5 ms·

I was fortunate enough to meet Doug Engelbart at a Hypertext conference years ago, where he was a keynote speaker. Very friendly and soft spoken man. From the h

by bouvin 8y ago

I was fortunate enough to meet Doug Engelbart at a Hypertext conference years ago, where he was a keynote speaker. Very friendly and soft spoken man. From the his keynote, I got the distinct impression that he was disappointed and a little saddened that we had not progressed further than we have. His vision of augmenting the human intellect through the use of computers was both bold and hopeful, but instead we are barraged by click-bait, fake news, trolls, and social networking sites carefully engineered to keep us hooked—not much of an augmentation.

walterbell 8y ago
At least we know that negative augmentation (a) works, (b) is profitable. Now we need to show the same for positive augmentation. Apple could develop privacy-oriented augmentation demos for their AR glasses, e.g. using local-only analysis of user data and preferences.
- willvarfar 8y ago
  Should the recent focus on privacy be projected onto Doug Engelbart's aims on positive augmentation? Can you have positive augmentation without privacy? In the demos it brings to my mind this idea where everyone's terminals are stitch-together as one massive desktop, rather like a pen-and-paper office you can go around browsing other people's desks. And perhaps a lack of privacy helps in a corporate office environment? ADD: it makes me wonder if my team couldn't have some kind of modern 'pc anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops. So people don't feel spied on you could have the camera feed of those who are currently sharing your desktop just like in the demo shown in this obituary.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Even those unconcerned with privacy ("click-bait, fake news, trolls, and social networking sites") have not achieved augmentation. Someone concerned with privacy could design a protocol for consent, to enable the secure information sharing required for augmentation. > some kind of modern 'pc anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops See LogMeIn which also owns GoToMyPC.
  - passthefist 8y ago
    While it's not the same, one of the best development setups I've worked with was really low tech, literally ssh-ing into commodity pc's running our app in a closet (production and staging were cloud hosted). Because everyone was comfortable on the command like and connected via tmux sessions, we could attach to that session from any computer we brought our keys to. We also had a couple pairing stations with one pc but two keyboard/mice and monitors so each person could take turns driving. The upshot of the tmux thing was that if we wanted to hop onto a pairing station it was as simple as taking a usb stick with your keys and then attaching to the tmux session you had at your desk. Same went for interviews, we'd just have a candidate attach to a tmux session and we had an interactive collaborative editor. There's some pretty obvious problems with this, but I think it's relevant since our setup used standard unix utils to achieve a modern 'pc anywhere' type setup, and if there's one thing I'll always think about when it comes to Doug Engelbart is how many of our new and shiny tools aren't really as new as we think. He really had it down with The Mother of All Demos way back in '68.

by bouvin 8y ago

walterbell 8y ago

At least we know that negative augmentation (a) works, (b) is profitable. Now we need to show the same for positive augmentation. Apple could develop privacy-oriented augmentation demos for their AR glasses, e.g. using local-only analysis of user data and preferences.

willvarfar 8y ago
Should the recent focus on privacy be projected onto Doug Engelbart's aims on positive augmentation? Can you have positive augmentation without privacy? In the demos it brings to my mind this idea where everyone's terminals are stitch-together as one massive desktop, rather like a pen-and-paper office you can go around browsing other people's desks. And perhaps a lack of privacy helps in a corporate office environment? ADD: it makes me wonder if my team couldn't have some kind of modern 'pc anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops. So people don't feel spied on you could have the camera feed of those who are currently sharing your desktop just like in the demo shown in this obituary.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Even those unconcerned with privacy ("click-bait, fake news, trolls, and social networking sites") have not achieved augmentation. Someone concerned with privacy could design a protocol for consent, to enable the secure information sharing required for augmentation. > some kind of modern 'pc anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops See LogMeIn which also owns GoToMyPC.
- passthefist 8y ago
  While it's not the same, one of the best development setups I've worked with was really low tech, literally ssh-ing into commodity pc's running our app in a closet (production and staging were cloud hosted). Because everyone was comfortable on the command like and connected via tmux sessions, we could attach to that session from any computer we brought our keys to. We also had a couple pairing stations with one pc but two keyboard/mice and monitors so each person could take turns driving. The upshot of the tmux thing was that if we wanted to hop onto a pairing station it was as simple as taking a usb stick with your keys and then attaching to the tmux session you had at your desk. Same went for interviews, we'd just have a candidate attach to a tmux session and we had an interactive collaborative editor. There's some pretty obvious problems with this, but I think it's relevant since our setup used standard unix utils to achieve a modern 'pc anywhere' type setup, and if there's one thing I'll always think about when it comes to Doug Engelbart is how many of our new and shiny tools aren't really as new as we think. He really had it down with The Mother of All Demos way back in '68.