Doug Engelbart Passes Away

lpress writes "If you use a mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, WYSIWYG word processor, multi-window user interface, shared documents, shared database, documents with images & text, keyword search, instant messaging, synchronous collaboration, or asynchronous collaboration, you can thank Doug Engelbart, who passed away today."

Comments

Guess he got first post

[Tim12s]

Guess he got first post

RIP, good sir.

[Deathspawner]

Thanks for all of your contributions to our computing.

Riding Bikes

[Anonymous Coward]

I got to see Doug speak about ten years ago. One thing he mentioned is that you can't let ease of use concerns limit capability. Ease of use is important but it can be sacrificed if necessary to give advanced capability. The example he gave was a bicycle. It's much more difficult to use than a tricycle but the benefits of bikes over trikes are so great that almost everyone goes through the effort to learn to use a bike instead of settling for a trike.

Re:Riding Bikes

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gnome team agreed to stick with tricycles since removing one wheel would confuse users. This was just before convening a two week conference to deliberate over the color of the handlebar streamers.

Re:Riding Bikes

[ShanghaiBill]

The example he gave was a bicycle.

Another example is the Palm vs the Newton. The Newton tried to learn to recognize the user's handwriting. The Palm trained the user to produce handwriting that it could recognize. The Palm required more up-front effort to use, but once you were past that initial learning phase, it was actually very usable. The Newton failed, while the Palm succeeded.

Re:Actually,

[not-my-real-name]

Talking to the dead is easy. It's getting them to answer back that the tricky bit.