With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

in the beginning was the Word

2007 January 30 17:02

I saw Douglas Adams speak at Indiana University in...I guess it was 2000 or early 2001 (he died in May 2001. One of the bits that Douglas put into some of his speeches was talking about first thinking that computers were calculating machines, and then thinking they were typewriters. Until today, I was never able to find a good reproduction of this discussion, but today I ran across one on BBC, a transcript of his speech at the 3GSM World Congress. He announced that the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy website that he'd started at the Digital Village would be moving to the BBC.

Here, cut from a couple of different sections of the speech, is the heart of Douglas's computer discussion:

Of course whenever we invent something new, we always base it on something we are familiar with. That’s why the first movies were just filmed plays for proscenium marches and all. That’s why we originally thought that a phone is something that we use to alert you that someone is bringing around a telegram, much the same way we now phone someone to tell them we have sent them an email. That’s why we first designed computers as a kind of super adding machine with a long feature list, then as a typewriter with a long feature list. Those of you who are familiar with Microsoft Word will know what I am talking about. Then as a television with a typewriter sat in front of it.

Now with the coming of the World Wide Web we have reinvented the computer as a kind of giant brochure. Now the computer is none of those things but those are all things which we are already familiar with and we model them in the computer in order to make the computer usable. The mistake we make of course, is to build in the limitations of the thing we are modelling along with its usefulness. ... So if the computer isn’t a typewriter or a television or telephone or any of these other things we have modelled in it, what actually is it? Well obviously it’s a modelling device. We can model in it anything we care to imagine and since it is also a communication device the possibilities are endless. Any of your modelling devices can communicate with any of your other modelling devices and create more and more powerful and more complex models.

It's a terrific speech; please read the whole text.