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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.
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.
*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.
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
"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
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)
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!
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.
...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
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
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.