Ray Ozzie wants 1973 back

It's fascinating to me how people's first interaction with computers seems to harden their ideas of what it can do for the rest of their lives. I can't tell you how many programmers I've met who still lust after Hypercards, or wish to recreate something they did on an Amiga or Commodore64. (My generation being the first to grow up on PCs, not have to work our way through the punchcard nonsense of mainframes.)

I have my own ticks like this: I want to use the simple email program pine at work, and I have yet to find anything to replay earlier versions of stuff that "just worked" like the Mac alarm clock program or the simple "cdplayer" that used to ship with earlier versions of windows.

And for "genius" programmers, it seems it is no different. The summary of this article could be "Ray Ozzie saw the future in 1973 at U of I, and just tries to keep recreating it. (The sad part is that while Notes was ahead of its time in 1989, it's truly awful now.)

But it means an interesting pattern emerges: the first language of computing you learn is the one you feel most comfortable in. You might learn new vocabulary (nifty keyboard shortcuts, iTunes, etc.) but the first impression hardens your mind on what a computer is.

It's a thought worth exploring:
- are programmers' ideas of what's possible shaped by language? (I happen to believe their design patterns of "good code" are often shaped by the first language.)

- are users ever happy with evolutionary software, or do they prefer the revolution to learn a new language of doing things? For example, it seems possible that much computer input could be done by touchscreen in 5 years instead of the keyboard mouse/combo. What will that mean for today's toddler?

I follow Ray Ozzie because I find his work fascinating. (I thought Groove was groovy, and sort of welcome cloud computing at Microsoft because I think it will be a paradigm shift for enterprise computing.) But clearly he keeps chasing what he thought he already had.