14 ms·
Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo
- dang 6y agoMany previous posts, of course, but most of the threads have been a bit less interesting than you might expect from the classicness of the topic. Some of the better ones were: 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626215 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366039 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939458 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138879 (Stewart Brand shot the video? who knew)
- mrspeaker 6y agoIt's not surprising about previous comments: there's not much you can meaningfully add after watching it. It floored me the first time, and I've been (just a lil' bit) disappointed about modern computing ever since!
- saalweachter 6y agoOne thing I occasionally like to think about -- either in the context of writing a program, or just driving down the highway when my thoughts are wandering from controlling a two-ton vehicle going 65 MPH -- is, What would a computer on an alien spacecraft look like? Not for how it would be different because aliens are aliens, but because you're presumably looking at something that is the result of thousands of years of iteration and refinement. If you're the Asgard from Stargate, you presumably aren't just doing OS updates and re-skinning your UIs and throwing away your old frameworks every three to five years for the fun of it. At some point you presumably figured out how your software should work, wrote it right, iterated on it until it was essentially bug free, and only extend it as needed within the same set of frameworks, languages and UI paradigms your civilization has been using for hundreds of years. What does that software look like?
- the-dude 6y agoIt is called a 'web browser' and programmed in Javascript. I am not making this up.
- notkaiho 6y agoIs this a reference to the SpaceX manned launch vehicle? Interesting use of "alien spacecraft" if so.
- noir_lord 6y agoCould be a reference to the replicator source code from stargate which was the html and js from a bank if I recall correctly.
- notkaiho 6y agoWow, that's ... niche
- noir_lord 6y agoWhenever code is on screen I pause and google it if it’s recognisably not total gibberish - have done for years, it’s always fascinating when it’s plausible and funny when it is not. My most recent one was Netflix’s Close, though that one was gibberish, it was just a html form with nonsensical attributes in that case. Found it, http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Stargate-Code-of-the-Replicators http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Stargate-Code-of-the-Replica...
- codr7 6y agoFrameworks and standards, definitely. But bug free software written do to exactly the right thing won't happen much. We're moving faster and faster, I don't think that's going to change. What seems to be happening more is designing around the fact to avoid disasters.
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- mrexroad 6y agoMy mind was blown when seeing connections [0] between Stewart Brand and many of the folks whose work deeply shaped my thinking about computing and systems. In retrospect, the influence is obvious and it’d be surprising if worked any other way. Which makes me wish CS programs included more courses covering history and philosophy of computing. I think we spent a a week or two on it —- Alan Kay even did a guest lecture —- but I still feel theres tremendous value in focusing on why we are doing what we do. [0] http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cybernetics_and_Counterculture.pdf http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cyberneti...
- jmtulloss 6y agoI highly recommend The Dream Machine[0] for an in-depth chronicle of the connections and influences that brought early computing to where it is today. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1732265119/ https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...
- throw_PLUTO 6y agoGood one. For an even earlier history, one should read 'The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture' by Brian Dear. The author spent decades researching and interviewing the pioneers. The PLATO system had chat rooms, instant messaging, screen savers, multiplayer games, flight simulators, crowdsourcing, interactive fiction, emoticons, e-learning (like MOOCs) etc.
- raleighm 6y agoOn the topic of videos involving Brand and Engelbart, they make amusing cameos in the film by Ted Nelson, which I recently stumbled upon. "Silicon Valley Story -- A Very Short Comedy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlyMrv8_dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlyMrv8_dQ [note: brief NSFW moment from 2:10 to 2:25]
- dang 6y agoThat's amazing! Ted might do an AMA on Hacker News, if I haven't spoiled our chances by taking pathetically long to follow up about it.
- raleighm 6y agoWhile I'm at it, here are Engelbart, Nelson and Howard Rheingold chatting casually over dinner. I really love this very much. These are two of my favorite bookmarks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc&t=221 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc&t=221 (I set the start time to skip Rheingold's introduction but feel free to go back and view.)
- dang 6y agoThat's marvelous! "It was like having Galileo and Newton over for dinner, as far as I'm concerned." I did go back and view Howard's intro and it's very nice as well. His love shines through.
- raleighm 6y ago> Ted might do an AMA on Hacker News Yes please!
- fit2rule 6y agoWhoa, that was great! Was that the very special Kiki Stockhammer at 1:08?
- acd 6y ago"The mother of all demos." Hyperlinking Computer mouse Videoconference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos Which influenced Xerox Parc which in turned influenced Apple.
- notkaiho 6y agoI wouldn't limit it to just Apple. Literally all of modern computing tools are influenced, to a greater or occasionally lesser extent, by this work.
- kps 6y agoThe associated paper is available for free this month. A research center for augmenting human intellect https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1476589.1476645 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1476589.1476645
- whatrocks 6y agoI'm not surprised this has been shared many times before, and yet I'm glad people are still discovering it. My journey to Engelbart's demo came through reading "The Dream Machine" book about JCR Licklider, which itself is an incredible computer history record.
- raleighm 6y agoSame here. This is a rare item I don't at all mind seeing every six months or so (it feels like).
- server_bot 6y agoWould highly recommend the "Advent of Computing" podcast episode on this topic: http://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=3a1d7af237bb48bb985e795c21f56bc3 http://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=3a1d7af237bb48bb985e795c2...
- EGreg 6y agoThis was my homage to Doug Engelbart from 2020... Instead of files and mouse cursors we have a vastly different set of components that all work together, and of course they integrate with the modern features like ApplePay and QR code scanning. Oh yeah and there is videoconferencing... just like in his demo :) https://youtu.be/FG93VxqV0EY https://youtu.be/FG93VxqV0EY
- MintelIE 6y agoAnybody watching this should also read As We May Think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
- antoniuschan99 6y agoI messaged his daughter Christina a few years back about what influenced his work: Here are two key links to his thinking on what's missing in today's information technology that would be very important to integrate in a seamless environment: About Open Hyperdocument Systems - http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/ohs.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/ohs.html short description and links to resources Toward High-Performance Organizations: http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-132811.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-132811.html A Strategic Role for Groupware. 1992 Engelbart article [print-version] (AUGMENT,132811,). And here's a bit about what he himself pioneered and why: http://dougengelbart.org/events/1968-demo-highlights.html http://dougengelbart.org/events/1968-demo-highlights.html Video highlights of Doug's 1968 Demo And lastly his historic work is captured in this repository for your browsing pleasure: http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html Engelbart Digital Archive
- fernly 6y agoIn the shots over his shoulder you see him using the original mouse with his right hand, and a "chord keyboard" with his left. He calls it a "keyset". That's a set of buttons, basically function keys, except they can be "played" in combinations. The chord keyboard was also an I/O device on the Xerox Alto, but AFAIK wasn't used again. I notice also, things didn't go as expected; he makes quite a few mistakes and very charmingly apologizes. But the fact that you can make mistakes and smoothly recover from them, was an important part of the demo. For context, by 1968 the concept of interacting directly with a computer in what we today would call command-line mode had been around for several years. The DEC PDP-1 was released in 1959; the IBM 1620 in 1960; Multics had started in 1964; the IBM 360 series began deliveries in 1965; all allowed an operator who had the privilege of being in the "machine room" to enter commands and get responses at a typewriter. The PDP-1 was alone (I think?) in having a 2-dimensional vector-based screen, but it was used for graphics (including the original Space War), not for text. Overwhelmingly, the paradigm for working with a computer was to prepare a "job" consisting of commands and blocks of data, all in punch cards, which was run as a "batch", producing output to print a/o disk or tape. If you made a mistake in setting up your job, you found out about it later, and could only "edit" by re-punching some cards, and re-running it. So when Englebart showed smooth interaction with data, editing and changing data ad-hoc, and making mistakes and correcting them ad-hoc without drama, on a two-dimensional screen -- that alone was a revolution. Hyper-linked media, hierarchical lists, that was icing.
- kps 6y agoYou should watch the 1963 demos of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad.
- larsbrinkhoff 6y agoI added the keyset to my Imlac emulator the other day. It can be used to play the Maze game.
- neilv 6y agoTwiddler chording keyboards were used by wearable computing people in at least the '90s. Looks like some Twiddler brand devices are still marketed. https://twiddler.tekgear.com/ https://twiddler.tekgear.com/
- divbzero 6y agoStill boggles my mind every time I see this. Imagine putting together a demo today that will still be discussed in earnest half a century from now…
- mongol 6y agoI think the Jobs Iphone demo might be that.
- pfarrell 6y agoYou’ve got something there. The last time I saw something, in tech, that felt “magical” was the first time I saw an iPhone. The intro video, from Jobs, is something I’ve watched several times over the years. It’s a masterpiece of marketing and storytelling.
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- randoman2000 6y agoMalwarebytes throwing up the following warning: Website blocked due to Trojan. Just an FYI
- randoman2000 6y agoMalwarebytes throwing up the following warning AGAIN: Website blocked due to Trojan. Shortly after my original post about this the site was accessible and no warnings.. now I am receiving the same warning again from Malwarebytes. Not sure whats going on but thought I would let folks know.