Re: TECH:NOMAD

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:15:14 +0000


On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Eugene Leitl wrote:

> Think see-thru headups, as non-dominant eye monocles, or i-glasses type
> of display (but better resolution, structureless pixel, wide-angle large
> opening pupil, eye tracking, etc.)

The only wearable I've seen (I didn't actually get to use it, just saw
some graphics demonstrating what it was supposed to be like) projected
incoming data onto the inside of a pair of 'sunglasses' which also
incorporated a miniature video camera to broadcast video back over the Net
to his home machine. I certainly wouldn't want to use a wearable display
which wasn't at least semi-transparent.

> Because the average consumer is a turkey. Ever seen a Lisp machine? Ever
> seen a Forth machine? Ever seen an Oberon 2 machine?

No, several, no... there was a 'mass-market' Forth machine for sale in the
UK about fifteen years ago. Much better than those running BASIC, but
sadly too late to compete.

> Forget unix. Unix is not sexy. Unix is simply the lesser evil of those on
> the market. Make? C? Memory leaks? Dangling pointers? Core dumps?

Heretic ;-). If past experience is anything to go by then in five hundred
years time the Jupiter-sized brains will still be running Unix ;-). I do
rather like the look of what I've seen of Plan 9 though.

> Brittle? Who _dares_ to say brittle?

What's brittle about Unix? I regularly get 100+ days of uptime on Linux,
so much so that I had trouble remembering my password last time I rebooted
my machine at work and had to log in again. Insecure, perhaps, but hardly
brittle.

> holographic store. What is 'save'? You mean your computer can drop state,
> and does not keep a history? Aw come on, joker.

One advantage of using 'vi' ;-).

Mark

P.S. The web archive of the list seems to be stuck again... last time I
checked it hadn't updated for a couple of days.

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