IA or AI?

I’ve been reading a paper [1] written two decades ago, which itself is an account of events two decades before that. It is Alan Kay nominally writing about the history of a programming language called Smalltalk. I say “nominally” because already by Smalltalk 72, Kay was losing interest in language matters and wanted concentrate on what the language, as part of the computer-as-medium, could do for thought. Along with various other sources of inspiration that led to Smalltalk (Sutherland’s Sketchpad, the Burroughs B220, the Burroughs B5000, …) Kay mentions attending in 1968 the conference presentation by Douglas Engelbart [2] that has since become known as the “Mother of All Demos”.

In 1968, when timesharing by users behind teletype terminals was regarded as avant-garde, Engelbart gave a demo that featured a number of firsts: a screen display for both and text and graphics, interactive text-editing, a mouse. All that was integrated into a fluidly handled medium. Kay gives testimony to the huge impression this made on him: “Engelbart was a prophet of Biblical proportions”.