Apple Newton

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Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

But the fact that Garry Trudeau made the Newton into a recurring punch line in his nationally syndicated comic strip, Doonesbury, didn’t help much, either. Mike Doonesbury: “I am writing a test sentence.” Apple Newton: Siam fighting atomic sentry. Mike Doonesbury: “I am writing a test sentence.” Apple Newton: Ian is riding a taste sensation. Mike Doonesbury: “I am writing a test sentence!!” Apple Newton: I am writing a test sentence! Mike Doonesbury: “Catching on?” Apple Newton: Egg freckles? Apple had rushed to market and paid the price. General Magic, meanwhile, wasn’t going to make the same mistake that Sculley did. Instead, they made the opposite mistake.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

In Cupertino, almost exactly a decade before the iPhone, Apple introduced the Newton, a “personal desktop assistant” whose core selling point was the agent lurking dutifully just under its beige surface. As it turned out, the new intelligent products bombed. In chat groups and on e-mail lists, there was practically an industry of snark about Bob. Users couldn’t stand it. PC World named it one of the twenty-five worst tech products of all time. And the Apple Newton didn’t do much better: Though the company had invested over $100 million in developing the product, it sold poorly in the first six months of its existence. When you interacted with the intelligent agents of the midnineties, the problem quickly became evident: They just weren’t that smart. Now, a decade and change later, intelligent agents are still nowhere to be seen.

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INDEX accessibility bias Act of Creation, The (Koestler) Acxiom Adderall advertars advertiser-funded media (AFM) advertising augmented reality and brand fragmentation and day-parting and disclosure of personalization in in social spaces on television Afghanistan agents: humanlike intelligent Alexander, Christopher algorithms CineMatch EdgeRank Google search OkCupid PageRank political districts and Amazon Kindle Web Services ambient intelligence Americans for Job Security Anderson, Chris Angleton, James Jesus anonymity Anti, Michael Apple Newton architecture and design Arendt, Hannah argument styles Ariely, Dan Arnold, Stephen art Asimov, Isaac AT&T Atlantic attention crash augmented cognition (AugCog) augmented reality Barlow, John Perry Battelle, John Bay, Michael behavioral retargeting Bell, Gordon Benkler, Yochai Berners-Lee, Tim Bezos, Jeff Bharat, Krishna Bhat, Tapan Bing Bishop, Bill Blades, Joan blogs BlueCava BlueKai Bohm, David Bohr, Niels books advertising in digitized Bosworth, Andrew Bowling Alone (Putnam) boyd, danah Boyd, Wes BP brain Brand, Stewart brand fragmentation bridges Brin, Sergey Burnham, Brad Burnham, Terence Bush, George W.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crackberry 4. Kenneth Kocienda et al., Keyboards for portable electronic devices. U.S. Patent 7,694,231, filed January 5, 2006, and issued April 6, 2010. 7. QWERTY 1. Mat Honan, “Remembering the Apple Newton’s Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact,” Wired, August 5, 2013. https://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-newtons-prophetic-failure-and-lasting-ideals/. Accessed November 14, 2017. 2. Wikipedia contributors, “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day&oldid=831048898.

Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen Hawking

anthropic principle, Apple Newton, cosmological constant, dark matter, Johannes Kepler

This said that each body inthe universe was attracted toward every other body by a force which wasstronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other.It was the same force which caused objects to fall to the ground. The story thatNewton was hit on the head by an apple is almost certainly apocryphal. AllNewton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat ina contemplative mood, and was occasioned by the fall of an apple. Newton went on to show that, according to his law, gravity causes the moonto move in an elliptical orbit around the Earth and causes the Earth and theplanets to follow elliptical paths around the sun. The Copernican model gotrid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them the idea that the universe hada natural boundary.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

Looking back on the dot-com crash, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, argues that little has changed. “Still today in our industry, if you go to a trade show, you walk around and you will find a lot of technology for which there is no problem that exists,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at this, we’ve got a great solution and there is no problem to solve here.’ ” 6 Think of the Apple Newton, the world’s first portable data assistant. Launched in 1993, it utterly flopped. According RIM’s Lazaridis, it was a failure of abduction. “It had no future,” he argues. “What problem did it solve? What value did it create? It was a research project. What could you do with it that you couldn’t do with a laptop?

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

It was this same force that caused objects to fall to the ground. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”) Newton went on to show that, according to his law, gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the earth and causes the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun. The Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a natural boundary.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The idea was to try to create a device that combined the Palm Pilot—at that time basically a combination calendar, Filofax, address book, and day planner, with note-taking capabilities and a wireless Web-based text browser—with a 3G cell phone. That way when you called up a phone number in the Palm Pilot address book, you could just click on it and the cell phone would dial it. And with the same device you could surf the Internet. Jacobs approached Apple to see if they were interested in partnering with Qualcomm on this, using the Apple Newton, their Palm competitor. But Apple—this was just before Steve Jobs came back—turned them down and eventually killed the Newton. So Jacobs went to Palm and together they ended up making the first “smartphone”—the Qualcomm pdQ 1900—in 1998. It was the first phone designed not just to relay text messages, but to combine digital wireless mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet with a touchscreen and an open operating system that eventually ran downloadable apps.

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Louis Park Agadez, Niger age of accelerations; dislocation and; education and; human adaptability as challenged by; as inflection point; innovation as response to; leadership and; the Machine and; Moore’s law and; social technologies and agriculture: in Africa and Middle East; climate change and; monocultures vs. polycultures in Airbnb; trust and air-conditioning Aita, Samir algorithms; human oversight and; self-improving Alivio Capital Allen, Paul Allisam, Graham Almaniq, Mati Al Qaeda Al-Shabab AltaVista Amazon (company) Amazon rain forest Amazon Web Services American Civil Liberties Union American Dream American Interest American University of Iraq “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now” (Kauffman Foundation) Amman, Jordan amplifying, as geopolitical policy Andersen, Jeanne Anderson, Chris Anderson, Ross Anderson, Wendell Andreessen, Marc Andrews, Garrett Android AngularJS Annan, Kofi Anthropocene epoch Anthropocene Review anti-Semitism APIs (application programming interfaces) Apple; see also Jobs, Steve Applebaum, Anne Apple Newton Apple Pay apps revolution Arab Awakening Arabic, author’s study of Arab-Muslim world, golden age of Arafat, Yasser architects, software for Armstrong, Neil artificial intelligence (AI); intelligent algorithms and; intelligent assistance and Artnet.com Ashe, Neil Ashraf, Quamrul Assad, Bashar al- Associated Press Astren, Fred AT&T; intelligent assistance and; iPhone gamble of; lifelong learning and; as software company Atkinson, Karen atmosphere: aerosol loading in; CO2 in; ozone layer of ATMs Auguste, Byron Austria Austro-Hungarian Empire Autodesk automation, see computers, computing autonomous systems; see also cars, self-driving Autor, David Avaaz.org Azmar Mountain Bajpai, Aloke Baker, James A., III balance of power Bandar Mahshahr, Iran bandwidth Bangladesh bankruptcy laws bank tellers Barbut, Monique baseball, class-mixing and BASIC Bass, Carl Batman, Turkey BBCNews.com Bee, Samantha Beinhocker, Eric Beirut: civil war in; 1982 Israeli-Palestinian war in Bell, Alexander Graham Bell Labs Bennis, Warren Benyus, Janine Berenberg, Morrie Berenberg, Tess Berkus, Nate Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall, fall of Bessen, James Betsiboka River “Better Outcomes Through Radical Inclusion” (Wells) Between Debt and the Devil (Turner) Beykpour, Kayvon Bible Bigbelly garbage cans big data; consumers and; financial services and; software innovation and; supernova and Big Shift Big World, Small Planet (Rockström) “Big Yellow Taxi” (song) Bingham, Marjorie bin Laden, Osama bin Yehia, Abdullah biodiversity: environmental niches and; resilience and biodiversity loss; climate change and biofuels biogeochemical flows biomass fuels biotechnology bioweapons birth control, opposition to Bitcoin black elephants Blase, Bill blockchain technology Bloomberg.com Blumenfeld, Isadore “Kid Cann” Bobby Z (Bobby Rivkin) Bodin, Wes Bohr, Mark Bojia, Ayele Z.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, delayed gratification, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, inventory management, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, The future is already here, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Don’t plan to the nth degree on the first day. The return on investment usually follows the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the benefits will be found in the simplest 20 percent of the system, and the final 20 percent of the benefits will come from the most complex 80 percent of the system.7 Apple used the 80/20 Principle in developing the Apple Newton Message Pad, an electronic personal organizer: The Newton engineers took advantage of a slightly modified version [of 80/20]. They found that .01 percent of a person’s vocabulary was sufficient to do 50 percent of the things you want to do with a small handheld computer.8 Increasingly, software is substituting for hardware, using the 80/20 Principle.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

NG 1: I don't know. Business class only, I think. I guess it would be cooler if you could play with the 13-year old kids back in coach . . . SEGA should send group testers on flights and do market research that way! (Titters.) Karla and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes, but were impressed. APPLE! NEWTON! JAL FIRST CLASS! I don't have frequent flyer miles on any airline. Loser. MONDAY Anatole's Lexus has a vertical slot in its dashboard. It's a coffee cup holder that pops out and does this flip-flip-flip origami thing - whoosh-whoosh-whoosh - and becomes horizontal. Karla and I went out around sunset and had coffees and sat in the car.

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

That distance was the fall Newton was looking for—the moon “falls” from a hypothetical straight line to its actual position. Newton calculated the distance the moon falls in 1 second, which corresponds to the dashed line in the diagram. In his quest to compare Earth’s pull on the moon and on an apple, Newton was nearly home. He knew how far the moon falls in one second. He had just calculated that. It falls about 1/20 of an inch. He knew how far an apple falls in one second. Galileo had found that out, with his ramps: 16 feet. All that remained was to look at the ratio of those two falls, the ratio of 1/20 of an inch to 16 feet.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

Nobody knows where the catflap myth started, but we do have a source for the legend of the apple tree: Newton himself. Never one for self-deprecation, he likened his discovery of gravity to Adam being expelled from the Garden of Eden, as both featured the sudden acquisition of knowledge through an apple. Newton often told the story during his lifetime, but, over a century later, the German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) offered his own version of events. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he made his great discovery.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Certainly, some consumer products that depend on the Christmas season for the bulk of their sales have frighteningly important due dates. But most software-based products, even consumer products, aren't that sensitive to any particular date. For example, in 1990 the PenPoint computer from GO was supposed to be the progenitor of a handheldcomputer revolution. In 1992, when the PenPoint crashed and burned, the Apple Newton inherited the promise of the handheld revolution. When the Newton failed to excite people, General Magic's Magic Link computer became the new hope for handhelds. That was in 1994. When the Magic Link failed to sell, the handheld market appeared dead. Venture capitalists declared it a dry hole.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

In the ten years since I wrote that book, it has become even clearer to me that technology is like language, best learned through early immersion. It was a much-coveted type of hard drive. If I recall correctly, the shouting was being done by Stepan Pachikov, a computer scientist who shared the direction of the computer club with me. His contributions to handwriting recognition software at the Soviet company ParaGraph were used in the Apple Newton. He later moved to Silicon Valley and founded Evernote, the ubiquitous note-taking app. I once made a television commercial for the search engine company AltaVista. If you want to know what happened to AltaVista, you can google it! This fits the axiom of Bill Gates. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

Ashton-Tate never missed an opportunity to piss off dBase developers, poisoning the fragile ecology that is so vital to a platform vendor's success. I'm a programmer, of course, so I tend to blame the marketing people for these stupid mistakes. Almost all of them revolve around a failure of nontechnical business people to understand basic technology facts. When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: Handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

YouTube became a mainstream possibility only once broadband access was prevalent. In both cases there were earlier attempts to accomplish similar things that failed because the timing wasn’t right. The rest of the world wasn’t yet sufficiently equipped with the necessary technology. Apple famously introduced the Apple Newton tablet device in 1993 and discontinued it in 1998 after lackluster sales. More than a decade later, Apple introduced a new tablet device—the iPad—which had the fastest initial adoption rate of any mainstream electronic device up to that point, even ahead of the iPhone and the DVD player. What changed?

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

., 8, 32, 75, 98 Super Mario Odyssey, 30, 32 Sushiswap, 223 sustainability, 125, 182, 209–10, 222–23 Sweeney, Tim, 12, 19, 44, 96 on advertising in the Metaverse, 264 on Apple, 22–23, 184 on blockchains and the Metaverse, 234–35 “critical mass of working pieces,” 244–48 on powerful companies controlling the Metaverse, 285, 289 on the scope of the Metaverse, 14, 119–20 “Sweeney’s Law,” 100–101, 181–82 on the timeline of the Metaverse, 239, 245 see also Epic Games; Fortnite; Unreal game engine tablets, xi failed Apple Newton tablet, 145 “iPad Natives,” 13, 249 iPads, xi, 294 lidar scanning, 159–60 techno-capitalists, xiii, 22 TeleGeography, 85, 130 Tencent, 19, 24, 166 “hyper-digital reality,” xii, 7n, 239, 307n lawsuit over game item trading, 128 use of facial recognition, xiii WeChat, 205–6, 209, 214, 303–4 Tesla, 101, 166, 271 3D, 29–30, 33–36, 58 avatars, 40, 124, 144 common standards for, 135–40, 248 immersive, 30, 37 isometric (2.5D), 9, 30 objects, 36, 40–41, 248, 299 televisions, xiv, 5 “3D internet,” 34 TikTok, 28, 34, 116, 298 Time magazine, 66, 73 Tinder, 19, 215, 255, 259, 261, 308 Tivoli Cloud, 193 T-Mobile, 212 Tonic Games Group, 137 Top Policy Group, x Totem AR headset, 144 TouchWiz OS, 213 trolls and trolling, 129, 229, 291 “Trouble with Bubbles, The,” 5 TSMC, 166 Twitch, 50, 135, 179, 278, 298 Twitter, 92, 129, 138, 229, 287, 300 2001: A Space Odyssey, xi, 305 ultra-wideband (UWB) chips, 160 “uncanny valley,” 82–83 Uncensored Library, 11 Uniform Resource Locator (URL), 38–39 Uniswap, 223, 233 United Nations, 243 United States v.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

When the Macintosh graphic user interface arrived in the 1980s, the mouse at first took over some of the commands of the keyboard, but many users soon clamored for function keys and keyboard shortcuts. In the late 1980s and early 1990s visionaries at Apple and elsewhere called for a new kind of computer that would recognize handwriting on a portable tablet. While the movement ended in a wave of failures, notoriously of the original Apple Newton, pen-based computing never actually died, and both Apple and Microsoft are doing their best to revive it. Yet the smaller the portable device, the more likely it appears that someone will find a way to plug a portable QWERTY keyboard into it. Several are available for the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA).

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Ten floors below him in the most coveted office building in Manhattan, Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management ran US$16 billion of assets in his specialist technology hedge fund. While most hedge fund reception halls were decorated with expensive art, Coatue’s paid homage to tech nostalgia. A white cabinet displayed relics that were precursors to the dawning computer age: early Nintendo consoles, the first-ever Apple computer, and the Apple Newton, a clunky handheld device that was discontinued in 1998. Laffont had been an analyst around the same time as Coleman, but Robertson had passed him over for funds, instead backing Coleman, Lee Ainslie’s Maverick and Ole Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global. The Belgian-born Frenchman was a graduate of the temple of nerd-dom that was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the mid-1990s was hired by Robertson to cover European tech stocks.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Remember also the Y2K threat, which reached its anticlimax weeks before that Super Bowl. We’ll never know whether it amounted to nothing because computer consulting firms successfully convinced everyone to upgrade their mainframes or whether they just brilliantly hyped a nonevent. Well before then history was littered with other failed tech ideas: the Apple Newton, digital audiotapes, and the Betamax video format, to name a few that our generation might remember. Still, ignoring change is risky, for which Eastman Kodak provides a cautionary tale. The century-old, Rochester, New York–based maker of film for analog cameras failed to pick up on the digital-imaging invention of one of its own engineers in the 1970s, only to be overwhelmed in the 2000s by the arrival of mass-marketed digital cameras.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Their idea was that users would mimic the actions of a mouse by working directly on the screen of a portable computer with a special stylus. They believed that drawing or writing directly on a screen was so natural and familiar that it would be the best way for people to interact with their computers. This was the nascent technology that John Sculley had counted on to make the Apple Newton MessagePad the next big wave in personal computing when it was introduced in 1993. The Newton failed, of course, partly because its handwriting recognition was embarrassingly inaccurate. Microsoft tried for two decades to make something of pen computing in tablet versions of the PC, but to no avail.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Powers was struck by Levchin: college students weren’t exactly regular attendees at enterprise technology conferences, nor were they this sharp. Levchin remembered Powers as “tall, gangly, wacky… and a good-hearted guy,” someone who “was always a decade ahead of his time.” Powers had come to the conference because of his interest in mobile computing. The first generation of mobile devices—the PalmPilot, the Apple Newton, the Casio Cassiopeia, the Sharp Wizard, and so on—had just burst onto the scene. When he met Levchin, Powers had begun reading up on wireless standards and mobile device security. “You could see the evolution coming,” he remembered. Shortly after the conference, Powers pitched the idea of starting a mobile enterprise consulting practice to his bosses at JD Edwards.

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

It's not quite an exit because the throw can be intercepted by catcher code in an enclosing procedure. Exceptions are normally used to signal errors or unexpected conditions that mean it would be pointless to try to continue normal processing. [160] http://www.eros-os.org/ [161] The operating systems of the Apple Newton, the AS/400 minicomputer and the Palm handheld could be considered exceptions. Problems in the Environment of Unix The old-time Unix culture has largely reinvented itself in the open-source movement. Doing so saved us from extinction, but it also means that the problems of open source are now ours as well.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

In time the vision gets stale, and the visionary grows stubborn, as others dream up new visions that challenge then replace the old. It’s how we got Facebook, the answer to MySpace, which was the answer to Friendster. It’s how we got Google, which was the answer to AltaVista, Lycos, and Infoseek. It’s how we got the iPhone after the Palm Treo, Apple Newton, and flip phones. PLATO’s story is no different. But what a story. — The Friendly Orange Glow is divided in three parts. Part One, “The Automatic Teacher,” begins before PLATO with the story of the 1950s work of the psychologist B. F. Skinner. In subsequent chapters we’ll see how a confluence of people, ideas, national emergencies, and government mandates led to the creation of the PLATO system.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

They were all technical, they were all enthusiastic about starting something like this—it sounded like a good idea to them, as opposed to something they were Joe Kraus 63 scared of. Actually, every one of us was in the same freshman dorm. This was a company started out of essentially freshman dorm relationships. So we get together at our favorite taqueria. We each had brought ideas to the table and they all sucked. There were things like applications for the Apple Newton—that was my brilliant idea. My other brilliant idea was automatic translation software, which to this day doesn’t work. Everybody had ideas and they were all terrible, and by the end we were all very depressed. And then Graham started talking. It’s hard to remember exactly what he said, but it was something like this: “Look, between CD-ROMs and command line stuff, more and more information’s being made available electronically.”

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

If they did, every creature would be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. An organism that devotes some of its matter and energy to one organ must take it away from another. It must have thinner bones or less muscle or fewer eggs. Organs evolve only when their benefits outweigh their costs. Do you have a Personal Digital Assistant, like the Apple Newton? These are the hand-held devices that recognize handwriting, store phone numbers, edit text, send faxes, keep schedules, and many other feats. They are marvels of engineering and can organize a busy life. But I don’t have one, though I am a gadget-lover. Whenever I am tempted to buy a PDA, four things dissuade me.