The Life and Opinions of David Weichert

Folklore.org ist eine Sammlung lesenswerter Geschichten aus den Anfängen der Firma Apple. Vom Apple ][ über die Lisa bis zum ersten Mac, wie die Unterschriften ins Gehäuse kamen, wie man Bill Gates beinahe eine Maus erklärt hätte, von Prototypen, Bugs und Porsches, …

Zuerst gesehen beim als Chaos TV Episode CTV107, möchte ich dieses Stück vergangene Zukunft allen ans Herz legen, denen in diesen Wintertagen nach etwas nuklearer Wärme ist.

Quelle: Süddeutsche Zeitung in der Ausgabe von diesem Wochenende (5./6. Januar 2008).

Check out this article on the history of Pixar (the company that brought you ‚Toy Story‘ and all those lovely names for your Debian releases). What struck me most was the following sentence: „… he was given a position at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he got a reputation for being peculiar.“ What? Peculiar in Xerox PARC in the 1970s? I was instantaneously impressed.

The person called peculiar is Dick Shoup who grabed and manipulated video footage when the people around him were trying to invent an office suite. Xerox PARC must have been one of the most creative places in space and time ever. Every time I sit on a bean bag I try to imagine what it must have been like there back then.

„Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there’s no substitute.“ – Thomas Scoville: The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature.

For over three decades Unix is known as a powerful and flexible operating system, technically superior to most of its more popular rivals. The larger the network, the more important the task, the more it shines. So why is Unix still not everybody’s favourite? OS X, KDE and Gnome have made Unix systems more accessible for the masses, but Unix is still quite remote, hidden under a layer of GUI. It’s like a novel competing with omnipresent glossy magazines, adverts and TV. It will always be apreciated by the savvy, but the majority will simply fail to even notice let alone understand. It is not only that Unix lacks marketing. It is that Unix is demanding. To use Unix you have to read and be capable of abstract thought. This will take some effort on behalf of the user. On the other hand people who lack numeracy and reading skills will always find plenty of opportunity to fail where others succeed.This may seem like the arrogant Unix geek drivel that puts people off, but at the core of the matter lies the fact, that being smart is quite a good thing — or why does everybody insist on telling children to go to school? If you made it this far, you might want to read some more.

Recently a friend recommended the documentary Commanding Heigths — The Battle for the World Economy to me. The good news is that it is available for viewing online. Based on a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw it tells the story of two of the most influential economists and how thier ideas shaped the economic policies of the twentieth century: Friedrich August von Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. The former being an advocate of free market capitalism and the latter the founder of modern macroeconomics and a devout believer in anti-cyclical government intervention to counter the most devestating effects of unreined capitalist market forces.The tone of the series is mostly pro free markets and pro globalization and critiques have pointed out the political bias reflected by the corporate sponsorship of the programme. However, Yergin and Stanislaw do not fail to address the problems of the new global economy (Russia, Asian Crisis, Argentina,…). They remain cautiously optimistic about the link between free market capitalism and freedom. Certainly it is more a trip to the market than a work indicative of a third way. This is probably not so much a shortcoming of the authors, but founded in what seems to be the unanimous success of free markets at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the failiure of viable alternatives to emerge.The question remains, how the cause of liberty can be served best under the current economic conditions and with terrorism and counter-terrorism raising the stakes for those interested in defending the idea of a free society. Some of the answers given seem too simple. Is freedom in Chile really a result of the forces of free markets? How does China’s model of capitalism with free markets without freedom for its people hold up? Is it just a transitional phase of capitalism or indicative of a failure of free markets to fulfill Hayek’s promise? Have free markets failed to emerge in Russia — as Yergin and Stanislaw suggest — because a (post-)soviet culture of theft triumphed over entrepreneurial spirit?

Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass ich diesen Satz einmal sinnvoll anbringen könnte, aber sehen Sie selbst!