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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.
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.
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.
Apple had one implementation. Then they started spending a lot of their money trying to prevent other implementations. A lot of us didn't like that. Thank goodness Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard managed to beak their back in the look-and-feel lawsuit. But Apple did a lot of damage in the meantime, running the competitors to Windows on x86 out of business. In a way, Apple created the Wintel monopoly.