LIFT OFF: Going Desktopless
swanson, bret
Going Desktopless David Gelernter's software will change the way you work BY BRET SWANSON So you use your desKtop? No, not the mahogany or synthetic surface on which your computer sits, the...
...use it...
...I don't store them when I get them...
...You can then scan them visually, not simply by name and certainly not by opening the full document to see if it's the right one...
...The basic information of each item is displayed on the index card, and as you move your cursor over the cards, larger, more detailed windows of the items appear.Two clicks display the full item...
...Gelernter's fantastical mirror world is now your world-and mine...
...Gelernter brilliantly critiqued the desktop metaphor and other hidebound Wintel legacies in several widely admired books including Mirror Worlds, Machine Beauty, and The Second Coming...
...This is how I work...
...But lifestreams can turn office paper into a temporary medium-for use, not storage...
...All items in your company's public stream also appear on your THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 The Scopeware information system is modeled on the parallel processes of your own brain, a complex, active network, not a dumb file cabinet...
...It would totally change my business day," I remarked...
...If the FBI used physical and digital file folders for a multimillion-document case, the answer is probably: quite difficult...
...I go back later and find them when I want them...
...When you need a paper document: find it in the stream...
...Microsoft is too powerful, and the populace is too dumb to know it wants something different...
...Gelernter doesn't believe Scopeware will yield the paperless office...
...the 16-year-old "desktop" environment is still the primary computer interface...
...Do you want to carry a desk in your pocket...
...Of course there is lots of nice blank space, filled with fluffy clouds or exotic wallpaper, and...hardly any useful information.You know, it's the screen you quickly click past anytime you want to do something useful-like write or surf or look up where you need to be this afternoon...
...In six years the Web has changed the way we work and live, but chronologically, and organizes them upon recollection...
...It's not overly friendly or organized the way I would prefer...
...But of course, his admirers tended to add, nothing can be done about it...
...Scopeware stores things automatically, displays them personal stream, but you can choose which personal items you want to place on the streams of specific co-workers or outside viewers...
...As Gelernter has written, "If you have three pet dogs, give them names...
...Today it is a sufficient, if clumsy, stopgap, but it will increasingly fall short as bandwidth abundance pushes more and more of our lives and work out onto the Web...
...Scopeware will be essential to unleash the power of mobile devices, whose tiny screens must use every pixel to display useful information...
...Inevitably we forget to or don't have time to search all the files, in all the directories, in all the geographies, in numerous computers comprising disparate systems, a phenomenon that will intensify as Web storage and communication devices continue proliferating...
...It has most of my e-mail and all kinds of payload contained in those messages: Word documents that I'm working on with colleagues, PDF files sent from technology firms pitching their latest products or PowerPoint presentations sent in advance of technical briefings by their engineers, photos from last weekend's family gathering, daily updates on the economy and technology, and articles and Web links friends think I should see...
...I've got to have this," Lehrman enthused...
...Future appointments are displayed in the "future" of your stream and move toward "now" as time marches forward...
...Accuse a slob of rationalization, but who has time to organize the bounty of information flowing in through our computers, phones, periodicals, and post offices...
...Scopeware is the first information system truly built for the Internet age, and he introduced it via video at Gilder Publishing's April Storewidth conference in Dana Point, California...
...Alas, it's more difficult than it sounds...
...throw it out...
...Scopeware's search and display method is destined to be the way we view the results of multibillion-page Yahoo or Google searches and Webbased "TV" programming as well...
...It wastes our time...
...Do you use this thing...
...if you wrote on the paper while using it, scan it back in...
...sm, where scientists, entrepreneurs, and yes, even bearded artist intellectuals, can transform idea into product and leave it to us rather than Bill Gates to choose...
...The starting point of all that I do on my computer is my e-mail programMicrosoft Outlook...
...The 'paperless office' is a bad idea," he writes, "because paper is one of the most useful and valuable media ever invented...
...Yale's David Gelernter, computer scientist, artist, author, and Unabomber survivor, has transformed the vision he outlined in 1992's Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox into a product...
...Both the Palm and Microsoft CE interfaces are modeled on the desktop, except in even clumsier and harder-to-navigate forms...
...E-mail is my way of circumventing the desktop...
...With Scopeware, you type in the subject, whether broad or narrow, and you get back a substream of cards with all the text files, e-mails, and other items having to do with your query...
...Reactions like this are common, I think, because Scopeware is modeled on the parallel processes of your own brain, a complex, active network, not a dumb file cabinet...
...In the stream-based office, for each newly-created or -received paper document: scan it into the stream and throw it away...
...Scopeware thus contains optical character recognition software, enabling you to scan magazine or book pages, newspaper clippings, and photos into your stream...
...And it doesn't know about all the other documents I creIr"% I I . - n ate or Web pages I like that don't come through my inbox, not to mention the proliferating papers, magazines, and mail that litter my home, my real desktop, and my travel bag...
...It seems so orderly...
...My e-mail program's search function is buried in a hidden menu...
...Going Desktopless David Gelernter's software will change the way you work BY BRET SWANSON So you use your desKtop...
...When can you come to New York and install it on our computers...
...No, not the mahogany or synthetic surface on which your computer sits, the one that sits inside it, created by Apple and made imperial by Wintel...
...You can also route newswire feeds and other electronicdatabases directly into your server so that they become part of your singlesearch world...
...In this way, Scopeware is also a massive collaboration program without the limitations of new software designed merely for collaboration...
...Our reactions were immediate and unambiguous...
...a bad place for information you want to store...
...If you tried to file it all-physically or virtually-there would be no time left to actually use any of them.Why can't fast microchips and Gigabit Ethernet office networks do the menial work of organizing for us...
...But it has quite a bit of the information I want to see and search...
...Right after the Tim McVeigh-FBI file fiasco, an incredulous ABC News anchor asked his panelists, "In this day and age, how difficult can it be to find all the Oklahoma City bombing files under 'Oklahoma City Bombing...
...Key to Scopeware is its prominent and powerful search feature at the top of the screen, necessary to sift through all the information that you will never have time to file...
...If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother...
...Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous...
...After the presentation, Thomas Lehrman, co-CEO of New York technology research firm Gerson Lehrman Group, and I received a 65 demonstration of Scopeware...
...On paper' is a good place for information you want to use...
...print it out...
...Jeffrey Satinover, also of Yale, vividly describes these transcendent properties in his brilliant new book, The Quantum Brain: "Human memories are retrieved by similarity," not "according to some kind of address-based filing system...but by association-similarity of form, contiguity in time, proximity in space, emotional category...
...But no longer...
...Scopeware was originally called Lifestreams because it fills your computer screen with a cascading "stream" of overlapping index cards, each one an email, text document, voice mail, video file, spreadsheet, or anything else that "comes into your life...
...Does anyone...
...Gelernter's fantastical mirror world is now your world-and mine...
...But Gelernter has made the leap unique to capitalism, where scientists, entrepreneurs, and yes, even bearded artist intellectuals, can transform idea into product and leave it to us rather than Bill Gates to choose...
...The main screen with the neatly arranged folders and icons, that you thought up neat names for, though now you can't quite remember what the names mean or what's in the folders...
...Offering few advantages over paper-filled file cabinets, it makes us classify and sort and file...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
