5 ms·

The failure to replicate Engelbart's vision of collaborative UI plagues me every day. I have to think of it every day I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus Notes, Exce

The failure to replicate Engelbart's vision of collaborative UI plagues me every day. I have to think of it every day I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus Notes, Excel and a bunch of different screen sharing services. Google Docs is probably the closest we got, but I'm not allowed to use it for my work anymore for now. The fact that we have ubiquitous cameras, microphones, bandwidth, input devices and compute power, but can't even achieve the level of integration they had back in the 60s - it's just mindboggling.

walterbell 8y ago
60's research landscape and 2018 commercial landscape have different priorities. There is little economic incentive today for interoperability protocols for augmentation, yet even the biggest companies have only a partial data view and subset of UX talent. The closest we have is the web, which remains a battlefield between "old" and "new" media, e.g. DRM is a higher priority than augmentation.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  It's not just that -- systems like the one Engelbart presented really benefited from all users essentially sharing the same memory space; everyone was on the same computer at the same time. As it appeared to the machine, there was essentially one user and that user was a gestalt of all the people using the system at the time. Now we have a web of different machines, which don't trust each other (because we don't trust each other); we haven't progressed in much the same way because we have much different constraints. In a sense, if Engelbart's system was a completely shared space in which everyone lived and was trusted, then of course our systems are inelegant by comparison. We're driving around in assault vehicles interacting with each other at a distance through signs, signals and the occasional open window. But then again, we're not solving the same problem Engelbart was solving. Can we emulate that experience? Of course we can, but we're going to have to change how it operates quite significantly, in order to have it fit with our differing, more complex, social requirements.
  - justinjlynn 8y ago
    Essentially, we built personal computers -- single user, application oriented. Engelbart started with and imagined an interpersonal computer -- all users, data oriented. Those are fundamentally different approaches; one in which systems are isolated and the other in which there is only one system; one in which data is in a standard interoperable semantic format, and one in which files are bags of opaque bytes. It's going to take more than some time for the two to converge, if they ever do.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      IoT sensors + ML are trying to climb the steep hill of semantic interoperability, at least in specific domains. But even there, the information flow is not symmetric.
    - pwang 8y ago
      Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at every level. Servers and server farms comprised of PCs are horribly complex to scale in a reliable way, and the programming models force programmers to have to either reason about complex "distributed computing" problems, or externalize state into a scalable "database" that has already thought about the problem. End-user PCs act as Frankenstein contraptions, both containing private data for some applications, and containing no data for others. In the former case, the OS ABIs and application paradigms do not treat data security and privacy as a first-class concern, so ransomware and malware abounds. In the latter case, our PCs are brain-dead for most daily productivity without being tethered to a "cloud" (aka Mainframe) run by companies whose sole investor remit is to monetize our data and/or our interactions with other people via their free applications. A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Every output an input.
- sitkack 8y ago
  We have no holistic work systems, mostly special cased tooling. This manifests in our internal applications, open floor plans, poor meeting places, etc. Google docs is predominantly a pretty, low-quality wiki w/o any of the affordances for a wiki.
emmelaich 8y ago
> I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus Notes, Excel ... That's the saddest thing I've read for a long time.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  Know what's worse? Of these three, Lotus Notes is probably the most productive to use nowadays. Reason being that its development has mostly stalled, i.e. they've stopped making it worse. But I'm talking Lotus Notes here, so that's saying something...
BjoernKW 8y ago
The interesting thing about Lotus Notes is that it started out as something that wasn't that far from Engelbart's vision of a collaborative UI. Unfortunately, it ended up being predominantly used as a makeshift email client but it had a lot of potential.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  Yes, I agree. Its core is quite powerful - like a way more powerful version of MS Access from back in the 80s. The problem is how it has been marketed and in what corner it has been pushed technologically. CouchDB/Couchbase is an interesting spiritual successor, but it misses a powerful application framework surrounding it (actually something we are working on).
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    Yeah, it's interesting that more dev folks don't know Notes as a powerful NoSQL technology but just as a crappy email client. Also, not widely known; Domino server was/is really good at clustering and data replication.
    - m_mueller 8y ago
      From a sysadmin and CIO viewpoint, Notes/Domino is a dream - because it's built for 80s servers, it's insanely cheap to run for large organisations (as long as you get user acceptance). I'd say the main thing people are missing though: Local replicas. Once you replicate the important DBs locally it's very responsive to work with, i.e. documents load without any delay. It just pains me that they never really modernised it. Should have switched to Couchbase, add their powerful permissions model, use continuous replication and a seamless switch to offline replica where already available, put a modern UI in front (but still with a drag-and-droppable designer) and bam - you have a programmable Evernotes on steroids.
  - scrumper 8y ago
    Do you mean that you are working on Notes-like app frameworks at Couchbase? That's enormously interesting.
grblovrflowerrr 8y ago
https://notion.so https://notion.so gets pretty close. They even cite Engelbart's demo as a main inspiration.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  wow looks promising, thank you!
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  They're also a sponsor of Dynamicland [1], Bret Victor and Alan Kay's attempt to reinvent how humans interact with computers. (I've been using Notion for the past few weeks and I love it) [1] https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
- j2kun 8y ago
  How is this like the demo? This looks like "unify all N productivity apps; now I have N+1 productivity apps!"

walterbell 8y ago

60's research landscape and 2018 commercial landscape have different priorities. There is little economic incentive today for interoperability protocols for augmentation, yet even the biggest companies have only a partial data view and subset of UX talent. The closest we have is the web, which remains a battlefield between "old" and "new" media, e.g. DRM is a higher priority than augmentation.

justinjlynn 8y ago
It's not just that -- systems like the one Engelbart presented really benefited from all users essentially sharing the same memory space; everyone was on the same computer at the same time. As it appeared to the machine, there was essentially one user and that user was a gestalt of all the people using the system at the time. Now we have a web of different machines, which don't trust each other (because we don't trust each other); we haven't progressed in much the same way because we have much different constraints. In a sense, if Engelbart's system was a completely shared space in which everyone lived and was trusted, then of course our systems are inelegant by comparison. We're driving around in assault vehicles interacting with each other at a distance through signs, signals and the occasional open window. But then again, we're not solving the same problem Engelbart was solving. Can we emulate that experience? Of course we can, but we're going to have to change how it operates quite significantly, in order to have it fit with our differing, more complex, social requirements.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  Essentially, we built personal computers -- single user, application oriented. Engelbart started with and imagined an interpersonal computer -- all users, data oriented. Those are fundamentally different approaches; one in which systems are isolated and the other in which there is only one system; one in which data is in a standard interoperable semantic format, and one in which files are bags of opaque bytes. It's going to take more than some time for the two to converge, if they ever do.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    IoT sensors + ML are trying to climb the steep hill of semantic interoperability, at least in specific domains. But even there, the information flow is not symmetric.
  - pwang 8y ago
    Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at every level. Servers and server farms comprised of PCs are horribly complex to scale in a reliable way, and the programming models force programmers to have to either reason about complex "distributed computing" problems, or externalize state into a scalable "database" that has already thought about the problem. End-user PCs act as Frankenstein contraptions, both containing private data for some applications, and containing no data for others. In the former case, the OS ABIs and application paradigms do not treat data security and privacy as a first-class concern, so ransomware and malware abounds. In the latter case, our PCs are brain-dead for most daily productivity without being tethered to a "cloud" (aka Mainframe) run by companies whose sole investor remit is to monetize our data and/or our interactions with other people via their free applications. A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Every output an input.
sitkack 8y ago
We have no holistic work systems, mostly special cased tooling. This manifests in our internal applications, open floor plans, poor meeting places, etc. Google docs is predominantly a pretty, low-quality wiki w/o any of the affordances for a wiki.

emmelaich 8y ago

> I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus Notes, Excel ... That's the saddest thing I've read for a long time.

m_mueller 8y ago
Know what's worse? Of these three, Lotus Notes is probably the most productive to use nowadays. Reason being that its development has mostly stalled, i.e. they've stopped making it worse. But I'm talking Lotus Notes here, so that's saying something...

BjoernKW 8y ago

The interesting thing about Lotus Notes is that it started out as something that wasn't that far from Engelbart's vision of a collaborative UI. Unfortunately, it ended up being predominantly used as a makeshift email client but it had a lot of potential.

m_mueller 8y ago
Yes, I agree. Its core is quite powerful - like a way more powerful version of MS Access from back in the 80s. The problem is how it has been marketed and in what corner it has been pushed technologically. CouchDB/Couchbase is an interesting spiritual successor, but it misses a powerful application framework surrounding it (actually something we are working on).
- 0x445442 8y ago
  Yeah, it's interesting that more dev folks don't know Notes as a powerful NoSQL technology but just as a crappy email client. Also, not widely known; Domino server was/is really good at clustering and data replication.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    From a sysadmin and CIO viewpoint, Notes/Domino is a dream - because it's built for 80s servers, it's insanely cheap to run for large organisations (as long as you get user acceptance). I'd say the main thing people are missing though: Local replicas. Once you replicate the important DBs locally it's very responsive to work with, i.e. documents load without any delay. It just pains me that they never really modernised it. Should have switched to Couchbase, add their powerful permissions model, use continuous replication and a seamless switch to offline replica where already available, put a modern UI in front (but still with a drag-and-droppable designer) and bam - you have a programmable Evernotes on steroids.
- scrumper 8y ago
  Do you mean that you are working on Notes-like app frameworks at Couchbase? That's enormously interesting.

grblovrflowerrr 8y ago

https://notion.so https://notion.so gets pretty close. They even cite Engelbart's demo as a main inspiration.

m_mueller 8y ago
wow looks promising, thank you!
jakelazaroff 8y ago
They're also a sponsor of Dynamicland [1], Bret Victor and Alan Kay's attempt to reinvent how humans interact with computers. (I've been using Notion for the past few weeks and I love it) [1] https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
j2kun 8y ago
How is this like the demo? This looks like "unify all N productivity apps; now I have N+1 productivity apps!"