51–60 of 99 posts
Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk. At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Insti…
Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk. At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Insti…
If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in 1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt... Edit: link had been to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY but a u…
In the demo video, there are some noises in the background, I'm assuming from his workstation -- rather pleasant and atmospheric. Anyone know what they are? Is it a transmission artifact? Feedback intended for the user (maybe related to the chorded keyboard)? I've read several accounts of this presentation ( one is in _What the Dormouse Said_ ), but don't recall an explanation.
He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programme…
We're not catching up, we're going back to it. Just this time we have dumb terminals just as powerful as the server that is doing things but relegated to doing nothing but displaying markup. It wouldn't surprise me if cost of the terminal compared to the cost of a central server at the time factored into his views.
The man was amazing, it is not often that one man can make such a impact on the everyday lives of so many, but in this case he missed where computing was going. Oddly, his creation of the mouse made personal computers more accessible to everyone.
A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written by one of Engelbart's team. It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain what word-processing did for text. It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss interested, and I moved on. Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called? Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never…
I tentatively thought it was "TheBrain", but that's a bit later, and I was working out if there's any link between Harlan Hugh and Engelbart.