Switch Interviews Douglas Engelbart

noema writes "If you don't know Douglas Engelbart you don't know the history of computers. Switch has published a transcript of an intense session with him about his visions on enhancing the human intellect. He was a major player in the development of the mouse, cut-and-paste, multi-window GUI, teleconferencing and hyperdocuments. He is a well known WYSIWYG and ease-of-use critic. The Mother of all Demos is his thing too." Here's a link to the transcript itself, which is presented as a PDF.

Comments

Re:A lot of his innovations

[radish]

For stuff like word processing, I would prefer for it to be navigatable without myself moving my hand to the mouse at all. THAT would be peak efficiency.


Never heard of keyboard shortcuts then? Any decent WP app (actually any decent app period) should be totally keyboard navigable, if it's not complain to the designers. The mouse is not a replacement for the keyboard it's an augmentation.

Journo's stupidity bugs me

[ishmaelflood]

"Slayton: ... about knowledge and organizations. If I think about an
airplane, the manufacture of an airplane, the first thing that occurs to
me is that no one knows how an aircraft gets built. No one. There's
no one that knows how to build an airplane anymore because the
artifact of the airplane is so complex and involves so many people that
that knowledge is dispersed. It doesn't belong to one person and it
probably doesn't belong to the group. It belongs to the interactions or
the associations between people and between organizations. That's a
such a different idea about knowledge as much as it is a phenomena
that our culture has found ourselves in more recently because of what
we produce. We continue to produce a more complex world..."

Well that's you buddy. Real engineers /do/ know how complex things are built. I can't, this minute, tell you how an engine management computer works (I do suspensions, for now), but you can bet that if I needed to, inside two weeks I would. Knowledge is dispersed inside an organisation, but if the chief engineers don't know what is going on then the whole edifice will do a Saddam.

This whole 'we are ants powerless in the face of the complexity of modern technology' crap gives me the irrits. Just because you are a word mangler who couldn't do a technical degree doesn't mean the rest of us are that stupid.

Re:Journo's stupidity bugs me

[Styx]

I thinks his point was, more likely, that no single person knows everything about our modern extremly complex systems. Even a chief engineer wouldn't (realisticly!) be able to wrap his head around all the minute details needed to build a 747. And why should he have to? He has specialists who understand all the minute details. He can concern himself with the objectives the contruction process has to achive, drawing on his specialists when he needs to.

You're not powerless, just because you can't know everything there is to how about everything, on a sufficiently large-scale project.

Computers too complex

[mufasio]

Some thing interesting from the transcript was when someone named Mays commented on a Mac ad:
Here you have a world famous cellist who has spent 30 years of his life learning how to play a complex instrument saying he wants his computer to be "easy to use."

I think that this makes a good point that computers are complex "instruments" as well and should require time and practice to use effectively just as it takes time to play a cello well.

Re:Good grief...

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably because the grandparent's feelings are matched by a fair few /. readers.

Not everybody who reads /. is in an IT industry/profession; News for Nerds has enough topics that it's a general tech news site. Learning something while reading is quite handy, and at least he seemed to have read the article, was just a little dumbfounded by it.

I always thought the mouse was invented at Xerox Parc. Ooops.