50 Years On, We're Living the Reality First Shown At the 'Mother of All Demos' (arstechnica.com) 82
Thelasko quotes a report from Ars Technica: A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart -- then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley -- gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others. Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact is that many of the technologies we take for granted now we're at least conceptualized if not outright demoed during that heady period of computer research in the 1950s and 1960s. Things like virtualizationation, parallel processing, OCR and the like were known quantities, at least on paper or in simulations years before Intel rolled the first integrated CPUs out. As much as anything, the key piece that brought computers to our homes and ultimately our pockets was the fabrication and minuturization
We've gone Backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but over the last 10 years I have witnessed a shocking degradation in the quality and functionality of the software I use on a daily basis. Mostly driven by shockingly poor UI choices coming from the mobile/tablet sphere, but increasingly driven by the "web app" concept, where bloated, slow, unresponsive online javascript monstrosities pretend to deliver desktop functionality while failing to offer features that were commonplace PC software in 1991.
Thank God for the Terminal. Without it we wouldn't be able to get anything done these days.
Re: (Score:3)
Englebart also failed to predict that the majority of computer capabilities would be intended to monetize the user.
Re:We've gone Backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
More like failed at nothing, since the demo asks: "...what's the product we're providing in this research? It is a sample augmentation system that is provided to augment computer system development. In addition the aim is to provide tools for generating further, improved augmentation systems--bootstrapping." -- THE DEMO [stanford.edu]
They had a whole lotta revolutionary stuff (for 1968) to demonstrate first before boring themselves and everyone else with navel-gazing about potential futures of computing. Failed at nothing.
All commerce is "monetizing the user" (Score:2)
Englebart also failed to predict that the majority of computer capabilities would be intended to monetize the user.
Why would this even be worth mentioning? ALL commerce is some form of "monetizing the user". A farmer buying seeds from the local co-op is being "monetized". Yeah some angles of it have turned out to be creepier than we should prefer but none of it should be surprising.
Re: (Score:2)
Was it clear that this sort of computing was going to be directly for commerce? Many computers were bieng used for academic or research purposes at the time. For Englebart's presentation it was about making the office more efficient, which is indirectly related to revenue. Today's world has many computers as a primary advertising revenue stream or as a direct entertainment device. Would anyone at that original demo have imagined that the most profitable US industries today would be in advertising?
Re: (Score:2)
What was timesharing but a form of monetization?
Re: (Score:2)
No, that was charge back from departments to the company, even if the company owned the mainframe rather than leased it
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Hear, hear. Modern user interface design is atrocious. A bunch of idiots just out of school, who blindly copy whatever nonsense Apple comes up with. Even Linux distros aren't immune to it.
Look at Windows 10 - what a shitfest that is. Atrocious design of dialogue boxes, with no buttons - it seems that buttons are 'old fashioned', and how dare people think they should be able to clearly see what is and isn't a button any more.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but over the last 10 years I have witnessed a shocking degradation in the quality and functionality of the software I use on a daily basis.
I very much doubt that. While I wouldn't dispute this is true in some cases, it's certainly not true as a general proposition for most people. It sounds to me like you have a problem with changes to your preferences for UI for applications you use which might be a valid complaint in some cases but I very much doubt you have lost meaningful productivity overall. I have the same complaint about some software I use too - there is a lot of form before function shitty UI design going on. But at the end of th
20 years ago called. They want their post back (Score:1)
We had all these things 20 years ago.
A non-story.
Still the greatest demo ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed to see articles in the Register and such saying this wasn't so great or that other people deserve credit. Sure he had a supportive govt program manager. But the way you get one of those is to deliver on a vision. and Delivering is harder than it sounds. Sure telefunken might have had a wheeled mouse. Yes V. Bush once imagined some thing called a "memex", as did a few sci fi writers. Really if you want the true vision that foreshadowed this have a look at the reading tablets and terminals of Kubrick's 2001
I think what people really can't fathom today is what things were like at the time. at that time the vast majority of people with big projects to run were still submitting jobs on punch cards. interactivity wasn't anyones daily experience, Teletype 110 baud terminals were starting to get common for dial-up time sharing. But you didn't have these on your desk.There was one down on the 3rd floor and people took turns using it. In a few very wealthy places There were some dumb character terminals and some vector graphics storage scopes but windows? Hyperlinks? on screen picture-in-a-picture video conferencing? Simultaneous text editing by many people. What he was showing was Arthur C Clark's definition of magic.
Now imagine pulling a stunt like that live!
For context, Most professional people even as late as the year 2000 still would not trust a laptop to give a presentation-- viewgraphs were the only way to be sure your presentation didn't crash or fail to project.
It was an event that's never been equaled in technology integration and showmanship using stuff 30 years in advance
Re:Still the greatest demo ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
People also don't appreciate the question Englebart posed. It's in the summary above. No one even knew what productivity enhancement was possible from an interactive computer. There wasn't even a visi-calc back then. He didn't just live in a world with a text editor or visicalc. He immersed himself and his team in a world not just where streaming video, and tactile control of the computer (mice and buttons), and hyper links existed, but they were available on your desktop. No one had any idea what that would be like. How useful might that be?
in short, desktop computing. Seems mundane when you boil it down to that. But we didn't get there for decades and he had been there and had come back to planet earth to tell us about it.
Re:Still the greatest demo ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep trying to imagine what it must have been like to see all that and working so seamlessly. What demo has been that mind expanding. Steve job's iphone demo was pretty insane, just scrolling through text with your finger and even the little flourish of the text bouncing when you hit the end was a real mind expanding moment the first time you got to think about having that in your pocket. But that's small potatoes. And also potatoes that while a few years ahead of the norm, wasn't foreseable. Englebarts demo was like.... I'm just not coming up with anything at all. Okay it would be like if someone had just invented the steam engine, and looked up to see Sir Englebart demonstrating his gasoline propelled new ornithopter. Not just demonstrating it, but just casually using it as a convenient way to get to town to buy a sack of potatoes for his evening meal and to perhaps plant some seeds in his fields. A glimpse into the future of what steam engines would achieve.
Re: (Score:2)
"Really if you want the true vision that foreshadowed this have a look at the reading tablets and terminals of Kubrick's 2001"
See, that's a problem. Kubrick's 2001 is NOT THE SAME as Clark's 2001. You want a 10 year leap forward in cinema, cite Kubrick. You want a multi decade leap in tech, cite Clark.
Yes there were Kubrick bits added in there, but the source and inspiration was all Clark. The author of the book.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree that it is pretty unique from the point of pulling together so many things at once.
However, it was also a different time in engineering R&D. They routinely built and tested things that they didn't know for sure would work. Develop, build, test, develop, build, test, that was the way of the world. Their idea of a demo was usually a major test or unveiling that sometimes had about as much chance of really working as this demo. In that light, I'd think either the first fission or fusion bomb demos
Re: (Score:2)
I'm amazed to see articles in the Register and such saying this wasn't so great or that other people deserve credit.
El Reg simultaneously had an article "debunking" Engelbart ... and another one praising the "inventor of the word processor" (who really sorta wasn't).
Re: (Score:3)
His crew went to Xerox Parc. The actual realization of desktop computing for the masses was carried out by apple. Englebart was living in the future for a long time before we finally had a macintosh on our own desktop.
Re: So, what happened to Engelbart? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple had one implementation. Then they started spending a lot of their money trying to prevent other implementations. A lot of us didn't like that. Thank goodness Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard managed to beak their back in the look-and-feel lawsuit. But Apple did a lot of damage in the meantime, running the competitors to Windows on x86 out of business. In a way, Apple created the Wintel monopoly.
Re: (Score:1)
Apple almost immediately sued Microsoft when Windows 2 came out.
Re:So, what happened to Engelbart? (Score:4, Informative)
His crew went to Xerox Parc. The actual realization of desktop computing for the masses was carried out by apple. Englebart was living in the future for a long time before we finally had a macintosh on our own desktop.
I would argue that it's Microsoft that brought desktop computing to the masses. Some would argue that there would have been no Windows without the Mac, but that would be ignoring that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs visited Xerox Parc and that both understood the importance of what they had seen. It's true that Apple had a product to the market first, but Microsoft Windows became the defacto business OS, reaching way more people than Apple.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft did drive down the price but I think your timeline is off. Even at the stage of windows 2, the microsoft version was a joke. It was barely usable, it was barely a graphical interface, but mostly was character generated pseudographics. And Win 2 wasn't even available till 1988. It Wasn't until windows 3 that they started looking a bit more like what people think of as windowed graphics, and even then the fonts were pretty ugly, and you sort had to switch modes to see what your document would lo
Re: (Score:3)
Microsoft did drive down the price but I think your timeline is off. Even at the stage of windows 2, the microsoft version was a joke. It was barely usable, it was barely a graphical interface, but mostly was character generated pseudographics. And Win 2 wasn't even available till 1988. It Wasn't until windows 3 that they started looking a bit more like what people think of as windowed graphics, and even then the fonts were pretty ugly, and you sort had to switch modes to see what your document would look like (ala WordPerfect, the competitor to Word). IN contrast the mac was fully graphical and had gorgeous fonts from day 1, it didn't have a DOS mode sticking out from behind a cheap false front. Window 3 came out in 1990, or 6 years after the 1984 Apple Debut of Lisa/Mac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I never argued that Apple didn't come first. In fact, I acknowledged this fact. One of my points was that Windows still would have been developed without the Mac OS because both Apple and Microsoft founders saw the same demonstration and realized the importance of the GUI. Yes, it took a few years for Windows to get there, but they did get there. It might have looked different, but it still would have been developed.
Regardless, my main point was that Windows has had a farther reach and a larger impact,
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless, my main point was that Windows has had a farther reach and a larger impact, thus trely bringing the desktop to the masses.
Meh.
I think it was more of an emergent property than anything else.
I mean, an awful lot of stuff we seem to regard as groundbreaking is in fact an idea who's time has come. This is not to say that the people involved are not much more skilled and smarter than average. They are, but there's usually a bunch of them and history only remembers the winners.
This is actually somewha
Not quite the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
Engelbart never envisioned:
o Constant, near inescapable mass surveillance of the whole population via their electronics.
o Power-grabs by ad agencies over person electronics.
o Pandering ever more to the dumbest users at the expense of the competent.
Technically he was ahead of his day. Far ahead. Socially... he had no idea of the dystopia that was coming.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Engelbart didn't need to envision those things, Orwell already had.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
> Monetize is not a word stop using it.part of the problem
Try looking in a fucking dictionary.
Leveraged Value (Score:2)
Now so many entities are leveraging the value from the machines that were originally dedicated to their users.
Re: (Score:2)
Original Site with annotations (Score:2)
Unfortunately the videos are in Flash format, but the annotations are quite informative and interesting:
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/... [stanford.edu]
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/676/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:3)
You mean this one: https://xkcd.com/1234/ [xkcd.com]
From Jacquard Loom to Instagram (Score:2)
Instantly responsive? (Score:2)
Maybe if you're running Windows 3.1