Our national character, says David Gelernter, is prejudiced against beautiful technology--a prejudice that has saddled us, in the computer age, with inelegant and ugly software, and the refusal to acknowledge the importance of aesthetics in science and engineering. In his central illustration, Gelernter asks why Apple, whose operational systems were obviously more elegant and "cute," lost out to Microsoft, with its clunky and difficult applications. The answer tells us much about our national penchant for "manly" as opposed ...
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Our national character, says David Gelernter, is prejudiced against beautiful technology--a prejudice that has saddled us, in the computer age, with inelegant and ugly software, and the refusal to acknowledge the importance of aesthetics in science and engineering. In his central illustration, Gelernter asks why Apple, whose operational systems were obviously more elegant and "cute," lost out to Microsoft, with its clunky and difficult applications. The answer tells us much about our national penchant for "manly" as opposed to beautiful technology, which is not seen as powerful. He takes us on a rollicking tour of "machine beauty" and our spectacular failure to develop truly revolutionary approaches to computer technology--from the numbing uniformity of computer housings to the backwardness of popular computer programs that remain moored to a pencil-and-paper mentality. Then he lays out his own radical alternative to desktop-model computers, called Lifestreams. Appraising our proven capacity for beautiful technology in the past, the author holds out hope that we can rise to the challenge.
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