Here we assemble stories of the legacy of computing, as they manifest in the features of federated wiki and projects of the federated wiki community.
The medium of this present site - federated wiki - is deeply entwined with the evolution of computing and programming in the USA. Although it has the general appearance of a text artefact, a federated wiki page, or site, or federation, is in fact a computing machine: a regime for distributed computing. As such it holds and evolves a legacy of some of the most significant visions in 20th century computing - and who knows, maybe some of the 21st century too.
We start with some bare bones, and expect to collect more flesh on more bones as the community offers responses. This is an arbitrary listing by a relative outsider in the world of computing - more of a provocation maybe? But hopefully a chorus of voices will swell into a richer score.
In each case, the page will make a connection more or less direct to some feature of federated wiki, or some experiment in the wiki (federated wiki) community.
Some significant experiments since, say, the beginning of 2022 are not even hinted at in this list.
- The Memex story - a thought experiment by Vannevar Bush. - 1968 - The mother of all demos - Doug Engelbart lays out a development agenda with an astonishing prototype. - Objects & windows - Alan Kay at PARC - The smalltalk story - Object orientation takes off - The Hypercard story - A Swiss army knife in software - The Alto - Almost a vernacular machine - Arpanet - Almost an internet - The pattern language story - Programmers review their emergent art - The agile story - Stuff at Techtronix - The wiki wiki way - The wiki principle - A story of Adidas - A story of pods - Signals rather than messages? - Awareness engine - Federation means seeing who is on the same trail - A story of scraping - A place where distributed data come together and mean something - A story of outposts - Computing at the edge - A story of control - Wiki as a controller - Refactoring - Evolutionary phases of wiki