Builders manifesto (aka* Software builders manifesto) Build as much as you can, experiment as much as you can, build something you are passionate about. *- I just created this manifesto, so it is a bit of overstretch on the “aka” part 😄

Sounds like the Kay "best way to predict the future is to invent it" quote. Waiting as a strategy may work out and if it does, saves a lot of time/effort and avoids risk of failure. On the other hand, there's no guarantee and reduced chance that the desired results will arrive eventually, or may be under control of some other parties to pursue/support their interests/goals - with an active/working/practical involvement vs. mere passive consumption. "Must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's" (minus personal computing/knowledge-management, because much of it would be too much work for a single person, also by duplicating/reinventing everything from scratch, point being with ARC, PARC, etc. it's teams/communities organizing and cultivating a larger effort). Obviously, there's the big names and pioneers who are famous for their contributions. Some of them might be geniuses, naturally talented or got lucky (right time right place), but a number of them might just have been regular guys like me, you, everyone else. Including the armies of lesser or not known people doing an enormous amount of many little and huge tasks, to enable any such progress to be made in the first place. A lot of the work is optimization details, which just clutters and distracts from the main concepts, therefore by just extracting the concepts, details/optimizations can be filled in later or differently. Today, computers are cheaply available and lots of people are on the network, these are additional advantages that can help. So OK, with Kay "perspective is worth 80 IQ points" (perspective including conceptualizations, architecture, etc., it's not a unique magic insight that is dropped from the heavens), one does not need to be that clever (given IQ not necessarily being any good in the first place, more at risk of producing and furthering the complication and complexity of the mess instead of reducing it?). Better perspective may come from looking at the history (which is largely forgotten, abandoned and lost, trapped/tied to old/lost machinery, trapped in restrictive copyright publications, out of print, not recorded, etc.), so the Bush/Licklider/Taylor <- Engelbart <- Kay <- Victor is to supply some of that perspective. Also, it's very, very unorganized: hard to find good materials, hard to (re-)discover their interrelations, hard to recognize and avoid known traps, hard to gain some overview (difficult and/or expensive). With, for example, Kay, looking at many things of his time, maybe this leads to doing all of the aspects eventually: hardware (input/output devices, computers), programming methodologies, languages, and so on, as otherwise would remain limited to (re)invent a minor detail that's trapped/limited by lots of other parts outside of one's control, versus innovation which is the combination of already existing parts, which just hadn't been combined as these previously were outside of the field/domain. I'm not sure if small experiments and prototypes are a good approach to get into addressing the various aspects, to learn about the challenges and why these are difficult/expensive, hopefully to learn navigating the problem space, avoiding traps, following up on potential solutions, making these easier and cheaper, going after these in a strategic manner. Because at the same time, I would also be worried about some kind of a mega-project, as these tend to conflate concerns and get trapped or fail that way (big bloated costly vertical monolith silo/stack).