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Xerox PARCers Doug Englebart and Alan Kay Webcast
Ryandav writes "Dr. Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse, and Dr. Alan Kay, creator of overlapping windows, were both part of the research group that created ARPAnet, and were heavily involved at Xerox PARC. Both were invited by the Progress Project and the University of Washington to speak about issues confronting humans as we rethink information technology in the future. The entertaining talk was archived for Webcast here." For those who enjoyed the article we posted earlier about the origins of the Lisa UI, check this out, too.
B.T.W, I can see this site getting /.ed really really quickly.
Polluting the Internet since 2003...
http://percep
The latest version of rvplayer I could get was version 5, which cannot play the movie... please do not post stories that only consist of a video file that cannot be played :-(
...especially his "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" song!
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
Man, the guy created Smalltalk, way back when (early 70's?)
He has a valid claim for _inventing_ OO programming!
I think thats just a little bit more substantial than inventing 'overlapping windows', duh.
A common misconception is that the mouse was invented at Xerox PARC. It was actually first developed at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI (they broke their affiliation w/Stanford). It used a pair of wheels to drive multiturn potentiometer shafts that converted the horizontal and vertical motion into corresponding voltages. The mouse was improved significantly at Xerox, by changing the design to use a ball that drives digital shaft encoders. The encoders generated in-quadrature signals that reveal the direction of travel.
For those of you interested in what Doug Englebart has to say, there is also a webcast available at Stanford. There was a Slashdot article on it a couple of weeks ago. You have to register and all of the info can be found here. http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/
Use Adsense for Charity
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When will these sites learn that for ARCHIVAL purposes, they should put these streams on an FTP or HTTP server, so that those of us with poor bandwidth can DOWNLOAD the stream and then listen to it at our convenience. I wish that Streambox would release a version of their program for Linux....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why waste time on the guys who invented the "mouse" and "windows?" I don't see the REAL INVENTOR OF THE INTERNET getting any credit here -- Al Gore.
These guys had great foresight in the 70s (and
even earlier) and should be honored for it.
But haven't done a whole lot since 1980
and are are being over-hyped.
More importantly, Alan Kay introduced the concept of personal computing and media. Previously, computers were considered devices meant to be used only by businesses and corporations. His vision of individuals owning and using computers was quite radical in the late '60s. To this day, some of his visions have still not been achieved, mainly the Dynabook (read his bio).
And yes, he did invent the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface.
Currently, Alan Kay is working on the Squeak programming langauge, which is a variant of Smalltalk. You can check out his page on the Squeak Swiki at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/378
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Both of these guys are still at it. They did *not* just spout some interesting ideas and then go back to hacking. They are busy putting in the 99% persperation that can transform "gee, what a clever idea" into "holy maceral, they just changed the world".
Specifically, Douglass Engelbert is working on making his idea of corporation/computer synergies come to life, and he's trying to explain to people just what the heck he's talking about (which to hear him, most people still don't get). Alan Kay is working on making his Dynabook goal finally happen, via the Squeak project (www.squeak.org). His original goals outstripped hardware of the 70's could do, but nowadays that is no longer an issue. In fact, when his group first announced the project a few years ago, they titled their paper "Back to the Future". Do they sound slightly condescending to the intervening decades of hacking? Well, they deserve to be!
Overall, let's not go by what the trade rags say is "hot". Trade rags are designed to give people warm fuzzies, not to excite them about difficult goals for computers in society.
I realize this is a *BIT* offtopic, but I have to ask:
At the very beginning, the Master of Ceremony said, '[He and I] rushed out to get the IBM Discounted Workpad for 269.00.'
What Workpad is this? I would like one. Cheap. Any info would be greatly appreciated.
++Om
here
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...and try to get your facts straight. Doug Engelbart was never at PARC, and neither he nor Alan Kay were in the research group that developed ARPAnet. Doug Engelbart's group was at SRI, later moved wholesale to Tymshare, Inc., not sure what happened after Tymshare was bought out by McDonnell-Douglas. Alan Kay's group did invent Smalltalk. They freely acknowledge a debt to Simula in the design of Smalltalk, so Alan Kay most certainly did not invent OOP, though Smalltalk did a great deal to popularize the concept. Dan Ingalls is generally regarded as the chief architect of Smalltalk. _Dealers_of_Lightning_ is the best account I've seen of early days at PARC, acknowledged as accurate by those who were there. Please read it before putting up another article mentioning PARC.
I was there, and it really wasn't all that interesting. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay did a lot for the computing world in their youths, but haven't done anything special in the past decade or so. (Although Kay supposedly had a hand in creating Squeak - it's a great project, check it out.) Engelbart hasn't made a peep in the past 30 years or something. Most of the people in the audience were technophobes, and concentrated on the political issues surrounding "the Internet thing."
My favorite part of the discussion was when the moderator asked "So what will the effect of the Information Technology of the next fifty years be on the general population" - then he coughed and cleared his throat - "of Rwanda?"