That would be a great name for a rock band – Ada Lovelace and the Librarians! You see, it is Ada Lovelace Day 2010, where we can all give a special tribute to a “woman in tech”. My 2010 Ada Lovelace tribute goes to two women – Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom. They recently displayed their magic skills at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, which I did not attend. @marks did, and he sent me a tweet saying I’d love the panel and that they were very funny. The title of the panel made my heart go pitter-patter: How the Other Half Lives – Touring the Digital Divide. Awestruck, I immediately started following @jennylish and @jessamyn. I viewed the slides and some follow-up material as soon as they were available, but I have not yet listened to the MP3 audio file of the talk (SO bogged down in work…
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Reading about the augmented future of technical communication triggered a memory. Many years ago, when I worked at Computer Associates, they produced a product called CA-7/OLC. (I think that was the abbreviation.) It was an enhancement to their CA-7 software, which is still used for scheduling jobs on big old mainframe computers. The interface for CA-7 was, of course, the good old green screen – green text on a black background. The software came on – are you ready, kiddies – magnetic tapes. CA-7/OLC was different. The demo included a large piece of hardware that played a 12-inch laserdisk. (Gee, I forget the names of all the parts after all these years.) The product was on a PC using 3.5-inch diskettes, and the laserdisk had some additional magic not possible on the PC back then. When you ran the program, you saw the usual green-screen interface. Slightly boring, with a…
1 CommentReboot11 was my first reboot conference. It was a milestone in my life. Nothing less. As a member of the reboot book crew, I took notes on all the speakers presenting in the main hall. It didn’t take long to see a pattern emerging – there was actually a sequence to the topics. Speakers were referring to topics already raised – and building on or enhancing those topics. It was stunning to watch this happen right before me. I asked Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the driving force behind Reboot, whether he had planned it that way when lining up the speakers. He said that if I saw it that way, then that was my contribution – interpreting the pieces brought together at Reboot. Here is what I saw emerge at the end of Day 1 of Reboot11. The Meditation We Reboot11 activists need the superpowers that let the body become all eyes.…
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