8 ms·
A few words on Doug Engelbart
- nhamann 13y ago> Engelbart hated our present-day systems. I'm not trying to say "[citation needed]" here, but I would be interested in seeing a source for this. Does anyone know of one?
- glibgil 13y agoThe citation, in this case, is Doug Engelbart. Bret Victor is reporting what Doug Engelbart told him about present day systems.
- nhamann 13y agoI was able to find some sources. The first is this article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/high-performance-gui-330 http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/high-performance-.... > Easy-to-use computer systems, as we conventionally understand them, are not what Engelbart had in mind. You might be surprised to learn that he regards today’s one-size-fits-all GUI as a tragic outcome. That paradigm, he said in a talk at Accelerating Change 2004, has crippled our effort to augment human capability. High-performance tasks require high-performance user interfaces specially designed for those tasks. Instead of making every task lie on the Procrustean bed of the standard GUI, we should be inventing new, task-appropriate interfaces. No, they won’t work for everyone. Yes, they’ll require effort to learn. But in every domain there are some experts who will invest that effort in order to achieve greater mastery. We need to do more to empower those people. The above cites Engelbart's 2004 talk "Large-Scale Collective IQ", so that is probably a good place to look as well. There's also this page, which presents some interesting related comments by Alan Kay: http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog9 http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog... > Alan Kay: ... If you have ever seen anybody use NLS [Engelbart's 1968 hypertext system for which he invented the mouse and chord key set] it is really marvelous cause you're kindof flying along through the stuff several commands a second and there's a complete different sense of what it means to interact than you have today. I characterize what we have today as a wonderful bike with training wheels on that nobody knows they are on so nobody is trying to take them off. I just feel like we're way way behind where we could have been if it weren't for the way commercialization turned out.
- jonahx 13y agoevery time i read something brett writes, i learn something new and feel like my world view has expanded a little bit.
- akanet 13y agoI found that the quip about how the document that they are sharing while having a conversation is not screensharing as we commonly understand it in modern parlance to be pretty illuminating. That modern screensharing is in several ways worse than a demo that came out decades ago is frankly amazing. I've tried to recapture a bit of that early magic with https://coderpad.io/ https://coderpad.io/ (multiple cursors, realtime editing/execution of code), but I can only imagine how jaw dropping that demo must have been when it came out.
- jonahx 13y agoIt really is amazing. I feel like there is a similar mismatch and almost backwards progress when you look at the concepts and tools behind smalltalk and the concepts most working programmers today reason with and are familiar with.
- jfb 13y agoI never had more than a passing interaction with a full blown Smalltalk-80 environment, but that was enough to make me look at e.g. any Java system and just feel sick to the stomach.
- xradionut 13y agoI think the huge focus on web development set CS back at least two decades in certain areas. The industry has been so intent on reinventing applications through the browser, it's lost ground in what can happen in areas like Engelbert's or Smalltalk or real hypertext.
- lsiebert 13y agoYes, exactly. It is the reinventing of his goals that is painful.
- chime 13y agoIf you think of technology progress as a global simulated annealing problem, it is ok to step back a bit to get out of the local maxima. Web Dev may have taken us back 20-30 years in certain areas but once caught up, it can take us much further than the previous methods could have ever expected us to. The previous methods in this case being, compiled software that require specific devices/OSes and require a very high level of competency in all aspects of development.
- lukasb 13y ago"Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals." reminds me of "Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek what they sought."
- kaflurbaleen 13y agoThis book, "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" is by the same guy who wrote the NYT obit with "the most facile interpretation of Engelbart" headline. It goes into far more depth about Engelbart's goals of augmenting human intellect.
- mpu 13y agoThis is a bit needlessly aggressive.
- quaunaut 13y agoIt's a bit aggressive, yet still feels respectful. I like the tone it balances.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoIt's called passion.
- glibgil 13y agoI'm always amazed at how much aggression is actually needed in many situations.
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- phdtree 13y agoAnyone knows who was Doug Engelbart's PhD advisor at Berkeley? We have his profile at phdtree: http://phdtree.org/scholar/engelbart-douglas-carl/ http://phdtree.org/scholar/engelbart-douglas-carl/ but there is no where to find out info about his PhD advisor.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoJohn Woodyard http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge... More: http://www.ee.washington.edu/people/alumni/profiles/woodyard_john_r.html http://www.ee.washington.edu/people/alumni/profiles/woodyard... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robert_Woodyard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robert_Woodyard Its also listed on his wiki page directly.
- phdtree 13y agoThanks a lot, updated! Another question: I figured out John_Robert_Woodyard's PhD advisor at Stanford was William Webster Hansen, http://phdtree.org/scholar/woodyard-john-robert/ http://phdtree.org/scholar/woodyard-john-robert/ but then I couldn't find out info about William W Hansen's PhD advisor, any help?
- Schwolop 13y agoThis is one of those times when I can't be emphatic enough without crudity. That was a fucking excellent eulogy.
- shurcooL 13y agoJust curious if anyone else here has tried Screenhero? I've found it to be quite excellent in a handful of situations where I needed to use it. It's screen sharing where each person has their own cursor. Works surprisingly well for a small company product.
- Myrth 13y agoNo 2 text cursors? Meh. j/k :)
- andrewflnr 13y agoHow did I not hear about this guy in detail before? His high-level goals sound exactly like mine. Where are the people working on this now?
- earljwagner 13y agoLook for IA as an reversal of AI, "Intelligence Augmentation" or "Intelligence Amplification".
- biggfoot 13y agoBeautiful eulogy. Compels me to read more about the person.
- earljwagner 13y ago"'Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88' This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil." That's what obituary headlines do: connect the dead person's achievements in a concrete way to readers' lives.
- kaptain 13y agoI found this article by Bret enlightening. The expectation, though, that Engelbart's legacy could be communicated clearly by the New York Times in the obituary is too high. The headline reads like this: > Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88 Imagine, then, if the headline read: > Douglas C. Engelbart, Augmenter of Human Intellect, Dies at 88 The former is much clearer and understandable, especially taking into consideration the audience of the New York Times. Bret's article has the luxury of expounding and explaining to an audience that is sympathetic to his values; I myself was ignorant of Englebart's contributions as well as his personal ideology when it came to this life mission, and so greatly appreciate Bret's writing. But, while the NYT article might seem untrue or ignorant to those who knew Engelbart and understood him, for most people, the appreciation for Engelbart comes out of the more 'mundane' things that were the side effects of his vision: the mouse, hypertext, etc. Most can appreciate the significance of these inventions, though the value of Engelbart's core works might escape them.
- msutherl 13y agoDouglas C. Engelbart, Computer Visionary, Dies at 88.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThis is true, the NYT is not at fault here. Bret got his message about Engelbart out by fighting a target to show some contrast between perception and reality, which is a useful writing technique. A strawman, but a meaningful one.
- juretriglav 13y agoI found this article to be very thought provoking with regards to Engelbart's work, but I can't help but read Bret's own worries in it. As if he himself fears being presented/remembered purely based on his inventions (Bret Victor, the inventor of the iPad interface) and not his goal (intends to invent the medium and representations in which the scientists, engineers, and artists of the next century will understand and create systems.) As a side note: why can't we, the general public, appreciate people like Engelbart with the same fierceness before they are gone? I'm sure they'd like to know their life was incredibly meaningful.
- Tloewald 13y agoThis is a good article but it's important to understand that vision doesn't necessarily trump implementation. Steve Jobs also had a vision of augmenting human intellect (one at a time rather than collective), but he's remembered for the things he built in pursuit of the goal, not the goal. Ted Nelson's vision for hypertext is also more transcendent than what we got from the world-wide web, but on examination it turns out that hos vision is flawed and unrealizable (in practice there is never a canonical reference for any text) while what we've actually built actually works.
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- shoover 13y agoI remember watching his NerdTV interview several years ago and being inspired by how principled and focused his work was. He wanted to apply his capacity toward solving interesting problems, and he did something about it. Original PBS page with now broken media links: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?ext=mp4&show=011 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?ext=mp4&show=011 The Archive has it: http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011 http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011
- DennisP 13y agoReal-time collaborative text editing based on operational transform, like Google Wave and Etherpad, is probably a better analogy to Engelbart's system than screen sharing.
- gruseom 13y agoThe closest present-day analog to Engelbart's collaborative editing demo (edit: I mean specifically the document-editing portion, not the video etc.) is not screen-sharing, but modern collaborative editors (Google Docs, Etherpad), which do provide multiple cursors. Thus the screen-sharing analogy is a straw man, and the author hasn't really made his case against "drawing correspondences to our present-day systems" from Engelbart's visionary work. He may still be right, but I'd like to know why.
- GuiA 13y agoIn Engelbart's original demo, the users can see each other, talk, collaboratively work on a document, and do together pretty much anything that the computer offers. The full OS, including the GUI, is intended to be multi-user. Google Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document". But say we need to work on something that involves listening to audio together or watch a video or use a third party program, we're SOL with Google Docs. What Engelbart's vision aspired to do was to allow people to work together through computers, no matter what the work was. Document editing is a microscopic facet of that.
- gruseom 13y agoGoogle Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document" Yes, but it's just the aspect the OP criticizes screen-sharing (as a proxy for present-day technology) for missing. I take your point that these things could be better integrated, though.
- tel 13y agoAs I began to read his thesis I was reminded powerfully of Conor McBride's Epigram system [1]. It's a very different kind of system, but the parity between a user's intent and the computer's ability to interact seamlessly with that intent is a powerful feature of Epigram. [1] I can't seem to find the source anymore, but there are many papers like cs.ru.nl/~freek/courses/tt-2010/tvftl/epigram-notes.pdf
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