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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?"
.. 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.
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.
Stanford aint Ivy League. Ivy League schools are only in the northeast. See list of Ivy schools, and list containing Stanford's conf (the Pac-10. I do agree, however, that Stanford would be Ivy if they were on the east coast.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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
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.
Real is a perfectly fine format to use to distribute this type of stuff. RealPlayer is available for Win, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. It's not like it costs you money or is not available for most computers.
Pull the fucking stick out of your ass and realize that not everything has to be open source. There are countless perfectly acceptable closed-source programs, and RealPlayer is among them.
The reason to hate Microsoft is not because they are a monopolist but because they are a monopolist which has been found guilty of breaking the law on multiple occassions and has refused to reform their behavior.
Go ahead, mod me down to -1, Troll. I've been at the karma cap for so fucking long that I'm willing to burn it back down to zero JUST SO I CAN TELL THESE OPEN-SOURCE ZEALOTS TO GO TO HELL AND GET INTO THE REAL WORLD!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
why does the screen make funny noises whenever the display changes? I wish mine did that.
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!
I don't have a problem with Real as long as I can download the videos over the fat pipe at work and view them at home. I don't think my boss would appreciate me spending 90 minutes watching these things and I don't think my kids would appreciate me staying at work past their bedtimes...
Unfortunately, people who use Real often only offer their content as streaming.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
...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.
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
UNIVERSITIES should not be using software that they have to pay for
You're joking, right? So every computer on every campus in the world should run either Linux or FreeBSD? What if it's a machine that Linux doesn't support, i.e. SGI (it actually does "works" on some systems, for lack of a better word)? Graphics design majors shouldn't be exposed to Photoshop, they should learn on the GIMP just on principle? Word shouldn't be available to students, even though (unfortunately) it is the de-facto standard word processor file format in the "real world"? What about AutoCAD? You're clearly insane.
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.