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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.
...I almost can't believe this. Read the mother of all demos link - demo'd mouse, word processing, hyperlinks, and a host of other stuff back in 1968! Is this for real? How come I've never heard of anything like this before?
Seems almost hoaxish...
My internal parser core dumped while reading the article, so I fiddled around a bit, replacing some words and names here and there...
.Net, Internet, WiFi, USB..).
... ah! now it all begins to make sense.
"If you don't know (Bill Gates) 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 (by switching from the Mac to the Windows PC).
He (Bill Gates) was a major player in the development of the mouse, cut-and-paste, multi-window GUI, teleconferencing and hyperdocuments (besides COM,
He is a well known (command-prompt) and ease-of-use critic. The Mother of all Demos (which he gave during the anti-trust trial) is his thing too."
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Douglas Engelbart...Since I've never heard the name before, scanning the headlines I read his last name, and was duly frightened that /. was about to post an article which had anything at all to do with Englebert Humperdink...
I agree wholeheartedly. Well, I'd have put Von Neumann and Harvard in there somewhere, but you're right -- this guy certainly hasn't gotten the recognition that the tone of the article suggests he should have.
He must have kept quiet over the past couple of centuries... if he was that good you'd have expected at least a couple of "I told you so"'s!
btw what's with posting as an AC? I almost missed your post 'cos it was scored 0.
I am artificially intelligent.
also I think became too pervalent for their own good...
Take, say, the mouse... it is good for some things, but UI has became WAY too dependent on the darn thing. (Okay, I admit context sensitive menues was not one of his wrongdoings, but nontheless it was not an outcome that surprised anyone).
For WYSIWYG, it's not necessary for many things you do. In fact - it is completely for the purpose of putting things onto paper. When you take away that premises, a lot of innovative UI can get done (3D desktops, let's say).
I personally believe that a lot of stuff has really became like the iMac design - way too popular and put into way too many places. 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.
(Yes I know mouse is very important for anything graphic - but admit it GUI is not the most efficient interface; it may be the most intuitive, but often you get a lot done a lot faster with just a keyboard - if a computer was designed for it. Too bad so few things are these days.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I know and I use a lot of shortcuts. However, a lot of things you just can't do with keyboard because the features were never designed with keyboard in mind.
I will use MS word for and example because I am using one right now.
Take, say, window split. you can split the window, but you can't switch between them.
Another thing might be putting in tab stops.
How about easily change font? Now - I said *EASILY*. I wouldn't even mind if it was a simple something that let me get to the toolbar (come on - that's the whole point of tool bar - FREQUENTLY ACCESSED STUFF). Going into three levels of menu to change a font is rediculous.
Heck, scroll-lock don't even work (though works in Excel).
I am not saying it's not completely impossible (with enough accessibility tools you can probably use cursor keys for mouse), but applications certainly arn't designed with keyboard users in mind - even though in many instances a pure-keyboard operation would be so much faster.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
"Slayton: ... about knowledge and organizations. If I think about an
/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.
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
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.
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.