As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

Future of Coding

A classic "80-year predictions" episode. How did we do, humanity?

Links

$ Patreon

• We're considering changing The Name of the FoC community, podcast, et cetera.
• Transatlantic Accent, and all the ships at sea.
• This episode's advertisements: Ex-Lax, Mifflin, et cetera.
• The New Media Reader is a good read(er).
• Blue Prince is surely everyone's 2025 GOTY. You'll find ample discussion of its twisty design in our bonus feed.
• Oppenheimer was probably my least favourite David Nolen movie.
• ENIAC was, for a time, the computer.
• Engelbart
• The Polaroid instant camera dates back to the 1940s!
• Google Glass and Ray-Ban Meta, sigh
• Wikipedia's List of Existing Technologies Predicted in Science Fiction
• Apparently microfilm and microfiche are both instances of microform.
• Boy Milk, no explanation needed.
• Sean M. Carroll, physicist.
• Claude Shannon, information theorist ;)
• AI Is Not Your Friend appeared in The Atlantic on May 9th, 2025.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk is "artificial artificial intelligence".
• Awesome GitHub lists
• Daring Fireball and Kottke.org are two long-running blogs that helped popularize the "linkblog" form.
• The Wirecutter was our previous top pick for product recommendations, but their history of shilling junk and our growing concerns about e-waste have led us to downgrade them in our rankings.
• Devine (the other Lu) maintains a pair of wikis, one for hundredrabbits and another for research and projects.
• Alexander Obenauer also does a lovely job publishing research notes.
• Unison and Dynamicland are two strong visions for the future of computing.

Music:

• lemon (tussed/screwed because everyone listens at 2x)

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See you in the future!

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/077

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