(2007-04-18) Kay Croquet Nsf

Recent interview with Alan Kay.

Croquet - But if you look at how the Internet has scaled since then, the Operating System and other software inside your machine hasn't scaled well. Why doesn't my machine look like an Internet inside? Because the Internet is a scalable architecture made up of real machines that are made up out of virtual machines. And that concept could actually be used as a basis for an operating environment that essentially doesn't have an operating system. There isn't a particularly good reason this hasn't happened; it's just that the dominant operating system architectures that we have are all from the sixties. Basically, the people who do operating systems got used to this kind of layered architecture in an operating system, and they tend to keep on feeding it, even though layered systems don't scale very well (Scalability)... You can think of Croquet as a new way of doing an Operating System, or as a Layer over TCP-IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time. It's mature enough to be supported by the Open Source Foundation and there is a start-up company called Qwaq that is working with Croquet. (I'm not part of the start-up.) We brought together David Reed - Croquet is a working model of his 1970s thesis-with other talented people, and funded them.

The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to - desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc. - in less than 20,000 lines of code. (proposal (PDF), video (WMV Video), pepsi and coke discussion lecture with links)

The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop (OLPC) to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold. link