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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.
More like failed at nothing, since the demo asks: "...what's the product we're providing in this research? It is a sample augmentation system that is provided to augment computer system development. In addition the aim is to provide tools for generating further, improved augmentation systems--bootstrapping." -- THE DEMO
They had a whole lotta revolutionary stuff (for 1968) to demonstrate first before boring themselves and everyone else with navel-gazing about potential futures of computing. Failed at nothing.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Hear, hear. Modern user interface design is atrocious. A bunch of idiots just out of school, who blindly copy whatever nonsense Apple comes up with. Even Linux distros aren't immune to it.
Look at Windows 10 - what a shitfest that is. Atrocious design of dialogue boxes, with no buttons - it seems that buttons are 'old fashioned', and how dare people think they should be able to clearly see what is and isn't a button any more.