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David vs. Goliath
David Gelernter would like to change the world. But he’ll settle for Windows.
November/December 2003
by David Pogue ’85
David Pogue, personal-technology columnist for the New York Times, is the creator and primary author of the Missing Manual series of computer books.
Remember the story of the six blind men and the elephant? One, seizing its tail, declares that an elephant resembles a piece of rope. Another, grasping the trunk, insists that an elephant is more like a snake. And so on, disagreeing, until they come to blows.
If you wanted to retell that story in modern terms, you might approach David Gelernter about playing the elephant.
To artists, he’s a painter from Connecticut who serves on the National Council for the Arts.
To 20 students at the School of Management, he’s Professor Gelernter, the instructor of a new course for non-technical people called “Operating Systems, the Internet, and the Web.”
To technologists, Gelernter is a visionary whose thinking led to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and inspired the Java programming language, and who even (in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds) more or less predicted the rise of the Web.
In the political media, he’s a stinging right-wing commentator who makes Rush Limbaugh look downright timid. He’s a contributing editor to the conservative Weekly Standard, and he wrote a much-discussed article in Commentary in 1996 called “Why Mothers Should Stay Home.”
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David Gelernter ’76 was nearly killed in 1993 by the Unabomber.
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And to almost anyone else, Gelernter is the computer science professor who, in 1993, was nearly killed by a package mailed by the Unabomber. In his 1997 book Drawing Life, Gelernter wrote that the Unabomber was only a symptom of a society out of whack. Any culture, he argued, that could declare Theodore Kaczynski one of the “most intriguing people of 1996,” as People magazine did, was clearly run by intellectuals who worship too blindly at the altar of tolerance.
Gelernter, who majored in religious studies as a member of Yale’s Class of 1976, remains an outspoken critic of society’s direction, but his latest passion is to effect a revolution in a mundane but ubiquitous corner of society: the personal-computer “desktop.” It drives him crazy that our computers still use a desktop metaphor—a filing system based on document icons and folder icons—that was designed 30 years ago, long before the era of e-mail, Web pages, MP3 music files, digital photos, and PDF files.
“The windows-menus-mouse ‘desktop’ interface, invented by Xerox and Apple and now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete,” he wrote in 2000. “It wastes screen space on meaningless images [and] fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images.”
Furthermore, he finds the requirement to name every document and choose a folder location for it an antiquated annoyance. “I never wanted to be a file clerk,” he says today. “The last thing I ever would do in the paper world is write a note, give it a name, file it in a folder, and give that a name.”
In the early ’90s, a cadre of Yale graduate students joined Gelernter’s research group, and they set out to hammer out a better system, creating a company called Scopeware to develop it. They released the consumer version of their creation, a program called Scopeware Vision, earlier this year (for Windows XP or 2000, available at scopeware.com).
The concept is extremely simple, highly visual, and, in its way, as radical and polarizing as any of Gelernter’s opinions. Scopeware Vision’s window covers up the familiar world of icons and folders. In its place, you view the files and e-mail messages of your life as a diagonally cascading stream of what appear to be index cards. As your cursor touches each, another part of your screen displays an enlarged detail view of it.
To find a certain file or message, you type a word or phrase—not necessarily the title—into a search box. In a flash, the program shrinks the visible collection of “index cards” so that you’re seeing only the matches. Where those files sit in the traditional Windows hierarchy of folders makes no difference.
To Gelernter, the most important twist is that your “index cards” are always sorted chronologically. “I have all of my stuff in a personal stream on the desktop: Drafts and files and e-mails and photos and Web bookmarks and appointments,” he says. “It’s a picture of time, from my birth certificate to this afternoon, and then into the future.”
By dragging your cursor across the cascading cards in Scopeware Vision as though you’re strumming a harp, you can rewind into the past and fast-forward into the future. The idea is to make searching easier, on the premise that files and messages for a certain project tend to enter your life at roughly the same time. When you find the file or message you want, you double-click it to open it as usual. (A corporate version, which Yale has licensed for use in administrative departments, makes your personal “stream” available from any computer in the world via the Web.)
Gelernter is convinced that organizing your life’s information tidbits into a time-based “stream” is the way of the future. “We have the first piece of what I think is a guaranteed transition,” he says.
There is, however, a big obstacle that stands between his invention and the masses who would benefit from it: traditional-minded computer geeks. PC Magazine, for example, dismissed Vision as “an adequate program” whose “search tools are somewhat limited when compared with [rival] products.”
“When you build something that’s built on a different model of the universe, you have to expect people will say, ‘I don’t get it,’” says Gelernter. “We do much better with somebody’s grandmother or my kids than with most technology people.”
It may seem improbable that a tiny, 18-person software company could revolutionize computing and wrest dominance from the likes of Microsoft. But Gelernter insists that a grass-roots movement is imminent—and that it won’t be the first time a new technological standard was born without Microsoft’s involvement.
“Microsoft was a puny company not all that long ago,” he says. “It takes an idea that will change people’s lives in three minutes. An idea that’s pictorial. An idea that matters every time you use a computer. When that happens, the world turns upside down. It gets Windows, it gets the Web browser, it gets the spreadsheet, or video games. These change the world. Once consumers see it, they’ll download our software like they downloaded browsers.”
And once Scopeware gains that traction, there’s no stopping the “stream” metaphor. Someday soon, he predicts, you’ll be able to walk up to any computer, or sit down in your car, or flip on the TV, to tune in your personal information stream.
If Scopeware does have a shot at widespread acceptance, one quirk of Gelernter’s makeup may be its ace in the hole: He doesn’t like computers very much. (That irony, he wrote in Drawing Life, was evidently lost on the Unabomber when he selected Gelernter as a target.) He considers himself an artist, a champion of beauty in software design, but not a technologist—a feature that puts him more in touch with the consumers he wants to reach than the usual programming nerd.
“The industry has this idea that if you don’t click with technology, you’re probably IQ-deficient. They say, ‘We’re sorry for you, and we’ll hold your hand and give you talking paper clips.’” Computer geeks, Gelernter says, are “tremendously valuable, but face it: they’re not the only smart people in the world.” In fact, he says, “all of the smartest people I know are non-computer people.”
If that doesn’t seem like a comment that would endear Gelernter to his own professional circle, it wouldn’t be the first. Every aspect of this opinionated thinker—whether political, artistic, literary, or professional—inevitably rubs somebody the wrong way, and sometimes several wrong ways at once.
“My colleagues in the technology world tend to be leftists,” he explains. “I have my students read part of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, which is a flaming social condemnation of English society in 1937—a society that assumes that if it’s a machine, it’s got to be better. Most of the people who agree with Orwell today are not Republicans; in fact, they’re often communitarian leftists. But that’s okay; I’m a weird case. I’ve accepted that fact for a long time.”  |
