The Two-Eyed Man | SpringerLink
We spent many happy hours in conversation along Venice and Santa Monica beaches. I wrote a script filled with “cool” science. There was a bit who wanted to be a program, and there was a video game warrior who wanted to be a human. The script was uploaded to PARC, and then I went up there and edited the script on the Alto computer, making Tron the first movie script ever to be edited using a Word Processing program. It sold to Disney and after eight new writers and considerable meddling it became the movie Tron. Groundbreaking, yes, but Alan and I think the marriage turned out better than the movie! We thank you, Ted Nelson.
As Thorton Wilder’s old fortune-teller says, “It is easy to tell the future,” but asks “who can tell the past?” It’s not just a memory problem, but one of too much complicated detail without enough perspective. It would be great if we could go back and look at the world Bonnie talks about, and, to some extent, we can.
The software computers are, in terms of virtual hardware, independent of the physical computers they run on. To bring this back to life, we emulated the virtual hardware in Javascript. It is faster than the actual PARC computers of 40 years ago! With this approach, we have a time machine that allows us to go back, back, back into the past and run the same software that both Bonnie and Steve Jobs saw.
