Alan Kay's opinion on TLD's

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

>From Wired's electronic letters column
http://www.hotwired.com/wired/3.09/departments/rants.html

No Paine, No Gain

My compliments on "The Age of Paine" (Wired 3.05, page 154). Many of the
original ideas about personal computers and networking sprang from
conscious analogies to history, especially the history of the printing
press. The original idea for the laptop/notebook computer - as opposed to
the desktop PC - came to me in 1968 when I noticed that the Gutenberg
Bible looked like those old, large, expensive manuscript books, yet most
books from the 16th century onward have been small and portable.

A few side comments: Though there were "3 million" men, women, and
children in the colonies, about half were slaves, so Paine's actual
audience was only 1.5 million. One careful estimate I have seen placed the
number of pamphlets then in circulation between 500,000 and 600,000 - so
almost every colonial family would have likely had a chance to read
Paine's writings.

Imagine what that kind of penetration would be like today. It would
require a press run of about 120 million copies. From all accounts, the
literacy rate and the ability to follow complex arguments are lower today
than they were in the 18th century, so fewer would participate. There is a
mass medium that can reach such a large audience - TV - but arguments
against monarchy and in favor of democracy cannot be reasonably debated in
the electronic stained-glass windows of television any better than they
could be handled with medieval stained glass. TV is about other kinds of
messages. Thus, in the 20th century, we have been without any mass medium
for serious discourse - until the creation of the Internet.

A final note: Paine's URL would not be http://www.commonsense.com because
he was not a commercial enterprise. How about
http://www.transcommonsense.ideas?

Alan Kay 
Fellow, Apple Computer