 81] coined “hypertext” and proposed world-wide networks for publishing, linking, annotating and indexing multiple versions of documents. With increasing numbers of research projects, papers, panels and conferences, and commercially available systems (e.g. Notecards by Xerox, Guide by Owl and HyperCard by Apple) in recent years, hypertext may be an idea whose time has finally come — or at least a phenomenon not to be ignored.

A computing engine of sufficient power can both simulate existing media and provide new framewords for creative ideas. It must be personal, portable, and inexpensive. Movies of such a (hard) system/(soft) language designed and built for “children of all ages” will be shown.