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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.

4 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. 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. 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.

  3. 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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