I was lucky enough to visit Dynamicland at one point. The computing environment they had set up there was interesting. Programs are stored on a central server, but are executed by putting a printout of the code (with colored dots around the edges serving as a barcode) on a tabletop that has a camera and a projector above it. I/O between programs happens by putting cards next to each other. The programs also affect what the projector displays on the board, but the only persistent state is the presence and position of cards on the table.
>Programs are stored on a central server, but are executed by putting a printout of the code on a tabletop that has a camera and a projector above it
So...timesharing and punchcards?
Ha! I'm amazed at how often computer history repeats (rhymes?) itself. Not to discredit Dynamicland's work, if anything I love that they took something that seems so ancient and turned it into something excited again. Sounds like such a cool place to work at.
Punchcards have their virtues! My family's business used them for inventory management in the 70s. You could print out a deck of cards for the inventory database, and walk around the warehouse pulling out cards for anything broken or missing, then scan those cards back in to change their category.
Now you could do it all on an iPad, but the bandwidth of shuffling cards by hand can be significantly higher than scrolling through a list.
Writing a scholarly paper now that points this issue out in DynamicLand. DynamicLand is amazing but making the "old" paradigm the centre point of the new is a contradiction. I wonder if Bret Victor has thought about this bottleneck.
