16 ms·

50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)

302 points by jdcampolargo 4y ago

spiralganglion 4y ago
Funny timing — the Future of Coding podcast (disclosure: hosted by myself, sponsored by Replit) just did an episode about Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect, perhaps offering a bit of the "more in-depth examination" Amjad was interested in. https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056 https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056 That paper (from '62) forms quite the contrast with MoAD (from '68). While the latter is quite specific, showing a lot of "features" that people tend to point to when citing Engelbart's influence, the former is arguably much more visionary. Doug had quite a lot more in mind than just pointing devices and video calling.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  I almost blew my ears off when I started it. I couldn't find a volume control in the media player, and the little button on the right wasn't it. Please add a volume control to the media player.
  - spiralganglion 4y ago
    Sorry about that! It's a player made by Omny, my podcast host. But I'm unhappy with them for other reasons too, so I'll be switching away soon — self-hosting, and using the native media player. So your volume slider wishes will be fulfilled. Thank you for the request.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      Suggestion: abandon the player, let your subscribers choose whatever player they like, such as their own browser's builtin player, and just post a link to the media file, like an mp3, and/or stream via a common protocol all browsers support, like rtsp. No middleman and far less fuss.
- AlbertoGP 4y ago
  I listened to it (thanks mikewarot for the warning about the volume), and at some point two of you discuss something I agree with that I haven’t seen noted before when talking about Doug Engelbart: > [... 1:17:32] Joe is writing down all of the things that you’re saying describing the system, and then he says that “it represents the clumsy phrasing and illogical progression of thought so typical of extemporaneous speech” [https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html#3b5a https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html#3b5a] which A: is what Jimmy and I are doing right now, B: is what Doug Engelbart’s writing reads like anyways. His writing reads like clumsy and illogical progressions of extemporaneous speech, except that it’s like, worked to within an inch of its life. It is so overwrought, and yet at the same time clumsy and illogical, so that... you know... grrrr! > [... 1:18:14] Doug is a bad writer, I don’t like Doug’s writing, I’ll say that, I have not enjoyed reading his writing. I enjoyed his fan fiction better than I enjoyed his technical manuals, it’s just not a pleasure to read. And it made me wonder, [...] did he feel the disconnect in quality between, like, Bush’s writing and his own writing? Did he feel like the quality of his writing needed to be formed into this very unappealing mold because of the context he was working in? > [... 1:20:42] I do kind of agree with you, his writing is very awkward, right? It is hard to kind of get at the ideas that are in here, and you know, maybe there is something to it where he is... this is clearly, some of this is an intentional stylistic choice, right? [...] he wanted to write in this way for some particular reason or other, I think.
- rektide 4y ago
  As one of my favorite books, I'm overdue for a re-read, but Waldrop's Dream Machines is a book about J.C.R. Licklider, but Engelbart definitely comes up again and again, and for sure, the Augmenting Human Intellect thread is highly present. At least we no longer reduce Engelbart to "the man who invented the mouse." But yeah, the not-exactly philosophical but big-idea-ed-ness, the frame-setting that folks had is such a valuable contribution. Engelbart had such a clear & sharp objective in mind, that he wrote about so early, & it's so compelling & humanistic a value. Few other examples of tech-workers across the decades seem to radiate with the clear moral & progressive clarity. Thank you for this call out. This idea, of whether computers are here to mechanize processes that people fit into, or whether computers are tools to augment & enhance our individual agency, is a huge question. Ursala Franklin has some good material on Technological Society. There's a couple different points of view she proposes, but I really enjoy the distinction she makes between Holistic technologies, where the capabilities of the user are expanded & opened, the user gains control, versus Prescriptive technologies, which relate more to macro-level control, to enforcing set-down processes[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Now that's a worthwhile Wikipedia page.
rmason 4y ago
I had the change to meet him in SF. He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz. But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been. Nobody would fund him. Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget. Who knows what he might have invented? He had that rare ability to see into the future. The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?
- gumby 4y ago
  What do you mean? He was funded by SRI for a long time, and spent time visiting other people and spreading the word. I first met him when he visited PARC, probably for the upteent time but I’d just joined. He was full of interesting ideas, not someone who just had one big insight long ago, and was great to talk to about your own work. His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades. Mind boggling how that works — quite different from a fully remote world. We talk about WFH vs office, but less about the value of running into Doug engelbart or don knuth while walking down the street.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    > His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades I was at that service and several people spoke about how his ideas did not really get the backing they deserved, Ted Nelson not the least of them. This makes more sense when you realize that what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked far more than he wanted to invent cool new tech, but while people were happy to have him as a member of staff he needed to be given freedom to play with organizations and no one was ready to try anything as radical as he had in mind. I remember there was a period where Google was trying to make him a permanent fixture and he said in a private conversation something to the effect of it feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue, not engage with his ideas.
    - 4y ago
throwawaycuriou 4y ago
when did 'demo' begin use as a shorthand for demonstration?
- lelandfe 4y ago
  At least 1936, according to this unsourced page: https://www.etymonline.com/word/demo https://www.etymonline.com/word/demo
- userbinator 4y ago
  I actually thought this would be about a demoscene production.
mftb 4y ago
Always glad to see this getting attention, I really enjoy computing history. There's a link to a video in the article, but it's part three of ten. Recently I came across this[0]. It's pretty much the whole thing in one video. It's long but it's well worth the watch. I was born in '68, so I can't remember the 60s, but I can remember the 70s and it's easy for me to understand why people felt Engelbart was, "Dealing lightning with both hands" at the Mother of All Demos. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
- martyvis 4y ago
  And I just found this very recent biopic on Doug. Just watched 10 minutes so far, but it looks to be really well produced, with interview snippets with Alan Kay, Vint Cerf amongst others. https://youtu.be/_7ZtISeGyCY https://youtu.be/_7ZtISeGyCY
  - mftb 4y ago
    Cool, bookmarked, ty!
musesum 4y ago
I met Doug Engelbart in the late 90's during his reboot sessions at Stanford. Lots of luminaries spoke, including Ted Nelson. I was there because I read every one of his group's papers, in the mid 80's, and wrote a version of Augment in MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal. I think I showed him a demo. He invited me to attend informal meetings at SRI. I left after a few weeks because I couldn't figure out how it would result in a product. Had already went into deep personal debt, once before (about $50K in 1990), trying to market something similar.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  You don't happen to have that code lying around anywhere do you? I'd love to take a peek.
  - musesum 4y ago
    Ugh, am embarrassed by my coding style, from back then. The product still works on Windows XP, but is in storage in Iowa (am in California). Next time I visit family, will bring it out.
- Kinrany 4y ago
  Monetization is an extra constraint that makes software worse :(
  - musesum 4y ago
    Counter opinion was Nolan Bushnell, saying that the best way to test an idea was to put a coin slot on it. This was during the era of arcade machines. But, then again, not sure how you put a coin slot on the Arpanet.
- criddell 4y ago
  How actionable where the ideas in those papers? A few times I've read old essays and papers and it always seems like there's eventually one poorly defined or completely abstract portion that boils down to "magic happens here".
idontwantthis 4y ago
I’m always left amazed, confused and disappointed when I read about this. How did something so monumental get built and demonstrated, but then not get followed up on for more than 30 years? Were there humongous caveats involved in the demo that made it impossible to leave the lab even for major corporations?
- gumby 4y ago
  The caveats were that 1 - you needed specialized research hardware that basically nobody had and 2 - people didn’t understand how revolutionary computers were.* Even in the late 80s the general consensus was that personal computers would be just used by specialists because “no executive can type, or would want to” And the labs in those days were pushing forward and “inventing the future”. We had network-native systems: not just computers with network adaptors, but cloud native software with mail, filesystem etc transparently available over the net. In fact where did the “cloud” concept come from? A TCP design document in the 70s. When you’d look outside the lab it felt like the past. DOS was the state of the art. And you’d visit your friends at different institutions and see different approaches to address the same problems. These days I never get that “this is the exciting future” feeling. The old nexus corporate labs (PARC, IBM, Bell Labs (RIP) and others) aren’t dominant as they used to be, but when I visit their successors (e.g. Google) the research doesn’t have that same jaw-drop impact. Not because I’m jaded, but because nothing appears to have come back through a time machine any more. Perhaps because computing went mainstream and then the constraints appeared? * and are: I think people still haven’t grasped how transformational they will be once we finally get computers to work and be useful. We’re still just puttering around at the base of the mountain.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    You requested my thoughts here in a different comment :) > The caveats were that 1 - you needed specialized research hardware that basically nobody had and 2 - people didn’t understand how revolutionary computers were.* Even in the late 80s the general consensus was that personal computers would be just used by specialists because “no executive can type, or would want to” I agree with this completely. The teleconferencing, for example, required a big string of trucks with equipment to transmit the signal IIRC. An incredible tech demo but not even close to something that could be productized. > Not because I’m jaded, but because nothing appears to have come back through a time machine any more. Perhaps because computing went mainstream and then the constraints appeared? I think another way to frame this is that early computers offered a clear paradigm shift, the shift happened, and now everything on the near horizon is within that paradigm. This true even for some of the more exciting projects like Bret Victor's dynamicland (I'm not sure it will actually go anywhere, but I'm happy to see someone carrying the torch of the multimedia dreams that died in the 90s). Personally, I think biotech has the best potential for the next "it's the future!" style revolution.
spicybright 4y ago
And yet we still haven't learned enough from it. The fact computers have been so isolated from one another (even with internet apps) is a complete tragedy. Even sending large files is a pain in the butt to this day. The demo had multiple people working on the same computer remotely, with their own cursors and ability to do things on the system at the same time. Best we have now is web-browsers syncing data silos, or a one way "let this person control my mouse + keyboard". It feels like building a bridge by everyone making parts in isolation then expensively shipping it to the work site that only has one crane to assemble them. Usually it's way easier to have multiple people work on something. Like carrying something heavy, or having a line of people walk the bridge with the right tools/verification to install the rivets right, or even the opportunity for someone to speak up present unique ideas to the group. Even just a few basic OS primitives early on could have jump started so much collaboration tools and techniques that mirror how we all work together everywhere else in real life. As an aside, the whole "meta-verse" craze might pull these ideas through to the mainstream again. I see lots of demos of avatars standing at a table working on stuff together, and I've been on VR chat before drawing 3d images with crayons at the same time with other people. It's incredibly fun to try and draw an elephant together and work on different parts at the same time to hilarious results.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  > The demo had multiple people working on the same computer remotely, with their own cursors and ability to do things on the system at the same time. Best we have now is web-browsers syncing data silos, or a one way "let this person control my mouse + keyboard". Apple's multi-user support in it's "iWork" productivity apps actually comes very close to this, and it's a real shame that it's not as well known as it is. In fact Apple just demo'd improvements to it a couple of days ago at WWDC. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181 It works almost exactly like you're describing and frankly I think it's amazing and am surprised more people don't rave about it.
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    It's OSX-only, which makes it a non-starter for most orgs. We actually are 100% macbook, but we still use Google Docs since some people want to edit documents from their phone.
paulpauper 4y ago
Matt Ridley famously quoted that "no one knows how to build a computer mouse" Well, this guy did.
VonGuard 4y ago
A piece I wrote on this a couple years back: https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predicted-future-mother-demos/ https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predic...
DeathArrow 4y ago
This is from Wikipedia article about the Mother of All Demos: >The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor If those things were possible in 1968, why did most of us started to use them just in the '90? Is normal to have that big of a gap between a technological demonstration and the technology becoming available?
- xmprt 4y ago
  This is state of the art stuff that would have been prohibitively expensive for most people. It's kind of like how a lot of home automation stuff was theorized back in the 90s and early 2000s but it only became mainstream recently.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Short answer - the PC won and we started at the bottom and worked up. Had the PC not won it's possible that something like multi-user systems would have become the main thing (which we now basically have, but we call it "the cloud").
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    I must, with respect, disagree that "the cloud" is the same (or even close to the same) thing. Indeed, you use the acronym "PC", which, I'll remind the crowd stands for "Personal Computer". It has recently dawned on me that the thing is not (for most people, ordinary, 'non-techie' people) "Personal", and is scarcely a "Computer" in the sense of Turing-machine/Universal computing device. Allow me to unpack that: "Personal" is the pair of shoes I wear every day, even though they're years past their use-by date, are ugly, smell funny and the soles are worn. For you it might be the jumper knitted for you by your Nan. It's the objects we use that, over the years, mould themselves to our personal idiosyncrasies, habits, preferences and style. Our computers scarcely have that (particularly in the Apple and MS worlds of Personal Computing!) and hardly live long enough to acquire personalisation/personality. Not to mention, too, it's quite hard to do. Example: my (Linux, KDE) box is pretty happy for me to define custom hot-keys for all sorts of things, from firing up frequently-used apps (I scarcely ever use the desktop menu these days) to typing my email address. But could my (tech-clueless) brother do that? Extremely unlikely. And it takes several non-intuitive steps to make a new hotkey... "Computer": How programmable is my phone? (I've done Android dev work. I don't ever wish to do it again.) How scriptable? How malleable in casual ways? Not at all. It's Google's device much more than it's mine. It's a sort of locked-down surveillance television, not a general-purpose computer programmable-by-me (except in a highly specialist and narrow sense.) Much of the blame I put at the doorstep of Visual Basic which reduced the scope and utility of direct-manipulation interfaces into a terribly narrow, constrained version of "paper forms on an electronic screen". It put the vision back by at least a decade. Maybe several. Finally, though, I have hope we might emerge from that. There's a bunch of us working on it.
Stratoscope 4y ago
Amjad's tribute is touching, and also be sure to read the Wikipedia page he links to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos I met Doug in the late 1970s when we worked in the same Tymshare office at 20705 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino. He had a little cubicle like the rest of us, in the far corner of the building behind the pine tree in the middle of this Street View image: https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A We only talked a few times, but I could always see the sadness in his eyes from the shabby treatment Tymshare gave him. No real team, and not much encouragement to continue his mission. Tymshare was quite a land of lost opportunities. Earlier in the 1970s they had a "programmable terminal" in a side office. I think it may have been a Datapoint 2200? I found the programming manual and saw that I could write code to respond to the cursor keys, put characters on the screen where I wanted them, and then run Conway's Game of Life! In my years of working there coding on Teletype machines, I'd never experienced anything like this. Eventually my manager saw me working on my GoL program, and kindly but firmly said, "Mike, this looks like fun and all, but no one is ever going to want to do something like this. We have important business problems to solve. Back to work now!" At one point they did consider doing something to take advantage of these newfangled "microcomputers". But they didn't pursue it very far, because they figured it might be a threat to their established timesharing business. And they were right!
mikewarot 4y ago
The main thing he wanted, and never got... was a group of people working together on some task unrelated to programming, with an agreed upon measure of productivity. He wanted to see how much he could optimize their productivity over time with careful measurement and plain old trial and error. It's never stated why funding dried up, but here's my suspicion: Nobody was willing to risk upsetting the traditional hierarchy with something that might obsolete management, for example. Nobody other than an angel investor, or group of old retired technologists can pull something like that off. It has to be someone with time, or f*ck you money. I have time.
dws 4y ago
And behind the camera, Stewart Brand
psaux 4y ago
I was very lucky to have worked with Doug on multiple projects and see his passion for computer science and humanity. He was one of the most humble people and was happy to share all his wisdom. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him. To be specific, I built out purple numbers for Doug. I remember demoing it to him, it was hacky, and the joy he showed made my soul smile. He was a very special man. I have many other stories, but that is for another day.
- zemvpferreira 4y ago
  We will be here to read them when you are willing to to share. It's a treat to hear personal accounts of my idols.
- roeles 4y ago
  I would be very interested in a post with more stories!
- leobg 4y ago
  Oh yes, please! He must’ve been terribly disappointed with how things evolved. In the 1960s, he envisioned computers to keep track of all human knowledge for us, to help us find contradictions, fill knowledge gaps, and ask better questions. And what did we get instead? Clickbait and spam bots. Did he see it that way?
kwatsonafter 4y ago
I'd like to to leave a link to Doug's 1962 paper: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html It's worth noting that despite the historical magnanimity of the 68' demo that the real, "meat and potatoes" of Doug's work is still the operating philosophy he developed that allowed SRI to dream up all this groovy shit and make it work. It's also worth remembering Bill English who was the, "director" of the demo who sometimes doesn't get enough credit.
- AlbertoGP 4y ago
  > Bill English who was the, "director" of the demo who sometimes doesn't get enough credit. Yes, as Doug Engelbart said when talking about the demo: “but anyway it worked, and the main reason it worked is because Bill English is a genius”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24064902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24064902
sbf501 4y ago
> as a lone inventor genius a la Tesla The de-facto deification is pervasive.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
I never knew of it until somebody mentioned on a newsgroup - amazing for the time. So thankful for these early pioneers to try out new ideas before it became a commercial success later on.
anon4523523 4y ago
After reading Bardini's excellent biography I found that Dr. Engelbart's unfortunate involvement with Werner Erhard and est was the beginning of his journey down the wrong path. It's hard to say if his ideas around Collective IQ, CoDIAK and DKR were too obtuse for practical application or the world just caught up with his ideas. In any case, it seems centralizing human knowledge isn't going to save the world after all.

302 points by jdcampolargo 4y ago

Funny timing — the Future of Coding podcast (disclosure: hosted by myself, sponsored by Replit) just did an episode about Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect, perhaps offering a bit of the "more in-depth examination" Amjad was interested in. https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056 https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056 That paper (from '62) forms quite the contrast with MoAD (from '68). While the latter is quite specific, showing a lot of "features" that people tend to point to when citing Engelbart's influence, the former is arguably much more visionary. Doug had quite a lot more in mind than just pointing devices and video calling.

mikewarot 4y ago
I almost blew my ears off when I started it. I couldn't find a volume control in the media player, and the little button on the right wasn't it. Please add a volume control to the media player.
- spiralganglion 4y ago
  Sorry about that! It's a player made by Omny, my podcast host. But I'm unhappy with them for other reasons too, so I'll be switching away soon — self-hosting, and using the native media player. So your volume slider wishes will be fulfilled. Thank you for the request.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Suggestion: abandon the player, let your subscribers choose whatever player they like, such as their own browser's builtin player, and just post a link to the media file, like an mp3, and/or stream via a common protocol all browsers support, like rtsp. No middleman and far less fuss.
AlbertoGP 4y ago
I listened to it (thanks mikewarot for the warning about the volume), and at some point two of you discuss something I agree with that I haven’t seen noted before when talking about Doug Engelbart: > [... 1:17:32] Joe is writing down all of the things that you’re saying describing the system, and then he says that “it represents the clumsy phrasing and illogical progression of thought so typical of extemporaneous speech” [https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html#3b5a https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html#3b5a] which A: is what Jimmy and I are doing right now, B: is what Doug Engelbart’s writing reads like anyways. His writing reads like clumsy and illogical progressions of extemporaneous speech, except that it’s like, worked to within an inch of its life. It is so overwrought, and yet at the same time clumsy and illogical, so that... you know... grrrr! > [... 1:18:14] Doug is a bad writer, I don’t like Doug’s writing, I’ll say that, I have not enjoyed reading his writing. I enjoyed his fan fiction better than I enjoyed his technical manuals, it’s just not a pleasure to read. And it made me wonder, [...] did he feel the disconnect in quality between, like, Bush’s writing and his own writing? Did he feel like the quality of his writing needed to be formed into this very unappealing mold because of the context he was working in? > [... 1:20:42] I do kind of agree with you, his writing is very awkward, right? It is hard to kind of get at the ideas that are in here, and you know, maybe there is something to it where he is... this is clearly, some of this is an intentional stylistic choice, right? [...] he wanted to write in this way for some particular reason or other, I think.
rektide 4y ago
As one of my favorite books, I'm overdue for a re-read, but Waldrop's Dream Machines is a book about J.C.R. Licklider, but Engelbart definitely comes up again and again, and for sure, the Augmenting Human Intellect thread is highly present. At least we no longer reduce Engelbart to "the man who invented the mouse." But yeah, the not-exactly philosophical but big-idea-ed-ness, the frame-setting that folks had is such a valuable contribution. Engelbart had such a clear & sharp objective in mind, that he wrote about so early, & it's so compelling & humanistic a value. Few other examples of tech-workers across the decades seem to radiate with the clear moral & progressive clarity. Thank you for this call out. This idea, of whether computers are here to mechanize processes that people fit into, or whether computers are tools to augment & enhance our individual agency, is a huge question. Ursala Franklin has some good material on Technological Society. There's a couple different points of view she proposes, but I really enjoy the distinction she makes between Holistic technologies, where the capabilities of the user are expanded & opened, the user gains control, versus Prescriptive technologies, which relate more to macro-level control, to enforcing set-down processes[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago

Now that's a worthwhile Wikipedia page.

rmason 4y ago

I had the change to meet him in SF. He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz. But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been. Nobody would fund him. Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget. Who knows what he might have invented? He had that rare ability to see into the future. The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?

gumby 4y ago
What do you mean? He was funded by SRI for a long time, and spent time visiting other people and spreading the word. I first met him when he visited PARC, probably for the upteent time but I’d just joined. He was full of interesting ideas, not someone who just had one big insight long ago, and was great to talk to about your own work. His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades. Mind boggling how that works — quite different from a fully remote world. We talk about WFH vs office, but less about the value of running into Doug engelbart or don knuth while walking down the street.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades I was at that service and several people spoke about how his ideas did not really get the backing they deserved, Ted Nelson not the least of them. This makes more sense when you realize that what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked far more than he wanted to invent cool new tech, but while people were happy to have him as a member of staff he needed to be given freedom to play with organizations and no one was ready to try anything as radical as he had in mind. I remember there was a period where Google was trying to make him a permanent fixture and he said in a private conversation something to the effect of it feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue, not engage with his ideas.
  - 4y ago

throwawaycuriou 4y ago

when did 'demo' begin use as a shorthand for demonstration?

lelandfe 4y ago
At least 1936, according to this unsourced page: https://www.etymonline.com/word/demo https://www.etymonline.com/word/demo
userbinator 4y ago
I actually thought this would be about a demoscene production.

mftb 4y ago

Always glad to see this getting attention, I really enjoy computing history. There's a link to a video in the article, but it's part three of ten. Recently I came across this[0]. It's pretty much the whole thing in one video. It's long but it's well worth the watch. I was born in '68, so I can't remember the 60s, but I can remember the 70s and it's easy for me to understand why people felt Engelbart was, "Dealing lightning with both hands" at the Mother of All Demos. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

martyvis 4y ago
And I just found this very recent biopic on Doug. Just watched 10 minutes so far, but it looks to be really well produced, with interview snippets with Alan Kay, Vint Cerf amongst others. https://youtu.be/_7ZtISeGyCY https://youtu.be/_7ZtISeGyCY
- mftb 4y ago
  Cool, bookmarked, ty!

musesum 4y ago

I met Doug Engelbart in the late 90's during his reboot sessions at Stanford. Lots of luminaries spoke, including Ted Nelson. I was there because I read every one of his group's papers, in the mid 80's, and wrote a version of Augment in MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal. I think I showed him a demo. He invited me to attend informal meetings at SRI. I left after a few weeks because I couldn't figure out how it would result in a product. Had already went into deep personal debt, once before (about $50K in 1990), trying to market something similar.

mikewarot 4y ago
You don't happen to have that code lying around anywhere do you? I'd love to take a peek.
- musesum 4y ago
  Ugh, am embarrassed by my coding style, from back then. The product still works on Windows XP, but is in storage in Iowa (am in California). Next time I visit family, will bring it out.
Kinrany 4y ago
Monetization is an extra constraint that makes software worse :(
- musesum 4y ago
  Counter opinion was Nolan Bushnell, saying that the best way to test an idea was to put a coin slot on it. This was during the era of arcade machines. But, then again, not sure how you put a coin slot on the Arpanet.
criddell 4y ago
How actionable where the ideas in those papers? A few times I've read old essays and papers and it always seems like there's eventually one poorly defined or completely abstract portion that boils down to "magic happens here".

idontwantthis 4y ago

I’m always left amazed, confused and disappointed when I read about this. How did something so monumental get built and demonstrated, but then not get followed up on for more than 30 years? Were there humongous caveats involved in the demo that made it impossible to leave the lab even for major corporations?

gumby 4y ago
The caveats were that 1 - you needed specialized research hardware that basically nobody had and 2 - people didn’t understand how revolutionary computers were.* Even in the late 80s the general consensus was that personal computers would be just used by specialists because “no executive can type, or would want to” And the labs in those days were pushing forward and “inventing the future”. We had network-native systems: not just computers with network adaptors, but cloud native software with mail, filesystem etc transparently available over the net. In fact where did the “cloud” concept come from? A TCP design document in the 70s. When you’d look outside the lab it felt like the past. DOS was the state of the art. And you’d visit your friends at different institutions and see different approaches to address the same problems. These days I never get that “this is the exciting future” feeling. The old nexus corporate labs (PARC, IBM, Bell Labs (RIP) and others) aren’t dominant as they used to be, but when I visit their successors (e.g. Google) the research doesn’t have that same jaw-drop impact. Not because I’m jaded, but because nothing appears to have come back through a time machine any more. Perhaps because computing went mainstream and then the constraints appeared? * and are: I think people still haven’t grasped how transformational they will be once we finally get computers to work and be useful. We’re still just puttering around at the base of the mountain.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  You requested my thoughts here in a different comment :) > The caveats were that 1 - you needed specialized research hardware that basically nobody had and 2 - people didn’t understand how revolutionary computers were.* Even in the late 80s the general consensus was that personal computers would be just used by specialists because “no executive can type, or would want to” I agree with this completely. The teleconferencing, for example, required a big string of trucks with equipment to transmit the signal IIRC. An incredible tech demo but not even close to something that could be productized. > Not because I’m jaded, but because nothing appears to have come back through a time machine any more. Perhaps because computing went mainstream and then the constraints appeared? I think another way to frame this is that early computers offered a clear paradigm shift, the shift happened, and now everything on the near horizon is within that paradigm. This true even for some of the more exciting projects like Bret Victor's dynamicland (I'm not sure it will actually go anywhere, but I'm happy to see someone carrying the torch of the multimedia dreams that died in the 90s). Personally, I think biotech has the best potential for the next "it's the future!" style revolution.

spicybright 4y ago

And yet we still haven't learned enough from it. The fact computers have been so isolated from one another (even with internet apps) is a complete tragedy. Even sending large files is a pain in the butt to this day. The demo had multiple people working on the same computer remotely, with their own cursors and ability to do things on the system at the same time. Best we have now is web-browsers syncing data silos, or a one way "let this person control my mouse + keyboard". It feels like building a bridge by everyone making parts in isolation then expensively shipping it to the work site that only has one crane to assemble them. Usually it's way easier to have multiple people work on something. Like carrying something heavy, or having a line of people walk the bridge with the right tools/verification to install the rivets right, or even the opportunity for someone to speak up present unique ideas to the group. Even just a few basic OS primitives early on could have jump started so much collaboration tools and techniques that mirror how we all work together everywhere else in real life. As an aside, the whole "meta-verse" craze might pull these ideas through to the mainstream again. I see lots of demos of avatars standing at a table working on stuff together, and I've been on VR chat before drawing 3d images with crayons at the same time with other people. It's incredibly fun to try and draw an elephant together and work on different parts at the same time to hilarious results.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
> The demo had multiple people working on the same computer remotely, with their own cursors and ability to do things on the system at the same time. Best we have now is web-browsers syncing data silos, or a one way "let this person control my mouse + keyboard". Apple's multi-user support in it's "iWork" productivity apps actually comes very close to this, and it's a real shame that it's not as well known as it is. In fact Apple just demo'd improvements to it a couple of days ago at WWDC. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181 It works almost exactly like you're describing and frankly I think it's amazing and am surprised more people don't rave about it.
- freeone3000 4y ago
  It's OSX-only, which makes it a non-starter for most orgs. We actually are 100% macbook, but we still use Google Docs since some people want to edit documents from their phone.

paulpauper 4y ago

Matt Ridley famously quoted that "no one knows how to build a computer mouse" Well, this guy did.

VonGuard 4y ago

A piece I wrote on this a couple years back: https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predicted-future-mother-demos/ https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predic...

DeathArrow 4y ago

This is from Wikipedia article about the Mother of All Demos: >The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor If those things were possible in 1968, why did most of us started to use them just in the '90? Is normal to have that big of a gap between a technological demonstration and the technology becoming available?

xmprt 4y ago
This is state of the art stuff that would have been prohibitively expensive for most people. It's kind of like how a lot of home automation stuff was theorized back in the 90s and early 2000s but it only became mainstream recently.
bombcar 4y ago
Short answer - the PC won and we started at the bottom and worked up. Had the PC not won it's possible that something like multi-user systems would have become the main thing (which we now basically have, but we call it "the cloud").
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  I must, with respect, disagree that "the cloud" is the same (or even close to the same) thing. Indeed, you use the acronym "PC", which, I'll remind the crowd stands for "Personal Computer". It has recently dawned on me that the thing is not (for most people, ordinary, 'non-techie' people) "Personal", and is scarcely a "Computer" in the sense of Turing-machine/Universal computing device. Allow me to unpack that: "Personal" is the pair of shoes I wear every day, even though they're years past their use-by date, are ugly, smell funny and the soles are worn. For you it might be the jumper knitted for you by your Nan. It's the objects we use that, over the years, mould themselves to our personal idiosyncrasies, habits, preferences and style. Our computers scarcely have that (particularly in the Apple and MS worlds of Personal Computing!) and hardly live long enough to acquire personalisation/personality. Not to mention, too, it's quite hard to do. Example: my (Linux, KDE) box is pretty happy for me to define custom hot-keys for all sorts of things, from firing up frequently-used apps (I scarcely ever use the desktop menu these days) to typing my email address. But could my (tech-clueless) brother do that? Extremely unlikely. And it takes several non-intuitive steps to make a new hotkey... "Computer": How programmable is my phone? (I've done Android dev work. I don't ever wish to do it again.) How scriptable? How malleable in casual ways? Not at all. It's Google's device much more than it's mine. It's a sort of locked-down surveillance television, not a general-purpose computer programmable-by-me (except in a highly specialist and narrow sense.) Much of the blame I put at the doorstep of Visual Basic which reduced the scope and utility of direct-manipulation interfaces into a terribly narrow, constrained version of "paper forms on an electronic screen". It put the vision back by at least a decade. Maybe several. Finally, though, I have hope we might emerge from that. There's a bunch of us working on it.

Stratoscope 4y ago

Amjad's tribute is touching, and also be sure to read the Wikipedia page he links to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos I met Doug in the late 1970s when we worked in the same Tymshare office at 20705 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino. He had a little cubicle like the rest of us, in the far corner of the building behind the pine tree in the middle of this Street View image: https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A We only talked a few times, but I could always see the sadness in his eyes from the shabby treatment Tymshare gave him. No real team, and not much encouragement to continue his mission. Tymshare was quite a land of lost opportunities. Earlier in the 1970s they had a "programmable terminal" in a side office. I think it may have been a Datapoint 2200? I found the programming manual and saw that I could write code to respond to the cursor keys, put characters on the screen where I wanted them, and then run Conway's Game of Life! In my years of working there coding on Teletype machines, I'd never experienced anything like this. Eventually my manager saw me working on my GoL program, and kindly but firmly said, "Mike, this looks like fun and all, but no one is ever going to want to do something like this. We have important business problems to solve. Back to work now!" At one point they did consider doing something to take advantage of these newfangled "microcomputers". But they didn't pursue it very far, because they figured it might be a threat to their established timesharing business. And they were right!

mikewarot 4y ago

The main thing he wanted, and never got... was a group of people working together on some task unrelated to programming, with an agreed upon measure of productivity. He wanted to see how much he could optimize their productivity over time with careful measurement and plain old trial and error. It's never stated why funding dried up, but here's my suspicion: Nobody was willing to risk upsetting the traditional hierarchy with something that might obsolete management, for example. Nobody other than an angel investor, or group of old retired technologists can pull something like that off. It has to be someone with time, or f*ck you money. I have time.

dws 4y ago

And behind the camera, Stewart Brand

psaux 4y ago

I was very lucky to have worked with Doug on multiple projects and see his passion for computer science and humanity. He was one of the most humble people and was happy to share all his wisdom. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him. To be specific, I built out purple numbers for Doug. I remember demoing it to him, it was hacky, and the joy he showed made my soul smile. He was a very special man. I have many other stories, but that is for another day.

zemvpferreira 4y ago
We will be here to read them when you are willing to to share. It's a treat to hear personal accounts of my idols.
roeles 4y ago
I would be very interested in a post with more stories!
leobg 4y ago
Oh yes, please! He must’ve been terribly disappointed with how things evolved. In the 1960s, he envisioned computers to keep track of all human knowledge for us, to help us find contradictions, fill knowledge gaps, and ask better questions. And what did we get instead? Clickbait and spam bots. Did he see it that way?

kwatsonafter 4y ago

I'd like to to leave a link to Doug's 1962 paper: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html It's worth noting that despite the historical magnanimity of the 68' demo that the real, "meat and potatoes" of Doug's work is still the operating philosophy he developed that allowed SRI to dream up all this groovy shit and make it work. It's also worth remembering Bill English who was the, "director" of the demo who sometimes doesn't get enough credit.

AlbertoGP 4y ago
> Bill English who was the, "director" of the demo who sometimes doesn't get enough credit. Yes, as Doug Engelbart said when talking about the demo: “but anyway it worked, and the main reason it worked is because Bill English is a genius”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24064902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24064902

sbf501 4y ago

> as a lone inventor genius a la Tesla The de-facto deification is pervasive.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

I never knew of it until somebody mentioned on a newsgroup - amazing for the time. So thankful for these early pioneers to try out new ideas before it became a commercial success later on.

anon4523523 4y ago

After reading Bardini's excellent biography I found that Dr. Engelbart's unfortunate involvement with Werner Erhard and est was the beginning of his journey down the wrong path. It's hard to say if his ideas around Collective IQ, CoDIAK and DKR were too obtuse for practical application or the world just caught up with his ideas. In any case, it seems centralizing human knowledge isn't going to save the world after all.