6 ms·

Bill English has died

115 points by gjvc 6y ago

peter303 6y ago
Ironically, the talking computer HAL was introduced in the same year as English's mouse. (Though the Star Trek oral computer beat this by a couple years.) Of the various human-computer interfaces- keyboard, graphical, oral- I suspect oral will dominate shortly. Oral is most natural, but required some A.I. to work well.
- skj 6y ago
  I think that oral control will only really take off once we can record it sub vocally, in the style of "speaker for the dead" ("ender's game" sequel). I like the flexibility, but I really really don't like people to hear what I'm saying. Imagine three people in a room trying to do this. It'd be total nonsense. Subvocal commands would be really nice, if that's a thing that is actually possible. Or maybe constant chattering from everyone around you becomes the new normal. I can totally imagine old me (38 now) being completely overwhelmed by this technology and all my grandkids wondering why I'm having such a hard time, and rolling their eyes when I say I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! Everything was simpler back then! I didn't have to listen to all this yabbering all the time and I could just tell the dang computer what I want it to dang darn do!
  - tushar-r 6y ago
    >I can totally imagine old me (38 now) > I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! About the same age, and I feel this way about mobile devices/touchscreens already!
    - eecc 6y ago
      I’m pretty annoyed by the inscrutability of some new UIs, their total lack of interactive cues and discoverability. It makes me feel old and most importantly it reminds me that often if not always, it’s not the potential utility that motivated my interest in applications, but a primal curiosity to tinker. The reward comes fryom just fidgeting with the widget and nothing more. Essentially a form of procrastination.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      About half this age, and I feel the same way already. I can't stand touchscreens for anything other then placing calls, and maybe controlling music playback. Anything more complicated I miss dedicated hardware for input.
  - danielbarla 6y ago
    I wonder if sub-vocal will happen anytime soon, and if it does, I am still not sure how it will solve voice being sub-optimal for some types of text. One example is plain old programming, and needs a fairly elaborate setup. The best example I've been able to find was Tavis Rudd's presentation [1], which seems to be a decent solution. I have tried to more or less replicate this setup, but found it less satisfactory. Aside from it demanding near-perfect audio quality to work remotely well in general (as well as a heavy time investment, initial and ongoing), you frequently run into edge cases where it just doesn't want to understand something you're saying. After the 5th or 6th mis-transcription of some specific phrase, you tend to just give up and reach for the keyboard, RSI be damned. (And this as a native English-speaker, with a relatively neutral accent.) I can definitely imagine better fleshed out solutions to either voice recognition for programming, or programming languages whose syntax lends themselves to easier and more productive voice recognition. I could see some definite productivity enhancements if it were achieved. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
    - mncharity 6y ago
      One upside of AR is sensor fusion, so components can be individually less robust. Those contending (mis)transcriptions might be selected among by an eye-tracked glance, rather than reaching for a keyboard, or even an "eep alt 3".
    - skj 6y ago
      Regarding sup-optimality... Currently our programming is optimized for keyboard input. If sub-vocal instruction becomes "a thing", I suspect we would spend some collective effort to create a programming language optimized for that mode of input. I think the only reason we don't have real languages using touch input is because of the lack of bandwidth for that signal.
  - J5892 6y ago
    I remember when I was in middle school reading a YA novel about VR (I think one of the Net Force books), the main character discovered a hacker and expressed disbelief that he was "entering commands with a keyboard!". I was like, "Wow, like on DOS? Why not use a mouse? What is this, the 80s?" Ironic now, that probably 50% of my interactions with computers are via command line.
- bitwize 6y ago
  I don't think so, and Scott Adams has his doubts too: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24 https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24
- HAL4way 6y ago
  To this day, I am creeped out by how often I use HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers). Was that acronym in common use at the time that the book was written? How about the movie? Which way does that causation go, if it exists at all? Sorry for the off-topic question, but it really does haunt me. Modern HALs are like rat nests, and I imagine it was worse in decades past. So it must be a pun...right?
- the-dude 6y ago
  The ambiguity of human language is one of the hardest problems in IT. I wouldn't hold my breath.
- vaxman 6y ago
  Alexa is taking over the game, even with the not-quite-natural syntax and privacy concerns. That said, speech is laborious compared to thought. Elon Musk is working on thought (for real).
- taneq 6y ago
  Maybe I'm old but if I'm composing text, I far prefer to type on a keyboard than dictate. I spend far more time re-reading and revising what I've written than I do typing it, and unless I were willing to significantly drop my standards of written communication I can't see myself gaining all that much from switching to voice control. Plus, talking all day is exhausting. Why would you want to do that?
- iso1631 6y ago
  The concept of a talking computer and mouse of course met in 1986's Star Trek IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE
brian_herman 6y ago
We should get a black bar for the co-inventor of the mouse.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  It was a great invention, sure. And he was very smart. But wouldn’t a computer mouse be independently invented by... basically everyone after computers started gaining traction?
  - rl3 6y ago
    Not necessarily. There's things that should've existed decades ago that still do not exist. It often isn't a matter of technology, so much as the vision and will to bring something into existence. Bill English was instrumental to the creation of the mouse, and rightly became a computing legend for his work. Legends deserve black bars.
  - uxp100 6y ago
    Unless they had stuck to light pens, or trackballs, or maybe a joystick? I think it's not quite as obvious as it seems.
- rvz 6y ago
  Indeed, he should get a black bar in recognition for his contributions just like other co-inventors did. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549809
kbumsik 6y ago
I was so surprised when I watched "The Mother of All Demos" from 50+ years ago (1968) and saw what they predicted and actually implemented. They demonstrated what's happening in 2020, video conferencing, real time collaborative word processing, and etc. Truly amazing. [1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
- vaxman 6y ago
  Rewatched it on the giant touch panel in my dashboard last night. One thing that is neat is the genlock-like mix of video and computer output —pretty cool for 1968. Going to hookup a mouse today and go trackpad-free for a while on the old ‘puter in honor of his passing.
- gjvc 6y ago
  and probably most of most historic importance, hypertext-navigable content editing. (note that Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1963). I often wistfully hope that some group of people will retrace the steps made by that generation of researchers, and evolve a better medium than TBL-derived efforts.
- cxr 6y ago
  > what they predicted From Bret Victor's "A few words on Doug Engelbart"[1]: > Almost any time you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder", you end up missing the point. [...] If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart's design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart's intent. [...] If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent.[2] 1. http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ 2. http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I knew Bill as the "I18N"[1] guy. SunOS 4.0 had this new feature that let you type things in languages other than English and Bill was there solving a lot of the weird problems that came up. That said, the systems folks "hated" all the scut work of adding complicated layers of interfaces everywhere the system printed a message. I knew he had been at PARC but it wasn't until the Computer History Museum Fellows dinner for Englebart that I found out his part in that demo. [1] A quick way to write Internationalization which has 18 letters between I and N.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Same reason why Andreessen Horowitz is also "A16Z" - not a lot of people know this. (and same reason why Mission and Market is "M14T" - a small micro-vc fund that I co-founded with two other friends - not a plug, as the fund is fully closed (e.g. raised all the capital intended to raise) and is fully deployed, and we don't need to market it anymore).
cbsmith 6y ago
Wow, he passed away several days ago. Totally missed this.
kanobo 6y ago
They say it takes on average around 30 years for groundbreaking technology like the mouse and touch interfaces to become mature and commonplace. It must have been exciting for those who worked at places like PARC and SRI building the future and slowly seeing the fruits of your labor as you age. RIP Bill English.
ftio 6y ago
Whenever I see comments about Engelbart and co focusing on their invention of the mouse, I'm reminded of a tribute[0] Bret Victor wrote about Engelbart after his passing. The NYTimes headline for Engelbart's obituary read "Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88". In response, Victor writes, "This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil." That is to say: English, Engelbart, and the other folks working on NLS had a much larger goal: augmenting human intellect. The mouse (along with the chorded keyboard and other mechanisms for interaction) was one component of that. An important one, but one nonetheless. It has been transformative, yes. But perhaps the most important aspect of the legacy of Bill English and his colleagues is not in what they built, in what they shipped, but rather in what their goals were. I highly recommend reading Bret Victor's piece (as well as his other writings). There's also a really solid book on the era in which NLS was created, the ups and downs of building (and funding) it, and its impact. It's called _What the Dormouse Said_ [1] by John Markoff. [0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
justin66 6y ago
It's possible he'll stop in here and write something himself, so I hope sharing this is not somehow presumptuous, but Alan Kay had a beautiful remembrance of Bill English on quora: https://www.quora.com/How-important-was-William-English-to-the-evolution-of-the-personal-computer/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/How-important-was-William-English-to-t...

115 points by gjvc 6y ago

Ironically, the talking computer HAL was introduced in the same year as English's mouse. (Though the Star Trek oral computer beat this by a couple years.) Of the various human-computer interfaces- keyboard, graphical, oral- I suspect oral will dominate shortly. Oral is most natural, but required some A.I. to work well.

skj 6y ago
I think that oral control will only really take off once we can record it sub vocally, in the style of "speaker for the dead" ("ender's game" sequel). I like the flexibility, but I really really don't like people to hear what I'm saying. Imagine three people in a room trying to do this. It'd be total nonsense. Subvocal commands would be really nice, if that's a thing that is actually possible. Or maybe constant chattering from everyone around you becomes the new normal. I can totally imagine old me (38 now) being completely overwhelmed by this technology and all my grandkids wondering why I'm having such a hard time, and rolling their eyes when I say I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! Everything was simpler back then! I didn't have to listen to all this yabbering all the time and I could just tell the dang computer what I want it to dang darn do!
- tushar-r 6y ago
  >I can totally imagine old me (38 now) > I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! About the same age, and I feel this way about mobile devices/touchscreens already!
  - eecc 6y ago
    I’m pretty annoyed by the inscrutability of some new UIs, their total lack of interactive cues and discoverability. It makes me feel old and most importantly it reminds me that often if not always, it’s not the potential utility that motivated my interest in applications, but a primal curiosity to tinker. The reward comes fryom just fidgeting with the widget and nothing more. Essentially a form of procrastination.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    About half this age, and I feel the same way already. I can't stand touchscreens for anything other then placing calls, and maybe controlling music playback. Anything more complicated I miss dedicated hardware for input.
- danielbarla 6y ago
  I wonder if sub-vocal will happen anytime soon, and if it does, I am still not sure how it will solve voice being sub-optimal for some types of text. One example is plain old programming, and needs a fairly elaborate setup. The best example I've been able to find was Tavis Rudd's presentation [1], which seems to be a decent solution. I have tried to more or less replicate this setup, but found it less satisfactory. Aside from it demanding near-perfect audio quality to work remotely well in general (as well as a heavy time investment, initial and ongoing), you frequently run into edge cases where it just doesn't want to understand something you're saying. After the 5th or 6th mis-transcription of some specific phrase, you tend to just give up and reach for the keyboard, RSI be damned. (And this as a native English-speaker, with a relatively neutral accent.) I can definitely imagine better fleshed out solutions to either voice recognition for programming, or programming languages whose syntax lends themselves to easier and more productive voice recognition. I could see some definite productivity enhancements if it were achieved. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
  - mncharity 6y ago
    One upside of AR is sensor fusion, so components can be individually less robust. Those contending (mis)transcriptions might be selected among by an eye-tracked glance, rather than reaching for a keyboard, or even an "eep alt 3".
  - skj 6y ago
    Regarding sup-optimality... Currently our programming is optimized for keyboard input. If sub-vocal instruction becomes "a thing", I suspect we would spend some collective effort to create a programming language optimized for that mode of input. I think the only reason we don't have real languages using touch input is because of the lack of bandwidth for that signal.
- J5892 6y ago
  I remember when I was in middle school reading a YA novel about VR (I think one of the Net Force books), the main character discovered a hacker and expressed disbelief that he was "entering commands with a keyboard!". I was like, "Wow, like on DOS? Why not use a mouse? What is this, the 80s?" Ironic now, that probably 50% of my interactions with computers are via command line.
bitwize 6y ago
I don't think so, and Scott Adams has his doubts too: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24 https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24
HAL4way 6y ago
To this day, I am creeped out by how often I use HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers). Was that acronym in common use at the time that the book was written? How about the movie? Which way does that causation go, if it exists at all? Sorry for the off-topic question, but it really does haunt me. Modern HALs are like rat nests, and I imagine it was worse in decades past. So it must be a pun...right?
the-dude 6y ago
The ambiguity of human language is one of the hardest problems in IT. I wouldn't hold my breath.
vaxman 6y ago
Alexa is taking over the game, even with the not-quite-natural syntax and privacy concerns. That said, speech is laborious compared to thought. Elon Musk is working on thought (for real).
taneq 6y ago
Maybe I'm old but if I'm composing text, I far prefer to type on a keyboard than dictate. I spend far more time re-reading and revising what I've written than I do typing it, and unless I were willing to significantly drop my standards of written communication I can't see myself gaining all that much from switching to voice control. Plus, talking all day is exhausting. Why would you want to do that?
iso1631 6y ago
The concept of a talking computer and mouse of course met in 1986's Star Trek IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

brian_herman 6y ago

We should get a black bar for the co-inventor of the mouse.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
It was a great invention, sure. And he was very smart. But wouldn’t a computer mouse be independently invented by... basically everyone after computers started gaining traction?
- rl3 6y ago
  Not necessarily. There's things that should've existed decades ago that still do not exist. It often isn't a matter of technology, so much as the vision and will to bring something into existence. Bill English was instrumental to the creation of the mouse, and rightly became a computing legend for his work. Legends deserve black bars.
- uxp100 6y ago
  Unless they had stuck to light pens, or trackballs, or maybe a joystick? I think it's not quite as obvious as it seems.
rvz 6y ago
Indeed, he should get a black bar in recognition for his contributions just like other co-inventors did. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549809

kbumsik 6y ago

I was so surprised when I watched "The Mother of All Demos" from 50+ years ago (1968) and saw what they predicted and actually implemented. They demonstrated what's happening in 2020, video conferencing, real time collaborative word processing, and etc. Truly amazing. [1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

vaxman 6y ago
Rewatched it on the giant touch panel in my dashboard last night. One thing that is neat is the genlock-like mix of video and computer output —pretty cool for 1968. Going to hookup a mouse today and go trackpad-free for a while on the old ‘puter in honor of his passing.
gjvc 6y ago
and probably most of most historic importance, hypertext-navigable content editing. (note that Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1963). I often wistfully hope that some group of people will retrace the steps made by that generation of researchers, and evolve a better medium than TBL-derived efforts.
cxr 6y ago
> what they predicted From Bret Victor's "A few words on Doug Engelbart"[1]: > Almost any time you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder", you end up missing the point. [...] If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart's design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart's intent. [...] If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent.[2] 1. http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ 2. http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I knew Bill as the "I18N"[1] guy. SunOS 4.0 had this new feature that let you type things in languages other than English and Bill was there solving a lot of the weird problems that came up. That said, the systems folks "hated" all the scut work of adding complicated layers of interfaces everywhere the system printed a message. I knew he had been at PARC but it wasn't until the Computer History Museum Fellows dinner for Englebart that I found out his part in that demo. [1] A quick way to write Internationalization which has 18 letters between I and N.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Same reason why Andreessen Horowitz is also "A16Z" - not a lot of people know this. (and same reason why Mission and Market is "M14T" - a small micro-vc fund that I co-founded with two other friends - not a plug, as the fund is fully closed (e.g. raised all the capital intended to raise) and is fully deployed, and we don't need to market it anymore).

cbsmith 6y ago

Wow, he passed away several days ago. Totally missed this.

kanobo 6y ago

They say it takes on average around 30 years for groundbreaking technology like the mouse and touch interfaces to become mature and commonplace. It must have been exciting for those who worked at places like PARC and SRI building the future and slowly seeing the fruits of your labor as you age. RIP Bill English.

ftio 6y ago

Whenever I see comments about Engelbart and co focusing on their invention of the mouse, I'm reminded of a tribute[0] Bret Victor wrote about Engelbart after his passing. The NYTimes headline for Engelbart's obituary read "Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88". In response, Victor writes, "This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil." That is to say: English, Engelbart, and the other folks working on NLS had a much larger goal: augmenting human intellect. The mouse (along with the chorded keyboard and other mechanisms for interaction) was one component of that. An important one, but one nonetheless. It has been transformative, yes. But perhaps the most important aspect of the legacy of Bill English and his colleagues is not in what they built, in what they shipped, but rather in what their goals were. I highly recommend reading Bret Victor's piece (as well as his other writings). There's also a really solid book on the era in which NLS was created, the ups and downs of building (and funding) it, and its impact. It's called _What the Dormouse Said_ [1] by John Markoff. [0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

justin66 6y ago

It's possible he'll stop in here and write something himself, so I hope sharing this is not somehow presumptuous, but Alan Kay had a beautiful remembrance of Bill English on quora: https://www.quora.com/How-important-was-William-English-to-the-evolution-of-the-personal-computer/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/How-important-was-William-English-to-t...