50 ms·

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 m

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.
input_sh 4y ago
His team pretty much all moved on to Xerox where they've released Xerox Alto just five years later, which then influenced Apple's engineers, who took the inspiration from Alto and channeled it into Lisa and the OG Macintosh, all of which were still prohibitively expensive for home usage. So it's not like people forgot about it for a couple of decades, there's a clear line from that demo to where we are now.
- Aloha 4y ago
  To the extend that the Alto had a chord set as an input device.

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.

input_sh 4y ago

His team pretty much all moved on to Xerox where they've released Xerox Alto just five years later, which then influenced Apple's engineers, who took the inspiration from Alto and channeled it into Lisa and the OG Macintosh, all of which were still prohibitively expensive for home usage. So it's not like people forgot about it for a couple of decades, there's a clear line from that demo to where we are now.

Aloha 4y ago
To the extend that the Alto had a chord set as an input device.