Part of the Process

The Future Soon by K Rupp on flickr Last Friday was the last dConstruct (at least in it's current form). For the past ten years this has been an interesting design conference held in Brighton looking at the culture/technology intersection. As a Artificial Intelligence graduate the subject matter was right up my street and changed the way I look at things just a little. While at University I had a certain nostalgia for the golden age of AI in the late 50s to early 70s, to have been around while Winograd , Weizenbaum , Schank , Newell and Simon were writing the papers that founded approaches and I was studying all those years later. What changed after dConstruct was that I now almost wanted to have been born later , with advances like 3D printing, robot kits that retail for around $1,600, and 10 companies with self-driving permits in California it feels like an exciting time to be studying, creating and entering the job market.  Looking at my Twitter timeline, this doe...

Mainframe Computer by Dave Winer I recently spent some time with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather often likes to tell us stories about his past career and this visit was no different. Previously I have heard about his work in London as an accountant using earlier computer systems, such as those pictured to the left. I don't remember any stand out stories or great surprises from this era, other than how similar it was to my own experience working on a Y2K project more recently. However, this chapter was more recent and dealing with his time in the small Sussex town they lived in while I was growing up. I listened to him explain how he had first started to sell personal computers with a business partner and then later to bundle with Sage accounting packages as a reseller- this was when PCs were very much a business tool and before Sage had grown as large as they are now.  Afterwards it struck me how the two different markets are so different now, large enterprise ...