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Mother of All Demos (1968)

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Re: Mother of All Demos (1968)

#2

Post by ux266478 »

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

Re: Mother of All Demos (1968)

#3

Post by dtagames »

ux266478 wrote: post #2

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

It is a sad ending, but Engelbart's software had an incredibly bad UI. The manuals are still online from the company he went to, Timesharing Systems, if I recall. The Xerox document model was the winning idea which was licensed to Apple and not stolen (Jobs and Gates were both invited to tour PARC).

Re: Mother of All Demos (1968)

#4

Post by thekuanysh »

ux266478 wrote: post #2

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

Tragic indeed. This has always been a tough business. Apple, Xerox, Facebook, OpenAI…

Re: Mother of All Demos (1968)

#5

Post by ux266478 »

dtagames wrote: post #3
ux266478 wrote: post #2

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

It is a sad ending, but Engelbart's software had an incredibly bad UI. The manuals are still online from the company he went to, Timesharing Systems, if I recall. The Xerox document model was the winning idea which was licensed to Apple and not stolen (Jobs and Gates were both invited to tour PARC).

Personally I'm skeptical it wasn't just a product of context. The Xerox document model was logical, in a world that still heavily relied on paper. Having an abstraction that seamlessly interoperated with the century of information storage that preceded it is a no-brainer. In today's world where paper is becoming increasingly rarer, and much work has been done in digitizing that mountain of documents? I'm not so sure. And I think Engelbart was focused on that future, rather than the 30-year transition period that would end up happening.

It's not to say that the specific implementations Engelbart was working with were good. But I'd point to Plan 9 from Bell Labs as a kind of hybrid between Douglas Engelbart's vision and what Xerox produced. It's a little alien, but relatively easy to learn, and at least conceptually it shows that an unstructured UI made up of hypertext and windows can be quite nice to use. When that's integrated with the primary IPC mechanism of the operating system, which also happens to be the filesystem, you end up with an intense synergy that's hard not to be delighted by. I don't think it was possible to avoid computers becoming digital filing cabinets, but I also don't think we should write off moving beyond this era at some point. There is a large, underexplored dark wood. I am very interested in what lives inside. I think revisiting Engelbart's ideas of human augmentation with a prolog-based system like the Japanese Fifth Gen Computer project has extremely promising implications.

Re: Mother of All Demos (1968)

#8

Post by psunavy03 »

dtagames wrote: post #3
ux266478 wrote: post #2

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

It is a sad ending, but Engelbart's software had an incredibly bad UI. The manuals are still online from the company he went to, Timesharing Systems, if I recall. The Xerox document model was the winning idea which was licensed to Apple and not stolen (Jobs and Gates were both invited to tour PARC).

"Well, Steve, it's like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox. I broke into his house to steal the TV set, only to find out you had already stolen it."

-Bill Gates

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