Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The IA of Things: Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned (16 Apr 2005) With the InfoSpace project, I was already wanting to move past what I saw as the simple embodiments developed in the 1960s at SRI, Xerox PARC in the 1970s, and embodied in commercial products in the 1980s. I was seeking systems that utilized data architectures based on non-centralized metadata strategies, and simple, but new and powerful interactive visualizations they made possible. When I moved to Palo Alto in 1989, one of the first presentations I made of the InfoSpace concept was to Apple Computer's Advanced Research and Development Group. I was pleased that the entire group sat in on my presentation of my ideas. The browser concept, the integration of it into the operating system's very desktop as an interactive space, and the powerful model of interactive data visualizations for files and returned hits (something that would serve just as well for net-wide searching as for visualization and access to local files). After my presentation, the then Director of Advanced Research thanked me, but told me that Apple didn't think the Internet was the future of the Macintosh. This was to be the first of many disappointing missed opportunities to bring what I felt were changes of great magnitude to the user experience and information architecture fields. Article URL: http://orbitnet.com/iasummit2005/ Read 20 more articles from By Special Request sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Thin Slicing in Information Space     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy