Cory Doctorow's notes on ETCon seem to be the most complete of those that I've seen. His notes on Alan Kay's presentation were particularly interesting. I don't know if 20 years is exactly the window that I would pick, but I definitely feel that PC's and computing in general has become quite boring. There's much less of an exploratory spirit than when I got involved in the business. It's been my hope that open source would help revive a spirit of innovation by relieving people from having to rewrite massive pieces of software in order to tinker with them, but that doesn't really seem to be happening.

Squeak has been jumping on and off my radar for a few years now. It has a number of desirable qualities: small, totally portable, open-source. From the demos that Cory describes, it seems like there's a lot of functionality. James Robertson from Cincom has been gently persistent at trying to get folks to pay attention to Smalltalk again. My big beef has been the lack of an open source Smalltalk -- but Squeak persistently slipped my mind. Perhaps it's time to go have a look at Squeak...