50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World
I saw one of these in the early 1980s at a Xerox engineering facility in LA.<p>It was shocking!<p>They also had a LAN where H/W engineers submitted their (graphically captured) schematics to the in-house PCB fab, via electronic transfer.<p>A week or two later, their prototype PCBs would arrive via the mail delivery robot!!! I'm not kidding, the robot would follow it's route and beep in front of an individual's office when they had mail on the cart.<p>It was WAY more back-to-the-future than any bullshit dispensed by M$ and Goggle today.<p>And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago? Quite simple really: technical innovation is not seen as driving shareholder value.<p>Why should a company invent something new when its "more productive" to just squeeze their vendors, employees and customers more tightly?<p>This is really in the same vein as M$ brain damaging billions of people into thinking "this is what a computer is".<p>There are no current trends in opposition of this corporate domination.<p>If you think housing, economic equity, or employee rights are trampled today, just wait. It's only going to get worse, until the mass of the population wakes up to who is actually screwing them!<p>It wasn't hippy tree huggers that sent all US manufacturing to China. undermining the entire US workforce, and leading to the current situation. Where those same assholes are now crying about the advancement of Chinese efforts to enact it's own world domination. CEOs paid for that rise in Chinese aggression by buying the crack of products produced with cheap slave labor. While continuing to dumb down the US population, and sell the same computer that Xerox didn't know what to do with 50 years ago.<p>Prepare yourself, it's only going to get worse...