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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,
Don't forget they're social and cloud, with lashings of NOSQL. And at least web 3.0. Or are we up to 4.0? yet. I'm still stuck on web 2.1.6-RC4.
At least that's what goes through the mind of the current tech industry.
They probably use all the latest fads as well, too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
When I discovered the World Wide Web c. 1994, I said "Wow, this is awesome! But it's going to suck once everyone knows about it." I wish I had been wrong.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Me too!
The internet existed in 1984. Some of us old timers still remember when AOL opened a gate and let their users into the readnews internet community, everything started going downhill about then. :-)
Could you be misremembering the Eternal September of 1993? The name AOL didn't event exist until 1989. Usenet did exist in 1984, but it was over UUCP, and there were less than 1000 hosts.