The premise#
Mindstorms collects the powerful ideas of programming and computing in one place, and tries to present them the way they deserve to be presented: as live, contested, beautiful, and unfinished.
Most of computing's public memory is short. We remember last year's frameworks and forget that the questions they answer were asked — and answered differently, often better — fifty years ago. This site is a small attempt to lengthen that memory, and to take seriously the oldest and most ambitious idea in the field: that the computer is not mainly a machine for automating tasks, but a new medium for thought, on the order of writing or mathematics.
The site is named for Seymour Papert's Mindstorms (1980), and shaped by the work of Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, J.C.R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Kenneth Iverson, Bret Victor, and many others you'll find throughout.
What's here#
- Topics — six themes that organise everything on the site.
- Essays — long-form pieces on the people and ideas that shaped, and could reshape, computing.
- The idea encyclopedia — short, linkable definitions of the recurring concepts.
- A timeline — the great ideas of computing in order.
- A reading & watching list — the primary sources, in their authors' own words.
A note on accuracy#
The pieces here aim to be accurate and fair to the historical record, and to send you to the primary sources rather than substitute for them. Where someone is quoted, it's a quote they're well documented as having said or written. Where the history is contested or uncertain, the text tries to say so. If you find an error, please flag it — see below.
Contributing & contact#
Mindstorms is meant to grow. Corrections, suggested essays, ideas for the encyclopedia, and pointers to sources are all welcome.
- Email: hello@mindstorms.site
- Suggest an idea or essay: send the topic and, ideally, the primary source it should rest on.
Reuse#
The writing on this site is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence — quote it, teach with it, build on it, just credit it and link back. The ideas themselves, of course, belong to everyone; that was always the point.