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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.
You can read a copy of his 1962 paper at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/EngelbartPaper s/B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkInd.html
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.
While he has admittedly been standing on the shoulders of giants, there is also a smattering of true visionary in all the things he has done. The Salon article on him, although old, is a fascinating read.
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.
"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.
...and I thought Al Gore invented all that stuff.
You never know.
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.