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Ted Nelson's Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart
theodp writes "Speaking at a memorial event for the legendary Douglas Engelbart at the Computer History Museum, Ted Nelson was pissed-with-a-capital-P. Nelson in effect gave two powerful eulogies — one for his friend Dr. Engelbart, who left this Earth in July, and a second for Engelbart's career, which essentially began 'dying' four decades earlier due to short-sighted organizations' failure to fund the brilliant guy who gave the world The Mother of All Demos in 1968. 'Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA,' Nelson laments. 'Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further...Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.' It's a very moving and passionate speech (despite some oddly inappropriate audience laughter). And, alas, a very sad one in a world that throws $4 billion at the likes of Snapchat and Pinterest."
Is that where the laughter was? I would have laughed there.
*they're
Yeah but Snapchat and Pinterest are hip, young and agile. Doug old and stuff.
At least that's what goes through the mind of the current tech industry.
Right, this guy got drunk and started ranting at all kinds of companies.
Engelbart lived at a time when bureaucracy and inflexible institutions ruled. To get anywhere one had to jump through hoops constantly and appeal to those few authorities that controlled the purse strings.
Today there are many points of accumulated capital that one can appeal to for assistance and funding. Forty years ago there was just the government or a few old giant corporations.
a great talent being denied the chance to continue his life's work:
Happened to me ... i could have been such a good beer taster
is that they think everyone else is smart too and have the same motivations. Meanwhile, in the real world, people laugh at eulogies, strive to throw a ball really far, screw each other over, deal with their short lifespan by burning twice as bright, etc.
Engelbart created a lot of the things that we associate with modern PCs, such as the mouse, graphical word processing, and hypertext links, but from what I've read it seemed like he was running out of steam and having trouble managing his projects by the time the funding dropped away from him. He had a great chance to contribute to the history of computing, and he definitely exceeded all expectations. I guess we'll never know what else he would have come up with if given another 40 years to work, or if he had already run out of ideas.
jfk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSEeO4zg1w0 mlk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL4FOvIf7G8
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a roast but apparently some people thought it was.
in a world that doles four billion to pinterest and snapchat, laughter at the death of an obscure genius seems like something of an expectation.
oh wait. no it doesnt.
christ god forbid you so much as crack a grin at the euology of Steve Fucking Jobs. unless you're joking about the presenters elocution during the pronunciation of aluminum.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Not that I necessarily disagree with the guy's expressed sentiments; but the complaint "the world wouldn't give my friend a chance, but now they're throwing billions at Snapchat and Pinterest" just sounds like a typical grumpy old man complaining about the state of the world.
However the summary reads in a way that makes me wonder if that jibe was his, or if it belonged to a grumpy old Slashdot submitter.
#DeleteChrome
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power. I'd wager that Ted sees more than a little of Doug in himself: an inventor of great things who -- in the end -- was largely ignored and forgotten.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Scale votes in proportion to I.Q.
...Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.'
And we can also only guess what almost half the world's population might do if they weren't trying to survive on less than $2.50/day.
There are all kinds of huge problems in the world that desperately need solving and there are huge numbers of people who struggle to find meaningful work. But somehow there's not much connection. In part, the people who control the world's wealth are able to isolate themselves from many of the world's most severe problems. And many people think that the purpose of life is competition rather than cooperation (i.e. taking a bigger slice of the pie for themselves rather than making more pie so everyone has enough).
But, regardless of whether you're lucky enough to count yourself among the technological elite or you're wondering whether you're going to eat today, the world is far from perfect.
For those who don't get humour, he's taking the piss in a somewhat serious way.
http://xkcd.com/1234/
Probably my favorite XKCD strip so far.
G.
Outside the US Pissed=Drunk. I was hoping to see a video of a drunk Ted Nelson at a memorial event.
At least then we wouldn't have both political parties trying to claim him for contemporary purposes.
I see you're unfamiliar with Englebart. At a time when most of us were doing batch processing on punch cards, at a time when the real digital elite was obsessed with the idea of "artificial intelligence" (hoping to get the computer to do more without submitting another damn deck of punch cards), Englebart came of with a vision of computers as interactive devices, partners that would amplify intelligence, and allow remote collaborative efforts between groups of people.
In other words, the world we're living in, except for that bit about "amplified intelligence".
If you watch the video, the audience reaction is remarkable. Basically, it appears to be composed of people who
1) cannot interpret or perceive when *real* human emotion is on display before them , or what it might mean.
2) react chiefly to the *form* of his sentences, and not the spoken content. Specifically, when Ted pauses, they interpret this as they're being given a pause by the speaker to process some joke which they were just told, and in response laugh politely.
The laughter is entirely inappropriate. Ted's pausing because he's overcome with emotion. That choking sound, that's where we get the phrase "getting choked up". That sniffling sound? That's Ted repressing tears and not a cue that you just heard a Louis CK -style joke which somehow went whizzing over your head.
Here's a guy -Ted Nelson - himself a luminary on par with Engelbart and Knuth, whose own vision for Xanadu :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
has largely been ignored and forgotten IMO, honoring us with his actual, uncensored thoughts about the life and passing one of his fellow greats, and people don't get it, at all. This is how the world is. The vacuous - yet ambitious ! - (lived there, know them ) residents of Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Palo Alto don't even know it's them he's ripping when he says:
"Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil."
a quote that reminded me of a line from Bilbo Baggins' speech at his "eleventy-one" birthday party:
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
The fact is the gentle, humane, inclusive and egalitarian visions of saints is an quiet and unassuming brute force of nature, provably irrepressible and the thing upon which every other owes its existence; it's like water. It is continually being reborn and reintroduced into the world over and over again, indefatiqable never driven out, never depleted, never defeated or even much deflected, unstoppable unstoppable unstoppable, having its way on the field of historical time, which is its only concern.
In other words, the world we're living in, except for that bit about "amplified intelligence".
Yeah, we seem to be in an area of "amplified market idiocy" instead.
Having a sense of humor can be quite useful though -
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhenIWasYourAge
What do you expect from a room full of stunted Asperger's cases raised on entertainment and computer interaction?
I don't agree. I listened to the beginning partly because of your post. It seems to me like he is being offensive to the audience, when he says things like this : we gather today in the pretense of unanimity and concord to croon over his ashes and grab for scraps of his robe...
That's insulting to the attendees, and they are right to nervously laugh. I don't think anybody should just accept somebodies derision with a solemn head shake, "yes, he's right, we are all here to grab for scraps of his robe..."
No, no, things are certainly amplified, so that part is correct. It's the "intelligence" part that's a bit off the mark here. Networking can help leverage the abilities of each of the networked nodes (people, in this case). When many of those nodes excel at being dumb animals, well, you get a heavy preponderance of lolcats and porn. Many (perhaps most?) of us humans are just living day to day and trying to get by. Not a lot of room there for higher-order thinking.
Lest we lose sight of all hope, it's important to recognize that it's not all gloom and doom, though -- despite all the porn and lolcats, there's also a good bit of smart thinking that is also amplified. That's easy to miss amidst all the noise, but it's definitely there.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power.
It got implemented. Autodesk funded an implementation. I knew the people who did that job. It just wasn't very useful. It was a centralized storage and revision control scheme for text only (No pictures; Nelson was very text-oriented) tied to a micropayments system. You paid to read a document, and payments were parcelled out to everybody who'd contributed to the document.
The fundamental problem was that it assumed that most text documents were worth orders of magnitude than they are now. Pricing was intended to be comparable to what overpriced academic journals charge for online access today. Another part of the problem was that Nelson had very strong ideas about how it should be implemented, but didn't know much about database technology.
With quotes from people like "the great poet Walt Kelly", you thought this wasn't intended to by darkly humorous?
You can laugh even while you cry.
I didn't have that in mind when I wrote it. If you listen to the whole thing- it's three minutes long or so, perhaps you'll see what I thought I saw. Every time he stops, obviously because he can't go on, they giggle, apropo of nothing semantic. They think it's a catchup-and-laugh-pause, but if they were processing what he said and his facial expressions and decoding his quavering voice, they never would have laughed. Lissten to the rest of it.
As to those specific remarks, he's old enough have earned the right to be cynical about funerals of name-brand illuminati. Especially since this guy was ignored , by his (and mine too) measure in life ...
Actually POGO is considered serious social commentary and Walt Kelly a insightful chronicler of his times. His most famous quote being I believe, "We have met the enemy, and he is us".
I'm afraid no one is getting the humour in this, even though it is a heartfelt eulogy in many ways.
Not sure what world you're living in, but I am constantly amazed about what benefits technology gives us on a daily basis. Also if you take the nostalgia goggles off, and ignore the attention seeking bombardment of hyped up controversy that passes for news these days, you'll see that by most measures the world is a better place thanks to technology. As an example my mother was diagnosed with a slightly rare condition earlier this year. The GP gave the standard diagnosis which wasn't so good, but after some self-research and collaboration with special interest groups across the world were able to locate a UK-based (opposite side of the world to us) specialist who was able to offer some alternate advice which has since remarkably improved our situation. This was only possible with the "amplified intelligence" that the Internet provides.
I have worked on SDS940 computers (dates me, eh?) used in DE's demo -- they were mighty for their time, and ran time-sharing networks, etc.
By the late '70's, a simulator of the SDS940 running on a Dec-10 was faster than the actual 940 hardware.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
The laughter is entirely inappropriate. Ted's pausing because he's overcome with emotion. That choking sound, that's where we get the phrase "getting choked up". That sniffling sound? That's Ted repressing tears and not a cue that you just heard a Louis CK -style joke which somehow went whizzing over your head.
Well, that's your spin on it anyways.
Here's a guy -Ted Nelson - himself a luminary on par with Engelbart and Knuth, whose own vision for Xanadu : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu has largely been ignored and forgotten IMO, honoring us with his actual, uncensored thoughts about the life and passing one of his fellow greats, and people don't get it, at all.
Nelson is no Engelbart or Knuth (except maybe in his own mind). Ted Nelson is smart, but he also suffers from mental issues (severe ADD and several other problems), and is incapable of programming (or doing much of anything really) on his own. He always relied on recruiting others to implement Xanadu and all his other grandiose ideas. Perhaps his greatest gift is a talent for convincing people (particularly fellow idealists) that Ted Nelson is a visionary who should be followed, even though he never has shown any talent whatsoever at the pragmatic details of getting from point A (the technology we have now) to point B (Nelson's grand utopian visions). Ted Nelson is the reason why Xanadu ever became semi-famous to begin with, but Ted Nelson is also why it failed. (Not exclusively why it failed, but a big part of it.)
Engelbart was a luminary because he had a clear vision of what was possible, and knew how it could be done. He wasn't in the right place or right time to do it himself, but many followed in his footsteps, and everyone knows that in the right context he could have had far more direct influence on computing history. Knuth is a luminary because of TAOCP, TeX, and his stature in the field of computer science. Ted Nelson has never personally been associated with any project which delivered or inspired anything real. He can't even claim the world wide web -- in fact, I'm pretty sure he's repudiated it before. It's not purist enough, you see. It doesn't support Xanadu features which Nelson believes are a requirement for a system to even call itself "hypertext".
Wired had a big Xanadu article a long while back which is enlightening:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html?topic=&topic_set=
Nelson's Xanadu has existed (for certain values of "existed") for almost 50 years now. It has never amounted to anything, and it is clear that it never will. It really comes as no surprise that Nelson would say crazy, inappropriate, and vaguely self-promoting things at Engelbart's eulogy. That's who he is, that's what he does. I'm pretty sure he sincerely believes his own BS (we're talking about a guy who obsessively tape-records and films almost everything he says or does, out of the notion that he's making an important archive for future historians to sift through while looking for pearls of Ted Nelson wisdom), but that doesn't mean it's all that valuable.
This is how the world is. The vacuous - yet ambitious ! - (lived there, know them ) residents of Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Palo Alto don't even know it's them he's ripping when he says:"Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil."
Sounds like you've got more than a little bit of Nelson's woe-is-me-I'm-a-genius-why-won't-anybody-take-me-serious mindset going.
Welcome to reality. "Western Civilization" is an enormous shitpile of lies. In fact Germans, British, French, Spanish colonizers were destroying lots of other civilizations around the globe. We still do. Just look at how Britain destroyed Iranian democracy and replace it by the tyrant Shah.
But be careful to keep this to yourself or they will nail you to a cross, like they did with Jesus or Bradley Manning. And sure as hell they have a cross prepared for Ed Snowden.
I know, because they tried to pull this shit on me too and they almost succeeded.
With all due respect I beg to differ. Ed Snowden and Bradley Manning and quite a few more "nuts" like me have been made possible exactly because of the WWW and its discussion forums.
Just build a computer of the Atari ST or Amiga Class yourself ! Then design an alternative to HTML/JS which is efficient enough to run on an 68000 with 8MHz and 512k RAM. Wirewrap and soldering iron will do !
Publish all of it as Open Source, so that the world can see you had not intercourse with NSA. We can really break free from the "need more megaherz, more cores, more gigabytes" insanity.
Just remember what we did on these 68000 computers and then sit back and THINK !
What's that ? The new, cyber-attack-safe, obfuscated U.S. STRATCOM missile lanch command message ?
If yes, I can testify only Americans can either understand or maliciously alter it. Way too hard for sane people.
Give me a penny for every deserving genius who got overlooked, cut down before his time, ignored, ridiculed or had a famous result named after someone else because his name come last in sort order on the journal paper and I could buy a country. Give me two cents for every obnoxious jerk, marketing hack, or talentless wannabe that became rich and famous because shit happens and I could end world poverty. Welcome to real life.
Wow, a long-winded Soviet-style character assassination (mental illness ! ) sprinkled with vague unsupported accusations of fundamental incompetence by an anonymous poster on Slashdot. This is an enlightening and devastating critique you've offered up here, sir, and it should be more widely read. Wonder why it's rated at ze-ro. Must be a case of overlooked genius as applied to you.
Actually succeeded in starting a nuclear war?
Soviet-style
wtf?
Wow, what a stupid reply. My post is rated at 0 because it's an AC post and nobody has bothered to vote on it. That's the way it usually goes when you post as AC, as I always do. (I don't have a slashdot UID at all, you see. I don't post here for the ego boost of getting voted up or down, and in fact I think the slashdot user moderation concept is total shit, which is why I don't participate in it.)
And "Soviet-style character assassination"? Puh-leaze. Read the Wired article. Nelson was interviewed for it and was up front about suffering from multiple mental illnesses, as well as his incompetence at even using computers. (Writing code? Fuhgeddaboutit.) After rereading my post, I didn't do a good job of expressing it, but I see Nelson as a tragic figure rather than a villain. Like most real people he's very complicated. He has good aspects, such as his idealism and passion and desire to make the world better, but there's also some bad. Such as his unreasonably large ego (way out of proportion to his actual accomplishments), and massive blind spots about how useful his ideas are actually likely to be, particularly to people who are not Ted Nelson. The negative parts of his personality are why it's no surprise to see him show up at a eulogy for Englebart and go on a big inappropriate rant.
My main intent was to point out that by no means is Nelson a luminary of the field, let alone your go-to guy for real insight about the problems geniuses face. He's more like this odd crank who long ago wore out his welcome. One who's always been an ideas-man rather than a doer, which in itself reduces his credibility. If he'd had his intelligence coupled with the ability to focus and get things done, he could have accomplished more and been a lot happier in life. :(