Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Mouse Video Archive
serutan writes "Stanford University has a retro-cool series of video clips of a 1968 presentation that foreshadowed the Internet and marked the public debut of the mouse. It is a surreal, weirdly captivating piece of computer history." Part of the site includes a solicitation for those who have memories and stories about the old days of computing, when programs were measured in inches and people felt they were lucky, lucky I tell you, to have ones and zeros.
The page linked is, of course, the one from BT's hyperlink patent story we discussed recently. One of the videos on the site demonstrates the use of that very thing.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
another repeat
It's the Ivy League theme-day on Slashdot!
.. How great it was when you figured out that WordPerfect 5.0 had mouse support? Not that anybody had mice back then... After all, it was the 1980's for cryin' out loud.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
[. ..] people felt they were lucky, lucky I tell you, to have ones and zeros.
Well, read this piece and think about it for a moment!
Okay it's a bit old.. couldn't resist though :)
we didn't have the luxury of 0nes AND Zeros, we had ONLY 0nes. Yup, those were the good old days. No bugs like division by Zeros and all array indices start with 0nes!
But eventually we grew tired of having only 0nes, so we tried all we can to discover the mysterious Zero.
We were sooooo excited when we finally realized the way to get Zeros (and lots of them) is to get rid of our NES that's been consuming so much of our time. So we are left with 0!
Ahh, the good old days. Though it sometimes troubles me to see how kids these days forget the pain we went through to bring them the Zeros. All they talk about are Twos...
even the first mouse had 3 buttons! ;)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
And why can't we have these clips in MPEG or something that everybody can see?
-- PC architecture - what a mess.
Doesn't this trump the BT patent on Hyperlinks?
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If you were not born when this event took place (1968) please step aside and wait until tomorrow to view the site. This way, us older nerds with the short memories can have a chance at it.
Younger folks who actually programmed a PDP-anything also can have a quick look.
Whould that be:
- Real life age?
- Internet age (equal to 10 times the numbers of years you've used the Internet)
- Slashdot age (slashdot_user_id - max_slashdot_user_id)?
*sigh* ...
British Telecom, Hyperlinking And Mr. Englebart Slashdot, 28 Sep 2000
I think it's amazing that these guys were developing all this back in '68 and it's taken 32 years before the rest of the world catches on.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
And of course, just to make my day even better, they used .ram to encode their video, so I couldn't watch it.
And before you tell me that I can download some worthless extra baggage of a player, I already know that there is one. I always messes up my system so I refuse to install it, and I don't want another player thank you. This is exactly why media formats should be free and why it's a good thing M$ bundles programs etc(just as linux distros do the same). We don't want to pay for watching a free piece of video...
Now ignore me and read someone elses post that probably won't make your day worse like this post has. I am feeling negative and I am letting it out on you.
This is great stuff! Someone should enter this into the ongoing BT hyperlink-patent trial if it hasn't already been done. Check it out yourself: http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/07engel200.ram Looks very much like hyperlinking to me! And that was 1968!
Maybe the bad guys will now lose for a change.
I have (an old copy of) RealPlayer for Linux so I was able to watch those videos.
...)
/. account)
I wonder if there are more websites like these.
It is interesting to find how many things were already thought and available several years before common people actually knew that they existed. (The Internet, Windowing environments, RPC,
If you know of other websites please post them here.
Thanks, TSK (Too lazy to have my own
God, I'd love to see this on the national news someplace.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Cue the ucam.chat New Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Binary? We used to dream o' binary!
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I just can't understand why universities continue to use the Real media format for streaming. Shouldn't they (universities) be embracing more open ended necessarily open source, though that would be even better) streaming technologies? It really bothers me that Stanford wants me to install Real's really crappy player.
AC comments get piped to
"Doug demonstrates working with a graphic file tagged with hyperlinked items. Clicking on a link in the graphic, Doug jumps to separate items, such as texts, linked to the graphic."
We call this Prior Art.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
I do believe the original prototype is still on display at The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA.
It's encased in a transparent plastic box and you can actually pick it up and study it at close. I was lucky enough to get a couple of snapshots of it.
Get a glimpse here.
naah sig schmig
* Microsoft rips off Apple
* Apple rips off Xerox
* Xerox rips off Stanford's Augmentation Research Center
Who did Stanford's Augmentation Research Center rip off?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I remember that particular mouse. It was like a big hockey puck, but without a ball. It had two feet that would spin when you moved the mouse. Depending on how both feet spun (together for left and right (cw/ccw for forward and back) it moved the curser (sic). It worked suprisingly well.
I like the new optical mice better though, especially since the "puck" mouse was awkward fit in the hand...
That stanford mouse is too old school
Has anyone got this as one big file?
I'd LOVE to put this on Video CD and show it to a bunch of people...
mindslip
people felt they were lucky, lucky I tell you, to have ones and zeros.
Oh yeah? We had to use the letter 'O'. And when RAM was being developed the only way we could store anything was by building up static electricity and using our fingers. And then sometimes we didn't even have socks. Other times we didn't have carpet. Any we liked it that way.
How can you not see the incredibale similarities to web browing. I found the video vey entertaining
These guys are going to get so sued by Disney, Don't they know that Disney owns "The Mouse"! :-)
I agree that formatting these videos in RealVideo was a regrettable choice.
I also wish it weren't encoded at such a high bitrate. You 56k users will have a hard time looking at these, if these are in the same format as when they were first slashdotted; at times, even my cablemodem couldn't keep up. In fact, since it is a monochrome recording, isn't there a monochrome codec that could be used to archive this video with the same quality but without the bandwidth overkill?
Yes... we loved our ones and zeros (not to mention BAUDOT too!)... and we loved the front panel lights where we could actually watch binary flowing through the registers... and who could forget the fantastic rocker switches on the front where you could REALLY man-handle your software.
Yes... the good old days where finding a bug in your program meant that the computer operator simply threw a 2 inch thick printout at you with a scrawled note at the top... YOU HAVE A BUG. And who could forget the chad wars while waiting for a program to compile!
But the thing we ESPECIALLY liked is the fact that there was no Microsoft.... computers were pure and we didn't need 2 gigahertz pentiums in order to take 3 minutes to boot a stupid OS.
The good old days... when computers were computers and programmers actually knew how to program!
Seriously, this is a story worth re-posting every two to three years.
There's always Net newbies coming here and bookmarks that need updating.
Most interesting to me this time are the metaphors Doug does[n't] use -- language shapes the world ya know.
Dirt doesn't need luck.
Doug Engelbart's comments on the '68 demo, recorded in 2000.
http://www.liquid.org/glossary/68_demo.html
why does the screen make funny noises whenever the display changes? I wish mine did that.
This time I have PROOF!
I love the little sounds that Engelbart's system made, as a function and work indicator. Not very practical, but cool nonetheless. I wish photoshop would do something like that whenever i apply a gaussian blur on a 40MB file. :)
Wasn't this posted before? Same content different site, just not cut up into short videos?
scott
I refuse to install Real. Shame..
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
OK, it's now 1998. What cool features do we want on our new computer?...ummm...
Disclaimer: I'm one of the "crusty old pharts" you read about...still make a living programming in, among other languages, COBOL. Last year, I burned a copy of this presentation on a CD, and now use it frequently to educate any "pimply-faced youth" that for whatever reason seem to believe that Microsoft *invented* computing. Try it sometime...
The moral of this story: It ain't innovation if you're copying what has already been done!
Haha, couldn't resist this one!
Mice are very useful, cheap, simple and work well. My ideal kind of hardware.
After some time, though, I get "tired". E.g.:
When you point at an icon, you really point at an area on the table. Mapping (x,y) movements to (x,z) ones is unnatural.
Translating (x,y) to rotation (as in Quake, Descent) is a little better, but not ideal.
========
== =====
Coindently just today I searched for hard-mods using mice (US $3 to #4 here).
A trackball would be great ($30, out of question here); maybe I try to cross a joystick and a mouse...
Ah, another neat idea: using DDR mats to control the cursor. Net result: hands always on keyboard.
Predating all of these was the sliding crank used as a target designator in the Nike missile system. This was a 2 degree of freedom crank; you could turn the crank, or slide the handle radially. This device is not well known, but can be seen at the restored launch site in Marin County, CA. The guidance computer for the Nike was an analog system, not a digital computer, though.
What exactly is a chord keyset? To me it looked as if the gentleman was using it to issue commands. I wish that something similar had been introduced into the PC. I know that I find it hard to remember keyboard shortcuts. Having a separate tool for this that had 5 or 6 keys would make a great addition the the PC platform and would make it easier for me to remember which buttons to push. Or maybe I'm just crazy.
Smeghead every day of the week.
LOL imagin if TG carryied this one!!! thatd be awesome cuz then we could all see the history of the Mouse.
...when programs were measured in inches
Inches long? Or inches thick?
I don't really mind closed source.
] ...sucks...[buffering(35%)]...my...[buffering(50%) ]...arse.
Hell, my desktop OS is Windows.
I never install Real because it's an ugly, ad-laden, untrustworthy piece of spyware crap.
Besides, I'd rather have files I can download, because streaming...[buffering (10%)]...in any...[buffering(15%)]...format...[buffering(20%)
And as for MS being an illegal monopoly, I'll just say I think Be's argument is much more valid than Netscape's, because unlike Netscape, Be's flagship product didn't suck.
C-X C-S
Hmmm....I read this a year ago on here. It's just like those stupid jokes servers I was on back before gopher. After awhile, I get the same jokes again. So I unsubscribed, nothing new.
Still it's an awesome video, who knows what videos they have now, of things that will look extermely weird to our children.
See this[stanford.edu]
Prof. Englebart creates a hyperlinked carrot!!!!
BT sucks @ss
While Doug certainly had alot to do with bringing the machine to the people, he didn't quite invent all of the ideas shown in the '68 Demo. Some of them had been around for years, and in some cases, decades. Alot of people tend to think that 50's and 60's computing were archaic and limited in scope..That everything before the personal computer was miserably bad, terribly slow and difficult to handle. Not true.
For example, Ivan Sutherland was doing primitive virtual reality, complete with head-mounted displays and motion sensors, by 1969.. Of course, it wasnt like Quake or anything, but the idea was there, the code was there, and the people to do it were there. Analog voice synthesis goes back to 1939. Realtime text-to-speech synthesis popped up in 1962. Your MP3 collection is the great, great, great grandson of research done in 1958 on digital sound synthesis.
More interestingly, perhaps, is videoconferencing. Videoconferencing, as an idea, was first demonstrated in 1926. If you can find Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" at Blockbuster, rent it. Like Englebart, Lang's vision was horrifyingly ahead of its time. Theres a scene in the film where one person dials up another person (complete with an on-screen display of the dialing process!) and within a few seconds, it connects and thye begin talking to eachother via video.
Not bad for 1926.
Cheers,
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
I saw a brief interview with Engelbart on TechTV over a year ago in response to tactile mice (like Logitech's iFeel mouse), and he had some interesting things to say about mouse evolution.
One of the things he mentioned was that his original mouse used two orthogonal wheels instead of a mouseball. If you tilted the mouse, it would rest on only one of the wheels. Depending on which wheel it was resting on, you then could move the mouse perfectly horizontally or vertically.
This can be kind of useful in CAD work. Modern mice don't do this, although I guess you can restrict movement to one dimension via software anyway.
The University of Canterbury (in New Zealand) used to show this to stage 1 computer science students. It blew me away then and it is still impressive.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
At least here in Sweden, it is a known "fact" that the inventor Håkan Lans invented the mouse (and color graphics, and a mini submarine, and...)
See this link for some more info about him.
But this has already been discussed before.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Try this site also..
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Losers
Was ANYBODY able to find Al Gore in those clips?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Why on Earth is this modded "Insightful"? Give the man what he wants (and deserves); mod him Troll.