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Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the father-of-us-all dept.

ReadWriteWeb writes, "HyperScope 1.0 is a new Web app based on Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March of this year in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Engelbart's NLS, on the Web, using current Web technologies such as Ajax and DHTML. In effect it gives an advanced browsing experience, including classic hypertext features like indirect links and transclusions of remote pieces of other documents. HyperScope has been completely built with open source JavaScript toolkit Dojo — meaning that everything is done on the client-side."

2 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:is this really a good idea? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If it takes you 10x longer to design the content and the person viewing the page can find what they want 10x faster then is it really a net gain?
    Maybe it won't make sense if only a single person is viewing it, but with hundreds, the gain could be very useful. Not just to the readers, but the writer too - if 100 people view the doc and 75% of them are able to understand it better thanks to this, that's much less questions the writer will have to waste time answering.
  2. The 1968 Demo by mrdrivel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In 1968 Douglas Engelbart gave a presentation of the NLS/Augment system in San Francisco. It's quite amazing. It uses a three button mouse and pointer (called a bug). It also uses several buttons operated by the non-mouse hand in a chorded fashion to select and copy text.

    Video conferencing, group collaboration, the hierarchical presentation and hiding of data, spatial representation of data, hyperlinking are all shown in the demo.

    There is a Quicktime of it here: http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/video-68-large. html

    I first saw this in one of my computer science classes at Berkeley; we were all surprised at how much of what we think of as recent technology (last 10 years or so) actually existed in 1968.

    NOTE: The video is rather long. The impatient (read: Slashdotters) might want to fast forward through parts.