And compare the ‘loss’ of that platform of the Next box, with the creation of a new platform – the web itself, remembered by Tim Berners Lee, in his book, Weaving the Web.

Love what you burn, burn what you love.

You will also find evidence of the birth of the PC gaming industry, in Masters of Doom by David Kushner.

Where the young John Carmack spends a winter in a northern state using his black next cube, while the ground outside was white with snow.

David B. Brownlee
David G. De Long

co-authored a book about the architect Louis Kahn,
published by Thames and Hudson.

The ideas I got for exploring hardware and its history in computing, derive a lot from Brownlee and De Long’s discussion in that book, about Kahn.

Kahn would try to understand what a school started out as – a space underneath a tree in a village, where all the young kids would collect to listen to an older knowledgeable person speak. It was only later, that things become more forumalised and regulated in a schooling system per se.

As in the discussion of Alvin Toffler, about the ‘industrialisation’ of schooling system.

Kahn felt it was important for the architect to understand the early essence, the origins of building spaces – if the modern interpretation was to be of any success.

For instance, with kids, you tube and parents fighting – you have to go back to the origins – like the light switch, where there were only two bits! The light is either on or off, and see how kids manipulated that to their advantage, and controlled the environment in which adults were trying to occupy.

This is what I mean about the adobe acrobat platform too – sure it Professor Iansiti dealt with the ecological network effects employed by MBAs at adobe to create the franchise as it were.

It is a way of looking at business, similar to the ideas in Mark Buchanan’s book, on Small Worlds and the ground breaking theory of networks.

PDF has been a fantastic success as a business strategy – a role model even.

But the ‘translation’ from physical book to digital book isn’t wonderful imo. The origin of the PDF was the book. But the PDF embodies very little of the original essence of that older platform I feel.

Ted Nelson talks about this, in the copy and paste translation of software engineers, which was a very poor imitation of what he remembers while working for a newspaper in NYC.

Negroponte discusses technology in a similar way in his book ‘Being Digital’. About the former lives of tools we find in the digital environment – and how sucessfully or poorly in some cases, their translation has been.

I would greatly anticipate Danah Boyd writing something along those lines. Where we see examples in her writing of other progressions in technology, to allow us to get a handle on the same notion of progression in web applications.

Or this sense of history, the layers of archaeology that Christine Finn has explored in her work. Where she talks about the compression of time, into momentary flickers which appear for a second and then seem to disappear again, almost as if they never existed.

That is the nature of digital platforms sometimes – they don’t have a life inherent in themselves – but they only live afterwards as ghostly shadows and flickers on the cave walls, as echos in later code.

“If changes in one small area are too quickly communicated across a system as a whole, they would tend to be dampened out. New and dissenting ideas need time to accumulate evidence and argument.”

Ilya Prigogine, winner of a nobel prize for chemistry.

Boyd has mentioned this before no doubt, as in hacking on live servers – patching code until 4 in the morning – the Ruby, PHP phenomenon of SNS.

We have to find another way to respond to the coming and passing of various platforms. To deal with this ‘loss’ of platforms.

I think that my piece about, about ‘How long does a platform really last’, offers at least a small philosophical route forward in our thinking about it. The notion that even though a company dies, or a product is no more, a part of it still stays alive – somewhat like Dawkins and Susan Blackmore’s idea of the meme.

But we have to get past this notion of the god given right of American software companies to exist and last for ever. When history proves that not to be the case. We have to find a different way to deal with their passing – rather than the usual ‘black and white’ way we deal with the issue. The company is either alive or dead.

I guess the network and ecological analogies do help there also, and give us another route to develop our thinking. We can no longer see this huge brand names purely in isolation, but to be alive they have to form a large organism with only creatures and environments.

Adobe PDF discussion

B.

A live DVD of the Monster II tour, filmed May 28th at Dublin’s Vicar Street, is on general release. This is Moran’s first live stand-up DVD.

But, when you talk about kids ‘power’ over their parents and messiness – I think you might enjoy checking out Dylan Moran’s description of the parent – kids relation dynamic. Moran talks about the kids control over the light switch – but what he says, could be expanded onto camcorders and you tube for sure.

Regards all,

Brian.