- "The principal aim is to develop and investigate, experimentally, a new way in which a computer can aid, more effectively, people in their creative work in their thinking in any field from research to engineering, design management, education and so forth. The fact of the matter is that the situation with respect to computers today is somewhat similar as the situation with respect to power — electrical power or mechanical power — immediately following the invention of the steam engine. The steam engine made it possible for people to build locomotives, big machines that could do work that no individual or group of individuals or group of animals, for that matter, could possibly do. In the same sense computers today can perform calculations and logical operation that would take years and years for any reasonable group of people to do by hand. The big difference, particularly to our society, came when power could be distributed to the electrical system and was brought into the home — into the offices of people wherever people worked. That made it possible: the development of use of power tools, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners. In a general sense power put new powerful physical tools in the hand of people. Now what we would like to do is do the same thing for what we might call logical power and bring the ability of computers to perform logical operation computations at the service of the individual in whatever he may be doing. ... In essence what we want is to make computers accessible to people."
"A person would like to be able to instruct a computer to do what it wants directly and conveniently. That is, using terminology and a language that is convenient to the individual and not necessarily convenient to the computer. Now, what has been stopping the use of the computer on the part of many people until now is just this barrier of instructing the computer, and what many scientists for instance have been doing is using specialists called programmers to instruct the computer to solve, let's say, the problem that the scientist may want. But this places a real barrier between the scientist and the computer. What we would like is to make it possible, for instance, for the scientist to instruct directly the computer and how to do what the scientist wants."
- Robert Fano
4 points by so-cal-schemer 21 hours ago | 1 comments