Post by Omar Rizwan (@omar@social.omar.website)

efficiency

> Even in this early period, graphics were considered by many to be a frivolous use of computing technology. Computational resources were a limited and extremely expensive commodity, and making pictures seemed to many a waste of time… [extended quote]

So much stuff is like this tbh and has these sort of vision-first (+resentment even after it succeeds) dynamics. Engelbart was similarly marginal, as were neural network people for decades, as was the internet back when it ran on phone networks
among other things it shows the problem with an efficiency mindset, because these are all 'inefficient' uses of available resources
but the thing is that once people actually want something, new hardware can often be created which _makes_ these things efficient, the available resource set can change

Lisp/dynamic/interpreted languages also feel like this: you pay (an extravagant-seeming amount) for a new creative substrate that lets you come up with different kind of stuff, and once you have the new stuff you see that it's valuable

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