Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about airplanes. In 1981, my mother and I flew from Warsaw to New York City in this airplane, an Ilyushin-62 . The Il-62 exemplifies a Soviet design approach I like to think of as "add engines until airborne". Soviet engineers lacked the computers to calculate all the bending and wiggling the wings would do if you hung the engines under them, so they just strapped engines on the back. This plane actually used a little kickstand when it was parked empty, to keep it from tipping over and pointing up like a rocket. In those days, Warsaw had maybe ten flights a day. It was a big deal...