{"id":3150,"date":"2011-05-16T10:21:22","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T15:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/?p=3150"},"modified":"2011-05-18T15:51:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T20:51:04","slug":"don-knuth-beat-me-to-email-divesting-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/don-knuth-beat-me-to-email-divesting-but\/","title":{"rendered":"Don Knuth beat me to email divesting, but&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu\/~knuth\/index.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Donald E. Knuth\" src=\"http:\/\/www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu\/~knuth\/don.gif\" title=\"Donald E. Knuth\" width=\"140\" height=\"192\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donald E. Knuth<\/p><\/div>In early 1990, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Donald-E.-Knuth\/e\/B000AQ6O7M\/\">programming hero and influential textbook author (&#8220;The Art of Computer Programming&#8221; in more or less four volumes so far)<\/a>, Donald Knuth wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu\/~knuth\/email.html\">I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I&#8217;d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.<\/p>\n<p>Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don&#8217;t have time for such study.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ve only been using something like email since 1977, but I stayed with it longer all the time hoping for improvements. The promised improvements didn&#8217;t come from email really; more from the various email interfaces the best of which are still attempting to integrate &#8220;Activity Streams&#8221; and variously named productivity flows into the desktop in some meaningful manner. The first mistake is focusing on the desktop and on work.<\/p>\n<p>Just as Xerox focused on a personal computer while &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2011\/05\/16\/110516fa_fact_gladwell\">as Malcom Gladwell notices (behind a paywall at New Yorker)<\/a> &#8212; Apple focused on a popular and affordable computer, email integration needs to so to where people both play and work, where they have family, friends and co-workers in some customizable way. And that means the most personal interfaces yet known &#8212; those on mobile devices.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, I&#8217;m exploring other options with your help. When you or others contact me and where will help me decide where to put my communications energies and time.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike Knuth, who handily handed off his email tasks to his secretary as he declared email abandonment, I&#8217;m divesting and looking for better, more efficient options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In early 1990, programming hero and influential textbook author (&#8220;The Art of Computer Programming&#8221; in more or less four volumes so far), Donald Knuth wrote: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I&#8217;d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noemail","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3158,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150\/revisions\/3158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}