mattlarge's comments

Ada was the first language I learned properly, 1996 first year Computer Science. It was the last year that they taught Ada as the starter language at that University, they moved to Java after that.

Totally agree with KWD. Freemind is the first app I open before starting anything new (project/proposal/article etc). I love mind mapping, Freemind's keyboard controls mean you can quickly produce a complex map without ever having to touch the mouse. Love it.

Check out some of the demos on the http://www.tinmith.net site, or http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/Projects/. I love the demo where a group of people draw on a virtual map and the person on campus sees the draw arrows to guide them.

I'd like some decent Augmented Reality apps/games, proper AR rather than the barcode based stuff. Something that could recognise an environment and overlay cool stuff. A decent camera, GPS, compass and good processing power are all required. Figure between G1 and iPhone 3 we might be getting there.

True, but I was being a little ham fisted in my original reply. They did win out by executing better than their competitors in the competition of the moment, but what I was trying to suggest was that, in all probability, no-one could have succeeded in trying to do those things at an earlier time. You couldn't go back to 1996 and start YouTube.

With YouTube you couldn't have survived the storage costs at an earlier time, and also there needed to be ubiquitous playback, in the form of Flash. Flickr similarly would have been financially onerous due to storage costs ealier on.

In 1996 our bandwidth was so tiny that you really could not have done YouTube at that point.

Wikipedia is a slightly different point. It was launched in 2001, so in 1996 you obviously could have gotten a lead on it, but if you look at the growth curve it wasn't until 2005/2006 that it really took off. I just don't think that the community of editors/users was broad enough until that point.

You are totally right that good execution counts for most of the success and going back in time would allow you to do that much better with the hindsight gained. My thought is just that there are constraints over what is achievable at any given time and the common thread that I see in wildly successful companies is that they managed to jump on those turning points just before they are there, first mover advantage and all that gumph.

I think Zepolen is correct, so much comes down to timing. If you look at a lot of the "successes" that you would want to get there before they were reaching slightly beyond current tech/social environment. For example, Flickr/YouTube were predicated on the fact that storage costs were crashing and end user bandwidth was drastically increasing. You couldn't have created them much earlier.

Wikipedia was timed for the explosion of users on the internet allowing for massive crowd sourcing, again you couldn't have gotten there much earlier.

The best way to leverage knowledge like that would be to go back and become the world's most prescient VC. Also avoiding the bubble bursting and the current crash would be great.

I like the idea of going back and getting myself into a position to work on some of these projects though. being able to be there when they happened would be cool

I normally draw a prototype in Inkscape using layers to show different states of a site.