41–50 of 59 posts
Original PBS page with now broken media links: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?ext=mp4&show=011
The Archive has it: http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It 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.
I 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.
Web development tools are the best we can use these days if we want to reach the broadest audience, benefit from each others experience and further enchance the platform. Other tools make us choose one walled garden where development is rosy and ideas old, all the while hoping it stays alive long enough. I hope web can do what Engelbart's system did in 1968, but this time as open source, documented, findable and usable by every user with every device connected to the same truly global network.
I 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/ (multiple cursors, realtime editing/executio…
Shared documents in Google Drive work pretty well for this - multiple cursors, integrated chat (although text-only I believe). But yes, this is decades later; we should be light-years beyond this, but are instead only just rediscovering it.
I 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/ (multiple cursors, realtime editing/executio…
The closest thing we ever got to "platforms that can evolve" were first Unix-like systems, that were too low level, limited and specific-machine-bound to be able to support the engelbartian applications that preceded them (probably this is why these applications and their concepts have been mostly forgotten, there was a "platform gap" over which they could not be ported so they had to wait for one more platform generation, but then people forgot all about them), then the Java platform (that should've been either the Lisp or the Smalltalk platform if market forces hadn't screwed up everything) and now the Web platform (you see, every platform moves up the abstraction ladder and away from the hardware - the annoying side effect is that you have to wait for the performance to catch up at every up step, like waiting 20 years to do in software in the 90s what you could do in hardware in the 70s, then waiting to do it on mobile devices etc.) - it's the closest that we ever got to having a "platform that can evolve", so we can gradually update the applications to evolve along with the platform, instead of porting them from one platform to another and loosing important pieces of them in the process...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It 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.
I 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.
I think we need to concentrate on steering the Web's growth in the right direction, instead of bitching about how much it set us back (and I agree, it did, but it's a "platform cost" that was/is worth paying if you want to "ride the wave" instead of sinking with your favorite ship and then swimming back to the surface every time a new Smalltalk ship show up floating, then sinks and then a new one comes and so on... as an example, even choosing to develop a desktop app or a native iOS app instead of an HTML5/Javascript one with minimal backend is basically "riding a sinking ship", even if you'll make profit out of it and even if you'll deliver a better product to the customer).
I 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/ (multiple cursors, realtime editing/executio…
It's even more amazing when you phrase it as 'half a century' (2013-1968=45).
The 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" fr…
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.