I like computing history. It’s fascinating to see what scientists have done in just few years. The end of the 60s and the 70s have been the richer years in computing. All the fundamentals of modern computing have been set up in this lap of time.

Alan Kay is one of those veterans. I watched a video of a conference he gave a couple of months ago. Here, he shows us the famous Doug Engelbart demo and I had a great time watching it again. Everything is here, we can recognize all computer concepts we’re familiar with. It was done from scratch by a bunch of 10 scientists in 1968. Simply Awesome. I imagine these guys thinking about computing in the next 20 years regarding to what they’ve done in one year. They sure thought–the future will be amazing! But the revolution didn’t happen yet.

Alan explains that most of the concepts introduced by Engelbart are still implemented “as is” in our today systems and some other still not. He insisted that almost no computer science have been done in the last decades and no major innovation changed the way we use computers. We’re still in the Engelbart vision.

It’s even more obvious regarding programming languages. Paradigm and concepts implemented by the Java language are more than 20 years old and most programmers think it’s brand new. The Lisp language–one of the oldest in computing history–implement powerful concepts a Java programmer can’t even think of.

Sure, there is a problem of mentality of computing professionals. I think computing should be teach more like philosophy. Learning from what have been done in the past. Learning from veteran in the field. This would avoid reinventing the same things again and again and lead to exploration of new ideas. Few people–generally, the veterans–are trying to push computing forward whereas most programmers waste their energy writing the next “graphical editor” again. According to Alan, computing innovation should come from the free software community instead of mimicking existing and limited systems–just what’s happening with .NET and Mono.

Todays computing is boring. Since computers have reached masses, no fundamental innovation have been done. Sure, computers are more powerful–but this power is wasted.