---
title: Retrospect on Foresight
author: Chris Hodapp
date: January 8, 2018
tags: technobabble, rambling
---

/(Spawned from some idle thoughts around the summer of 2015.)/

Why are old technological ideas that were "ahead of their time", but
which lost out to other ideas, worth studying?

We can see them as raw ideas that "modern" understanding never
refined - misguided fantasies or even just mistakes.  The flip side of
this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of a nearly
inescapable modern context and all of the preconceptions and blinders
it carries.

In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:

- they're detached from this modern context (by mere virtue of it not
  existing yet),
- they have considerable experience, imagination, and foresight,
- they devoted time and effort to work extensively on something and to
  communicate their thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.

To put it in another way: They give us analysis done from a context
that is long gone. They help us think beyond our current context.
They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path
then?"

[[http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html][Epigram #53]] from Alan Perlis offers some relevant skepticism here: "So
many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a
voyage on the semantic gulf."  My interpretation of it is that we tend
to idolize ideas, old and new, because they sound somehow different,
innovative, and groundbreaking, but attempts at analysis or practical
realization of the ideas leads to a bleaker reality, perhaps that the
idea is completely meaningless (the equivalent of a [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deepity][deepity]], perhaps),
wildly impractical, or a mere facade over what is already established.

* Examples

* Scratch

- Douglas Engelbart is perhaps one of the canonical examples of a person
  who was an endless source of these ideas.  Ted Nelson arguably is
  another.  Alan Turing is an early example widely regarded for his
  foresight.
- [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/][As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)]]
- "Do you remember a time when..." only goes so far.