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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."
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.
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
otoh, 40 yrs ago, ageism practically didn't exist. older meant more experienced and wiser. we used to respect it.
now, if you are over 35, its hard to get an interview, let alone get hired.
things have gotton worse, not better.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
10 years ago there were other ways. We're back to bureaucracy and inflexible institutions now.
I mean if he did something hip and pintristy he might get hired by some MS research like group that hires people just to keep them from innovating...
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.
Using proper punctuation, capitalization and spelling might also be a factor.
Eh, it is a mixed bag. Something that we have gotten worse about today is general research. After the 80s there was an increased focus on short term returns and multiple companies built business models around looking at good ideas other companies took risks on but failed then repackaging them with better marketing, which created a climate where companies became highly research adverse. Everyone hopes some other company (or university) will take those risks and the profits go to whoever does the same thing next.
During Engelbart's time, there were more companies still running research departments. Not that we do not have such places today, but they have become increasingly rare.
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
Drifting off-topic here, but getting interviews over age 35 isn't hard. Finding a hiring manager who is not a complete tool, now *that* is much harder.
Maybe Engelbart had the same problem, in his career. Compared to him, practically everyone is a tool.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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
Engelbart lived at a time when bureaucracy and inflexible institutions ruled...
He was alive this year. I don't think that culture changed in the last 6 months.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
No, they've gotten both better and worse, in other words, things are different.
You're right; ageism is much worse these days in computer-related professions (and others). However, OTOH, technology is cheap and easily-accessible today, unlike 40 years ago. Today, if you're brilliant, you don't need some big institution to give you access to their computers for you to do computer-related work; you can buy a laptop for $100-200 on Ebay and do all the coding you want. You can even easily start a business with it: write a brilliant app for smartphones, start your own 1-person company, and sell it on iTunes/Google Play and make millions potentially. Or you can start a highly-successful open-source project and become the next Linus Torvalds or Guido von Rossum. Unfortunately, Engelbart retired about the time microcomputers were starting to become popular, so he was well ahead of his time.
...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.
Yeah, it is really importent to do that when posting to this web site, because all the power HR people come here.
What a load of bullshit.
Forty years ago there was a government very keen to make long term investments to advance the nation's technological prowess rather than something which could be a vehicle for corporate welfare; there was an academia that was very keen to make groundbreaking explorations with no obvious short-term purpose rather rather than something which could be quickly spun off as a profit-making corporation; there were various non-charitable organisations at various lengths from government which had a specific remit to advance some aspect of society, e.g. communications companies (AT&T - remember where Unix came from?), broadcasting companies (BBC before the privatisations and spin-offs of the '90s and early '00s), &c.
Money today has never been more concentrated in the hands of the few, and these few will be highly willing to invest in fashion - something which is likely to give them a quick return. Technology design today is governed by the same factors as clothes design.
And your big corporations of 40 years ago are the very few actually making progress: IOW making ICs smaller and faster.
http://xkcd.com/1234/
Probably my favorite XKCD strip so far.
G.
Having no sense of humor isn't a sign of maturity. (And I'm probably older than both of you combined)
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.
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.
Yeah, wtf. I could understand some people not being aware of their surroundings at the start of the speech. Who knows what came before this guy took the stage. And maybe a lot of people are drinking heavily. But once you get past the point where the guy is emotionally sobbing out the lines of eulogy about his dead friend and how the horrible the world is there's just no appropriate reason to be laughing.
Ok, ok, I guess he announces that he's pulling quotes from "the great poet Walt Kelly", and people laugh in that pause. I found that really odd, but I didn't know that he's the guy who wrote a political/philosophical comic called Pogo. It's like referring to Bill Watterson as a "great poet". (Which hey, HE IS, but he wrote comics).
But all those other points? When people laugh and APPLAUSE about how "Doug was the real thing". Dude, that's just wrong. And it.... man... it makes it look like the world really IS circling the drain.