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50 Years On, We're Living the Reality First Shown At the 'Mother of All Demos' (arstechnica.com)
Thelasko quotes a report from Ars Technica: A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart -- then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley -- gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others. Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
When can I time travel to December 8, 1968, and kill that bastard before he delivers his talk?
I don't know about you, but over the last 10 years I have witnessed a shocking degradation in the quality and functionality of the software I use on a daily basis. Mostly driven by shockingly poor UI choices coming from the mobile/tablet sphere, but increasingly driven by the "web app" concept, where bloated, slow, unresponsive online javascript monstrosities pretend to deliver desktop functionality while failing to offer features that were commonplace PC software in 1991.
Thank God for the Terminal. Without it we wouldn't be able to get anything done these days.
We had all these things 20 years ago.
A non-story.
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I'm addicted to creimer's booty and I can't give it up!
And, why did it take so long to implement his ideas?'
Also, I thought the U.S. Government invented computer networking.
"Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
Augmenting intellect is not what the internet is for. Advertising is what the internet is for.
Unlike every other advertising platform in history, the internet allows for bidirectional communication, which empowers advertisers to spy on their marks directly.
The internet is the most intrusive advertising platform ever made and the worst invention ever invented.
Engelbart never envisioned:
o Constant, near inescapable mass surveillance of the whole population via their electronics.
o Power-grabs by ad agencies over person electronics.
o Pandering ever more to the dumbest users at the expense of the competent.
Technically he was ahead of his day. Far ahead. Socially... he had no idea of the dystopia that was coming.
I'm amazed to see articles in the Register and such saying this wasn't so great or that other people deserve credit. Sure he had a supportive govt program manager. But the way you get one of those is to deliver on a vision. and Delivering is harder than it sounds. Sure telefunken might have had a wheeled mouse. Yes V. Bush once imagined some thing called a "memex", as did a few sci fi writers. Really if you want the true vision that foreshadowed this have a look at the reading tablets and terminals of Kubrick's 2001
I think what people really can't fathom today is what things were like at the time. at that time the vast majority of people with big projects to run were still submitting jobs on punch cards. interactivity wasn't anyones daily experience, Teletype 110 baud terminals were starting to get common for dial-up time sharing. But you didn't have these on your desk.There was one down on the 3rd floor and people took turns using it. In a few very wealthy places There were some dumb character terminals and some vector graphics storage scopes but windows? Hyperlinks? on screen picture-in-a-picture video conferencing? Simultaneous text editing by many people. What he was showing was Arthur C Clark's definition of magic.
Now imagine pulling a stunt like that live!
For context, Most professional people even as late as the year 2000 still would not trust a laptop to give a presentation-- viewgraphs were the only way to be sure your presentation didn't crash or fail to project.
It was an event that's never been equaled in technology integration and showmanship using stuff 30 years in advance
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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Now so many entities are leveraging the value from the machines that were originally dedicated to their users.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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That honor goes to Thomas Edison.
In order to demonstrate the dangers of his bitter rival Tesla's alternating-current (AC) technology, Edison had a live elephant electrocuted to death using AC current in a gaudy carnival-like public demonstration.
Instead of causing all to reject Tesla's AC tech in horror, it started a series of events that lead to the "electric chair" as a means of execution.
Unfortunately the videos are in Flash format, but the annotations are quite informative and interesting:
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
No, we're not.
Slashdot of 15 years ago celebrated nerds and technology which was accessible to ordinary nerds. These days Slashdot does nothing except pander to Silicon Valley tech mogul billionaires.
Nay. You can never have too much of a phat bootay!
Monetize is not a word stop using it.part of the problem
https://xkcd.com/676/
#DeleteFacebook
> Monetize is not a word stop using it.part of the problem
Try looking in a fucking dictionary.
And spaces after periods. Please.
(I know...but I'm drunk.)
In many ways, modern computing started with the Jacquard Loom, which was a technology to mass-produce digitized pictures. Today, it looks like the most important application of computers is posting pictures of one's posterior. We've gone a full circle, and in the process ended up staring at our own behind.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Maybe if you're running Windows 3.1
Englebart also failed to predict that the majority of computer capabilities would be intended to monetize the user.
Why would this even be worth mentioning? ALL commerce is some form of "monetizing the user". A farmer buying seeds from the local co-op is being "monetized". Yeah some angles of it have turned out to be creepier than we should prefer but none of it should be surprising.
Alan Kay gave a talk at the golden anniversary. His group at Xerox Parc probably realized the most complete implentation of Englebarts vision, albeit in a workstation that cost $400,000 in todays currency. Alan is critical of the piecemeal implentations that followed, i.e. the Mac, HTML/HTTP. These obstruct the colloborative development of software and media in the original vision.
And voice assistants are finally start to chip at the dream too.
Commercialism overtook Science. And now we have UI designers who are effectively artists, or artist+programmers, instead of engineers with a minor in something else, like behavioral psychology. Furthermore corporate direction and consumer demand cares more about 'new' interfaces than intelligently designed ones, and has been slowly allowing the erosion of functionality for 'what looks cool'.
It is still possible to recover, but it would require a large concerted demand among nerds, likely in their free time, and while being even less inclusive than projects that decided not to support a CoC. Whether gathering enough individuals is possible under project leadership that can consolidate and organize good ideas and understand how they should be put together, like those original pioneers did, is debatable.
Cat videos