3 ms·

Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future

29 points by conanxin 4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago
The article gets all the facts right... thus not much attention here. It really is a shame he got kneecapped in his work.
chmaynard 4y ago
Lovely, I was wondering who did that. :)
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
A big piece of the puzzle is missing from the article. Government funding to academic endeavors was drastically reduced across the board in the 1970s, thanks to sweeping neoliberal reforms. Mass privatization took over and businessmen started running everything. Computer historians always downplay this major historical hingepoint for a few reasons, but usually because doing so helps conceal just how much the modern computer industry depends on technology which could only have been developed by the public sector.
- joak 4y ago
  I met the guy in 2005 and he was deeply sad about that. After "the mother of all demos", showing internet, mouse, windows, videocalls, etc for the first time. They said to him you'll get all that budget to come up with so little. They cut his budget. It was only in the nineties that he got proper recognition.
rapjr9 4y ago
Where is his source code? I'd like to see the implementation of all the ideas he says were never realized.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  The idea that was never realized was "Bootstrapping". That is, to fund a group of developers to give a group of not-office-workers computer tools highly optimized for their work. The idea was to see the computer as something other than a glorified typewriter or filing system. Imagine if mechanical engineers were given the tools in the mother of all demos, and then given a decade to keep making them better, all green fields design, optimized around their productivity, and nothing else. The key and ONLY measure would be how much work they could get done, an existing non-computer centric metric. I can't even imagine how far we'd be beyond what can be done with AutoCad. The human factors results could then be generalized to apply to other fields, and perhaps other bootstraps could have been done. Instead of "one size fits all" mass software, there would be highly optimized tools that require a lot of skill to learn, but then multiply productivity by orders of magnitude. There's no source code because the project wasn't funded. We still really don't know how productive an organization can be if they were able to tap the full power of a computer for their exact needs.
  - rapjr9 4y ago
    Interesting, thanks! Seems like there are a few areas where bootstrapping has been applied. CGI and camera control in the film industry for example. Or software tailored for business management and operation. CAD tools certainly do have a lot of room for improvement. Construction seems to be lacking good computer tools. Medicine is just starting their journey into computerland and seem intent on demanding optimization. Robotics might be an example of an ongoing effort to optimize computing for specific work (though pretty slow moving). There must have been source code for the "mother of all demos", it would be fun to take a look at it if it was on Github. Maybe it no longer exists though.
BizarroLand 4y ago
Here's his paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" which turns 60 years old in a few weeks: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

29 points by conanxin 4y ago

The article gets all the facts right... thus not much attention here. It really is a shame he got kneecapped in his work.

chmaynard 4y ago

Lovely, I was wondering who did that. :)

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

A big piece of the puzzle is missing from the article. Government funding to academic endeavors was drastically reduced across the board in the 1970s, thanks to sweeping neoliberal reforms. Mass privatization took over and businessmen started running everything. Computer historians always downplay this major historical hingepoint for a few reasons, but usually because doing so helps conceal just how much the modern computer industry depends on technology which could only have been developed by the public sector.

joak 4y ago
I met the guy in 2005 and he was deeply sad about that. After "the mother of all demos", showing internet, mouse, windows, videocalls, etc for the first time. They said to him you'll get all that budget to come up with so little. They cut his budget. It was only in the nineties that he got proper recognition.

rapjr9 4y ago

Where is his source code? I'd like to see the implementation of all the ideas he says were never realized.

mikewarot 4y ago
The idea that was never realized was "Bootstrapping". That is, to fund a group of developers to give a group of not-office-workers computer tools highly optimized for their work. The idea was to see the computer as something other than a glorified typewriter or filing system. Imagine if mechanical engineers were given the tools in the mother of all demos, and then given a decade to keep making them better, all green fields design, optimized around their productivity, and nothing else. The key and ONLY measure would be how much work they could get done, an existing non-computer centric metric. I can't even imagine how far we'd be beyond what can be done with AutoCad. The human factors results could then be generalized to apply to other fields, and perhaps other bootstraps could have been done. Instead of "one size fits all" mass software, there would be highly optimized tools that require a lot of skill to learn, but then multiply productivity by orders of magnitude. There's no source code because the project wasn't funded. We still really don't know how productive an organization can be if they were able to tap the full power of a computer for their exact needs.
- rapjr9 4y ago
  Interesting, thanks! Seems like there are a few areas where bootstrapping has been applied. CGI and camera control in the film industry for example. Or software tailored for business management and operation. CAD tools certainly do have a lot of room for improvement. Construction seems to be lacking good computer tools. Medicine is just starting their journey into computerland and seem intent on demanding optimization. Robotics might be an example of an ongoing effort to optimize computing for specific work (though pretty slow moving). There must have been source code for the "mother of all demos", it would be fun to take a look at it if it was on Github. Maybe it no longer exists though.

BizarroLand 4y ago

Here's his paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" which turns 60 years old in a few weeks: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html