Article on Inventor of the Mouse

Karim sent us a link to a sweet little article on Douglas Engelbart, best known as being the who invented that mouse thing that has completely changed the landscape of the computing world. The article is interesting- about research, and finance, and the industry as a whole. Worth a read.

Comments

An interesting article

[Effugas]

"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 responsive, how much value could you derive from that?"

Douglas Engelbart
Dec. 9, 1968

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Great article. Apparently, he pulled off what is known as "The Mother Of All Demos", basically demonstrating Internet Groupware in the late 60's. Exceedingly cool.

I read this guy with great interest. He comes up with all this incredibly useful and usable stuff, and turns around and holds disdain for user friendlyness--he says people are unwilling to learn stuff and it's causing them to use less efficient tools. Where I think the true problems lie in the fact that user friendliness intersects with maximum efficiency only at great research expense to the designers of the hardware or software--in other words, it's easy to be efficient and hard, and it's easy to be inefficient and easy, but it's hard to be efficient and easy.

Working so hard on UI stuff(I'm leading a BOF at LinuxWorldExpo! :-), it's interesting to hear the perspective of an undisputable master of my field. Read this article, you'll probably find it as fascinating as I did.


Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://doxpara.netpedia.net


Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.