Shhh…The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.

It would soon be 30 years since Alan Kay and David A. Smith had a conversation about how frustrated they were with the state of computer operating systems, and then the Croquet Project was born. Alan had talked about how ideas in research can take 20 years to be adopted in the market, and I was wondering if 2020 would be the year when Croquet’s ideas would start to really thrive in the world. Today, Croquet was an SDK that David had recently released for developers to build live collaboration into their apps, however it was not yet the operating system that Alan and David had dreamed of.

Croquet was perhaps the latest descendant of Smalltalk –– the object-oriented programming language that was created as a result of a bet that Alan made at Xerox PARC. He recounts in his paper, The Early History of Smalltalk (1993):

“I had expected that the new Smalltalk would be an iconic language and would take at least two years to invent, but fate intervened. One day, in a typical PARC hallway bull session, Ted Kaehler, Dan Ingalls, and I were standing around talking about programming languages. The subject of power came up and the two of them wondered how large a language one would have to make to get great power. With as much panache as I could muster, I asserted that you could define the “most powerful language in the world” in “a page of code.” They said, “Put up or shut up.” –– Alan Kay

In 1997, Alan gave a talk at talk at OOPSLA titled “The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened yet” and in 2007, he wrote The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet, and today it didn’t look like it had happened. We were still living in the same paradigm, and Alan’s pioneering ideas with Smalltalk –– which Croquet was continuing to keep alive –– had not yet manifested. The Internet, smartphones, apps and tablets – in their current incarnations –– were a misstep in the evolution of computing. The easiest way to predict the future, Alan had said, was to prevent it, and if we did nothing to keep Smalltalk and Engelbart’s ideas (and those of many others) alive, we would be preventing the future.

David and I had another call so I could hear his ideas on what to work on next. Recruiting, funding and speeding up the development of Croquet were on my mind, and David shared with me some of the work he was doing in those areas. I was excited about the pace at which things were moving and his plans for next year.

David was happy that I was writing about Croquet. He had read some of my recent posts, and thought that I should write about the things that people were building with Croquet. He believed we needed to show, in simple terms, what sort of ideas were possible with these technologies, and excite developers to join the community. We needed to build momentum behind this paradigm shift, and we would need many of the most compelling thinkers (who were also developers) from around the world to build their ideas with Croquet. They would have an influence on how the computer revolution would take place. I thought it would be a developer’s dream to build their products and startups using Croquet technologies. I would have to communicate the grandiosity of this dream with anyone who asked me about why they should build things with Croquet.

I wanted to make it easy for others to understand, and hoped that they wouldn’t struggle to see the bigger vision. More than anything though, I hoped that developers would have the right intent when they were building with Croquet. I hoped they would understand why it was important to work with principle, the way Bret Victor had talked about. I had started to learn that lesson after many mistakes over many years, and now I had a guiding light that would always remind me why I was choosing to work on important ideas. It would keep me going when things got tough.

David explained how pleasantly surprised he had been with the things that people were building with Croquet. He named a few people I should contact to learn about their ideas and write a few more stories. I was happy writing about how Croquet was inventing the future. It helped me organize my thoughts and try to explain computer history in the right way to myself and to anyone who read my work. And thanks to Alan, I had plenty of reading to keep doing, so writing was a good way for me to spend my time in between my bursts of reading.

My first call was going to be with Zack Qattan. Zack was the most active Croquet developer I was aware of, and David was impressed with his ideas. I had seen the demos Zack had built on Croquet’s Slack developer workspace, such as using a smartphone as a browser controller. He had shared on Twitter his spatialized conference call & multi-track recorder, a phonetic typography demo, and another demo of using your smartphone as an external webcam. I was also impressed with what he was building, and with his ideas of what was possible. By the end of our call, I had 12 pages of scribbled notes, and wished I had used Skype’s call recording feature so I could go back and dissect his ideas.

The Computer History Museum had recently invited Zack to give a talk at the “New Web and Future of Spatial Computing” event in Mountain View. Alan had kicked off the event with a talk, followed by a talk by David. I wished I was there.

Instead of using Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation softwares, Zack used Croquet to build his presentation, and audience members could follow his talk from their devices by opening a URL in a web browser.

Zack described to me the interactive features he used in his talk, and the possibilities for new ones. Audience members could navigate through presentation slides from their devices, they could type in questions on relevant slides that the speaker would see, they could take part in polls and fix typos, they could use their smartphone microphones to ask questions (instead of passing around a microphone). Zack’s ideas were about bringing collaboration to presentations, instead of them being a one-way conversation by the presenter.

Croquet could similarly empower audiences in events such as political rallies. Zack asked me to imagine light bulbs positioned next to politicians at debates, and the bulbs’ brightness levels would increase or decrease in real time as audience members upvoted or downvoted the speakers’ answers to questions.

Zack had plenty more ideas he wanted to share. He talked about transforming brick and mortar experiences and restaurant experiences. He talked about ideas like improved interactive podcasting, animated speech, ear-tracking using brainwaves to detect a user’s focus on a particular sound via the “cocktail party effect”, and other applications in the spatial computing paradigm. I could hardly keep up with his ideas.

Zack talked about a “True Internet Safari”, and perhaps it was a jab at Apple’s Safari Internet Browser, but he was right. Browsers are today’s doors to the Internet, there are billions of separate rooms (websites) on the Internet and each room may have smaller rooms (pages in the website) within, but the rooms didn’t seamlessly connect to other rooms, the rooms don’t have tools in them for people to work on things together. We had been living as isolated creatures on the Internet. We were instantly connected to billions of people, yet we were still alone. It was time for a new paradigm, and Zack’s presentation had shown Croquet’s potential of taking people on more interactive safaris around the Internet.

Zack described Croquet as a “Multiplayer experience out-of-the-box, without code.” As a non-programmer myself, I was drawn to the idea of “without code”, and now I was waiting for the day I could tell the Croquet story using Croquet, without the need for me to write any code.

I might have mentioned evangelizing Croquet during our call, and Zack was quick to point out that it might not be the best way to think. Indeed, in his talk at the Computer History Museum, one of his slides read: “I am not an Evangelist.” Underneath, it continued: Evangelist –– A screwdriver trying to convince every nail, nut, and bolt that they’re a screw, and therefore ought to be screwed.” I had to start thinking about how we were going to communicate Croquet’s story with developers.

Croquet Resources

Croquet.io

• David P. Reed’s MIT thesis “Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system” (1979)
• Croquet — A Collaboration System Architecture (2003)
• Croquet — A Menagerie of New User Interfaces (2004)
• David A. Smith’s Blog
• David A. Smith’s YouTube channel

Alan Kay Resources

• Viewpoint Research Institute papers
• Alan Kay’s “The Early History of Smalltalk” (1993)
• Alan Kay talks
• Etoys educational tool
• Squeak programming language
• Scratch programming language for children

More Stories I’ve Written

• Keeping Doug Engelbart Alive
• Keeping Maria Montessori Alive
• Reverse engineering Doug Engelbart’s vision for augmenting our collective intelligence

Thank You

Much of what I have learned about the history of computers and technology is a result of Alan Kay’s guidance and patience in answering my often wrong questions. And much of my enthusiasm for contributing towards inventing the future is because of him. I am eternally thankful. Thank you to David P. Reed for his patience in explaining the ideas in his MIT thesis he wrote 40 years ago, and which will take me many years to understand. Thank you to David A. Smith for allowing me on this journey, for his guidance on Croquet and its history, and for suggesting that I talk to Zack Qattan. Thank you to Yoshiki Ohshima for his help with understanding Smalltalk and reviewing this story, and thank you to Zack for painting visions of the endless possibilities with Croquet.