1. terminal, technology and lots of talking

Finding out that 1968 was the world debut of interactive, personal computing and not the late 1900s — early 2000 came to me as a surprise. Knowing that some of the ideas that have gained popularity recently had already been lingering around people’s minds for over decades and decades really put things into perspective. Whether it was Buxton’s Collection or the ELIZA, this is technology which we have incorporated into our lifestyles now in different forms and mediums which if you think about it, is really fascinating.

Delving into the history of these computing ideas and really trying to understand them and having to come up with our own has been challenging. Having read about conversational agents, we’re expected to come up with our own agent within the context of our choice and since, we cannot deliver the exact experience to the end user due to lack in resources we are expected to use the technique of ‘Wizard of Oz’ which is an experimental method to simulate robot behaviour using an experimenter taking the robot, the human and the environment into consideration which is quite exciting.

Something that I really enjoyed were the coding bits during the studio where we executed command prompts and also touched upon python. I’m interested to look more into it. Adding to this, here’s an excerpt from one of the readings (Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham) which I especially liked —
“It means that a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.”