4 ms·

I've studied HCI and Engelbart's work for quite a long time, and I'm not sure I would fully agree that things would have been better had Engelbart continued wor

I've studied HCI and Engelbart's work for quite a long time, and I'm not sure I would fully agree that things would have been better had Engelbart continued working on NLS, or if NLS had won out. One simple example is with copy and paste. NLS had a highly complex and error prone copy-and-paste system. A lot of the commands in NLS were modal (vs modeless), and thus error prone. See this article for more info: http://worrydream.com/refs/Tesler%20-%20A%20Personal%20History%20of%20Modeless%20Text%20Editing%20and%20Cut-Copy-Paste.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Tesler%20-%20A%20Personal%20Histo... Another issue was basic usability of NLS. Engelbart's vision was on continuous bootstrapping, continually aiming to create more powerful and expressive systems. This vision was pretty good for technical people, but also comes at the cost of basic ease of use and entry for newcomers. For instance, think about how many problems non-technical people still have with today's PCs and smartphones, many of which strive for "walk up and use" kind of usage. Having been in research for over two decades now, my position is that we researchers will often identify the right problem and get the right general direction, but not always the right form. For instance, in the late 90s at Berkeley, folks correctly identified cluster computing as the future, and that we should aim to create abstractions to host Internet services to make them more scalable and robust. The specifics went in a very different direction (e.g. cloud computing, Kubernetes, etc), but the general thrust was right. As another example, my colleagues and I correctly identified rapid prototyping and testing tools for user interfaces as a major need, and while we inspired a lot of ideas with our work (pen-based sketching), industry went in a very different direction (see Figma and Axure and InVision). I think the same is true with Engelbart's work. He was definitely a pioneer and helped open up people's imaginations as to what was possible with computing, but was off on a lot of the details and specifics that really matter for adoption. And that's ok because to a large extent, that's one of the many reasons we as a community and society do research.

mikewarot 4y ago
I've heard that some people objected to his strong focus on "bootstrapping". In some ways, maybe we avoided a repeat of Babbage and his continual push towards something better at the cost of completion. It's hard to know from this perspective where the truth of the matter lies.
urthor 4y ago
This is due to the different vision of what engineers/researchers and consumers want. Researchers/Engineers want bottom up progress. They place incremental development at the heart of their system. Partially since researchers have very little money. They cannot do anything that requires 100 developers. They want a low hurdle rate, a low barrier to entry. To get started and make visible progress. Engineers are constantly demanding progress. They want solutions that are state of the art, for various different reasons. The lots of small, incremental improvements to keep the cutting edge. Consumers want the complete opposite. Consumers want whatever ecosystem has the most money and progress invested into it. Then the consumer want it to never change. Ever. They don't want to invest capital expenditure/attention span in learning new things. They have other important problems to deal with. Then, when there is a deal-breaker scene change, they will jump to the next big thing.
closedloop129 4y ago
> but was off on a lot of the details and specifics that really matter for adoption. How can this be sped up? It feels like progress was made as fast as possible but in hindsight it's almost silly that there was not a computer in every household in 1970.
- randomifcpfan 4y ago
  Given 1970 hardware CPU and RAM costs that doesn’t seem possible. Unless you count something like the telephone, where all the smarts are elsewhere.
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    Did those costs come from raw materials? Otherwise scaling up would have driven down those prices massively.
    - randomifcpfan 4y ago
      Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling were in full swing during that era. The thing about exponential growth is that most of the gains come at the end. The Alto cost $100K in 1973, the price for equivalent hardware halved every 18 months. That’s exactly what happened. By 1983 we had Mac for $1000 hardware cost / $2500 list price.

mikewarot 4y ago

I've heard that some people objected to his strong focus on "bootstrapping". In some ways, maybe we avoided a repeat of Babbage and his continual push towards something better at the cost of completion. It's hard to know from this perspective where the truth of the matter lies.

urthor 4y ago

This is due to the different vision of what engineers/researchers and consumers want. Researchers/Engineers want bottom up progress. They place incremental development at the heart of their system. Partially since researchers have very little money. They cannot do anything that requires 100 developers. They want a low hurdle rate, a low barrier to entry. To get started and make visible progress. Engineers are constantly demanding progress. They want solutions that are state of the art, for various different reasons. The lots of small, incremental improvements to keep the cutting edge. Consumers want the complete opposite. Consumers want whatever ecosystem has the most money and progress invested into it. Then the consumer want it to never change. Ever. They don't want to invest capital expenditure/attention span in learning new things. They have other important problems to deal with. Then, when there is a deal-breaker scene change, they will jump to the next big thing.

closedloop129 4y ago

> but was off on a lot of the details and specifics that really matter for adoption. How can this be sped up? It feels like progress was made as fast as possible but in hindsight it's almost silly that there was not a computer in every household in 1970.

randomifcpfan 4y ago
Given 1970 hardware CPU and RAM costs that doesn’t seem possible. Unless you count something like the telephone, where all the smarts are elsewhere.
- closedloop129 4y ago
  Did those costs come from raw materials? Otherwise scaling up would have driven down those prices massively.
  - randomifcpfan 4y ago
    Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling were in full swing during that era. The thing about exponential growth is that most of the gains come at the end. The Alto cost $100K in 1973, the price for equivalent hardware halved every 18 months. That’s exactly what happened. By 1983 we had Mac for $1000 hardware cost / $2500 list price.