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Xerox PARCers Doug Englebart and Alan Kay Webcast

Posted by emmett on from the nifty-stuff dept.

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.

10 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. What, no text version? by the_burton · · Score: 2
    I don't know about you guys, but I'd much rather skim through a text version of a presentation... Much faster. Who has time to listen to a long webcast these days? Oh well...

    B.T.W, I can see this site getting /.ed really really quickly.

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  2. Pls give Alan Kay more credit! by caliban · · Score: 3

    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.

    1. Re:Pls give Alan Kay more credit! by Kaufmann · · Score: 4

      To be fair, Simula already had objects in the late 1960's, although its objects were conceptually more like coroutines than like the modern concept of an object. But otherwise, I agree with you that Smalltalk pretty much started it all in terms of OO, and calling him "the guy who invented overlapping windows" is ridiculous.

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    2. Re:Pls give Alan Kay more credit! by Kaufmann · · Score: 2

      Uh? What edition of Hackers are you referring to? I read the 1994 paperback edition, and it doesn't mention anything about this at all. (*blinks, shakes head*)

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    3. Re:Pls give Alan Kay more credit! by Tim+Pierce · · Score: 2

      Check out HACKERS by Steven Levy to support this, but according to that book it was actually Bill Atkinson @ Apple who invented overlapping windows.

      You're probably thinking of Insanely Great, also written by Levy. That book describes how Atkinson developed a new method for calculating overlapping regions after visiting PARC:

      During the PARC visit, Atkinson was impressed that Smalltalk somehow ``knew'' how to show only the visually relevant information at any given millisecond. The irony is that Atkinson was mistaken -- the Alto used a much less elegant, and slower, method than clipping. But buoyed by what he thought was Smalltalk's existence proof of clipping, Atkinson kept hammering at a solution.... Eventually wave after wave of Atkinson's brainpower eroded the problem. He had set out to reinvent the wheel; actually he wound up inventing it. His solution dealt with a sophisticated use of algebra to calculate which ``regions'' of the window had to be drawn and remembered. ( Insanely Great, 1994, paperback p. 87)

      It's a flawed book but is still very entertaining. Levy has a knack for capturing the excitement and spirit of hacking.

  3. Stanford Research Institute by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    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.

  4. Doug Englebart at Stanford by Raindeer · · Score: 3

    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/

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  5. Blasted Streaming Media by wowbagger · · Score: 2
    Unfortunately, the site doesn't have the real audio file available for download. The only way they have it is via PNM or RTSP, i.e. streaming.

    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....

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  6. They are moving! by lexspoon · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. SciAm Sept. 1977 page 234 right here by ch-chuck · · Score: 2

    here

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