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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."
I believe this is something that should be mandatory for all computer engineering/science students should watch, along with getting a bit of a history lesson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a11JDLBXtPQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61oMy7Tr-bM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNXLK78ZaFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zz1SwCTCEE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dVNxlLYTsQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiJA7_Sw9aM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI8LZKW5Lwk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYDg2wr2QfI
The concepts for the time, in my opinion, are mind blowing. I hope there are some people in this world who are considering some equal mind blowing ideas for these times, although I do not think they could ever get pulled together into one demo like what Doug Engelbart did.
I met Doug and spoke with him a few times when we were both at Tymnet, which was purchased by McDonnell Douglas in 1985. At the time, Doug had a shock or white hair but was still cranking out ideas. At that time, he was working very hard to sell his idea of a chord keyboard -- you had five keys for each hand and you "played" them to control the computer. Doug was amazing with them -- he code program and write documents extraordinarily fast with them. He thought that DEC might buy the idea and turn it into a product, but obviously that didn't happen. Doug was always thinking a generation ahead -- recall that at that time, we had not really accepted the mouse yet. But from Doug's perspective that was old news from almost twenty years ago. Talking to him was amazing -- just trying to get into the frame of mind he was in was challenging and fun. I wish I could have spent more time with him. Thanks for everything, Doug -- we still haven't caught up with you.