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Thought as a Technology

cognitivemedium.com · 4,581 words · saved by 14 readers

Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world? Some people experience this when they play imaginative video games, such as Monument Valley, Braid, or Portal. For some people, it occurs when they first understand how a spreadsheet program can be used to model a company, an industry, or even an entire country. And for some people, it occurs when they first use a programming language based on particularly powerful ideas, such as Haskell or Lisp. My own first experience of this awe and delight was when I used the program MacPaint. I was 11 years old. Up to that point, my experience of computers was with command line interfaces, such as the Apple II, IBM PC, and Commodore 64: To do graphical work was complicated. On my Commodore 64, I would sometimes make games, using graph paper to sketch out the pixels in my game characters, before translating them into a sequen

Thought as a Technology Thought as a Technology Michael Nielsen / November 2016 Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world? Some people experience this when they play imaginative video games, such as Monument Valley , Braid , or Portal . For some people, it occurs when they first understand how a spreadsheet program can be used to model a company, an industry, or even an entire country. And for some people, it occurs when they first use a programming language base

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