
Behind the Scenes at Xerox Parc’s Futures Day – 40 Years Ago - never-the-bride
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/silicon-revolution/behind-the-scenes-at-xerox-parcs-futures-day40-years-ago
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m_mueller
Goes right along with what Alan Kay has been saying - if you want to see the
future in computing you can just buy it. Maybe today's analogue would be to
give a smartphone a full reservation of a current supercomputer with 50
PFLOP/s and see what kind of application one could do by using computations on
the phone's sensor? I'd imagine something AR related could be interesting, or
applying some kind of NN training within seconds that would not be feasible on
a phone today. Maybe throw in a quantum computer once supremacy over classical
is achieved in some areas (which appears to be pretty close now, sidenote).

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shalabhc
You can buy the future in hardware - assuming you have a design. Given you can
already buy compute power over the cloud today, 'buying hardware from the
future' could perhaps mean a different architecture than just 'a large number
of CPUs'.

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Someone
Perhaps, but the cloud adds unavoidable latency that may be a bigger loss than
what can be won with increased computing power.

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Aloha
The book "Dealers of Lightning" deals with this, and many things about Xerox
PARC, its a great read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-
Computer...](https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-
ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA/)

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icc97
Or you can read Dream Machine [0] as recommended by Alan Kay. It deals with
everything mostly leading up to and during PARC.

[0]:
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/014200135X/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/014200135X/)

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Aloha
I bought this book - but boy are paper versions of it expensive, I'll read it
and see how it compares to dealers.

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icc97
Yeah, I bought the kindle version then stripped it of the DRM [0]

[0]: [https://www.wired.com/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-
kindle-e...](https://www.wired.com/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-
books-and-others/)

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simonhamp
“The wives were right”

