I was asked in a recent interview to talk about the first software I remember seeing demoed. This was hard, because when I started programming, in the mid-70s , what we think of as software today, didn’t exist. In 1979 I got my eyes opened with a demo of VisiCalc. I had never ever conceived of something like that. I immediately decided to copy their user interface. Didn’t take more than a few seconds to grok it. That's elegance, a clear breakthrough. #
Chris Lydon interviews Evgeny Morozov. I tried listening, couldn't get very far into it. In the last 25 years a huge amount of new media has been created, I can't think of a single thing that was created at the Media Lab. Negroponte's column at the back of Wired wasn't a place to turn to for new ideas. Mostly it was self-promotion, as I recall. Demoware has always haunted tech. In my experience that's what the Media Lab pushes. Stuff the funding organizations go for. It seems in all the mess that came out of the Epstein affar at the Media Lab, someone at some point would have offered a defense of the form, "But the Media Lab gave us X, Y and Z." But that never happened. I think in the early days, before the web, they did create some influential stuff, like the Logo language. What's been uncovered in this scandal is how little is created with all the millions of dollars of funding, not just at the MIT Media Lab, but at all the media labs everywhere. Moral of the story, at least in this round of tech, money isn't what creates new media, individuals with a vision who persevere do. #