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I recently posted Doug Engelbart's advice to a young software developer, with some links to interesting videos about his work on the chord keyboard and glove, and also a link to a new product called "Tap" that seems to be inspired by his work (more links and interesting stuff about Doug Engelbart's work in the discussion):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121629

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse! https://www.tapwithus.com/

I haven't had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet... In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic, ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as modular as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

⬐ DonHopkins

I found this incredibly interesting stuff on Valerie Landau's youtube channel of Douglass Engelbart, her mentor. The videos have apparently been viewed only a few times, but they deserve much more attention, because the ideas presented are so important and relevant today!

She was a long time friend and collaborator with Doug Engelbart, and she was responsible for transferring the 1968 film of The Mother of All Demos from film to video so it could be preserved. She tracked him down and interviewed him, and after airing the interview, he asked her to help him articulate his vision to share with the world, which she's been working on since then.

https://www.youtube.com/user/islandeweller/videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Landau

Valerie Landau is an American designer, author and educator. She serves as Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University where she designed a software application that facilitates analysis and assessment of how effectively an organization is meeting their goals and objectives at course, program and institutional levels.

She has filed two patents along with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes multitouch interface for chorded text entry. The new patent is inspired by Engelbart's early work developing the Chorded keyboard. They also released an application for the iPhone for chorded texting called "TipTapSpeech".

Engelbart and Landau also collaborated on writing the book "The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" along with co-author Eileen Clegg.

Landau is also a co-founder of Program for the Future, a non-profit organization that promotes Engelbart's vision of Collective Intelligence. She also is author of the seminal book on online education "Developing an Effective Online Course" and earned the "Online Pioneer" award.

Landau, also known for her work in multimedia at Round World Media and for her work mentoring students in a three-year project studying and applying the Engelbart Hypothesis. and created an online archive of Engelbart related events and videos.

She is an instructional and interaction designer and has worked on many award-winning projects, educational games and online courses.

In addition, she leads high level research delegations to Cuba.

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

----

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

----

Engelbart Using HandWriter. Douglas Engelbart demonstrates early prototype of The HandWriter with Valerie Landau.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wAD2aji3Q

Q: So whose ideas was the glove?

Engelbart: I invented actually a separate keyset with the five keys, and her idea, you can make a glove to do that.

Q: And what's the advantage of using a five key chording system?

Engelbart: Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input.

And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too.

Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word.

Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words.

All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it.

----

iChord: Clips from video of Eric Matsuno & Valerie Landau showing their new iPhone app to Douglas Engelbart. To Douglas C Engelbart and Bill English, and to Karen Engelbart, Roberta English and Mary Coppernoll. Present in spirit but not in molecules were: Evan Schaffer and Dr. Robert Stephenson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXdnu5n9vI

So we're going to be able to be configurable for whoever's hand. [...] Go ahead and give it a try: so swiping it down puts it in the history, and swiping it left takes the last ...

----

Andres Types His Name

Andres writing his name on TipTap late on a Saturday night. I arrived home after a party and found him typing on TipTapSpeech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WI88q7coEY

----

This final silent video is chock full of photos and memories of Douglass Engelbart's friends and family, drawings, whiteboards, posters and brainstorming sessions!

Memories with Douglas Engelbart: Photos from my work with Douglas Engelbart creating a Educational Networked Improvement Community Engelbart and working with Eileen Clegg on the writing of the book the Engelbart Hypothesis: Diaglogs with Douglas Engelbart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnsWKikS_w

----

⬐ pvg

This is indeed all really interesting but it looks like you've posted a video from a blog post about this and then dumped the blog post in a bunch of HN thread comments instead of an actual blog post.

⬐ DonHopkins

I'll write a blog post about it soon, but I was hoping to benefit from other people's comments and links from discussing it here first. (You could accuse me of "crowd sourcing" my blog post, but I'd like to think of it as applying collective intelligence! ;) )

"The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed." -Douglass Engelbart, Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 9/19/05

https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/great-doug-eng...

Or as the great philosopher Linda Richman said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw&feature=youtu.be...

⬐ pvg

Sure but taking over the entire discussion thread still looks like an abuse of the site, however on-topic and well-intentioned. You can just post a link to the draft you want people to chime in on.

⬐ dang

In general you have a point but Don's enthusiasm is an international resource. Let's not hold it against him.

One goes to the internet with the DonHopkins one has.

⬐ pvg

I'm not holding it against him. I enjoy reading this stuff. But if the purpose of the comments section is conversation, this is a completely bananas way to have a conversation.

⬐ DonHopkins

If you like bananas, you'll LOVE watching Baxter the Chimpanzee Erase the Voting Log: ;)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/dumbold-voting-machine-for-th...

⬐ pvg

Misrepresenting an ape as a monkey is surely a nigh-criminal violation of simlection laws.

⬐ pvg

Although, since you're on the line, I have a question about your last post. In all the research and measurement that's gone into pie menus, have people looked into 'exploratory pointing' in pie menus? It's very common when looking through a linear menu with a mouse (many people also do it with text selection while reading) but it's super clunky and jittery in the actual pie menus I've seen in the wild.

⬐ DonHopkins

Great question and observation!

I'm not sure this is exactly what you're getting at, but it's related:

One of Ted Selker's students at MIT Media Lab came up with an idea of (normal linear) menus that "second guess" the user's favorite item, by measuring how much time they spend in each item, and guess their second favorite choice as the non-selected item they spent the most time pointing at.

I thought it was such an insidiously simple yet evil idea that I had to try implementing it with pie menus.

This video shows the Internet Explorer JavaScript ActiveX Behavior control running in Internet Explorer version 5. (Please excuse the ugly HTML and XML and XSLT!)

At 4:25 there's a demo of "Pie Menu Second Choice Guessing". The basic idea could be applied to any menus, but you're right that people tend to browse around menus by pointing at the items, and that definitely applies to pie menus.

But with linear menu, once you've browsed down to the bottom item, you've gone a long way in the same direction, so you're far away from the first item, and have to move back up to select it.

But with pie menus, you only go a little way in each direction, which cancels out and brings you back to where you started, and you stay near the center adjacent to all the items, so it's easy to change your mind and reselect any item without moving your mouse very far.

In other computer science words: Linear menus are O(n), while pie menus are O(1).

JavaScript Pie Menus: Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5, configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins.

https://youtu.be/R5k4gJK-aWw?t=4m25s

>This was inspired by some research at MIT Media Labs. This is a demonstration of pie menus that try to guess what your second choice would be. So when I click up, it allows me to select my favorite color. Let me zoom in here. Well, I think it's blue... No, red! Ok. So it says: "I think your favorite color is red, but I guess your second favorite color is blue." And that's based on the fact that when I popped it up, even though I selected red, I spent the most time selecting blue. People tend to browse pie menus like this, looking at things, and when they find what they like, they click it, but then they'll pause to consider things. So I can click up the menu and go: Yellow? Oh, no. I'll just cancel it. And now it's guessing that my favorite color is yellow, even though I didn't select one. This is a simple elegant idea that I applied to pie menus, and it could be applied to a lot of other things, and used for e-commerce and art galleries or whatever.

If you're not living in 1999, you might prefer the jQuery pie menus that run in any browser. You could easily implement the "second choice" feature without modifying the code by using tracking callbacks, which are all documented here:

http://www.donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/JQuery_Pie_Men...

And here's the source code:

https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie

I don't know what other menu implementations give you callbacks for changing the selected item before you select one, as well as continuous pointer tracking (passing the current item, direction and distance), but pie menus definitely should.

Callbacks like that are very useful for researchers evaluating and comparing menu performance. And also for developers, who can provide nice application specific feedback in the menu or on the page.

Callbacks can use the distance as a parameter, for selecting between multiple items in the slice, or pulling out a continuous value like a "slider", changing the font size, selecting a hue and saturation with direction and distance (with an outer ring you can dip into to set the brightness), etc.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*ngAv4gwWUcFCfQeJ.g...

I hate jQuery as much as the next person, so I'm sorry I haven't implemented them in a trendier more modern framework yet, but I'm having a hard time deciding which one, and they all seem to either suck or not have a very big following. I'm open to suggestions!

It's even better for menus to display more information during browsing when you point at each item (including for disabled items, telling you WHY they're disabled and WHAT to do to enable them, instead of mysteriously ignoring you and not selecting), and hide (or shrink or make translucent) unselected items, so you don't have to put so much cluttered distracting information about every item on the screen at the same time.

These PyGTK SimCity pie menus show icons only (which correspond to the icons on the tool pallet), but show titles when you point at them, and a description of the menu when it pops up and nothing is selected, along the bottom of the menu.

SimCity Tools Static Pie Menu with “Build” Selected:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*-x3kctcC1nbZeT9H.p...

SimCity Build Static Pie Menu with “Park” Selected:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*I6jUSzJFSTeiJ_38.p...

⬐ jacquesm

How do those patents help with spreading Doug Engelbarts work? They would seem to hinder rather than help.

⬐ jarmitage

Excellent, thank you so much for sharing.

⬐ 8bitsrule

One video on the /islandweller channel is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQx-tuW9A4Q a 56-minute visit / presentation with Doug and several others at Google.

Inspirational ideas (unfortunately displayed with slides instead of Hyperdoc demos) and perplexed reactions in the ending Q&A session. These ideas are so different; ordinary presentations are clearly incapable of selling them. (As Nelson, too, found out repeatedly.) Looks like job#1 is bootstrapping Hyperdoc presentation methods. Guess the 'Mother of all Demos' needs a 'Mother-Squared'.

Another reaction: the video I saw had very low resolution, and the audio was recorded in a terribly noisy environment. I'm completely unable to process how this could -ever- have happened. TV did better in the Ted Mac era.

⬐ jsutton

The key takeaway for me: "Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

⬐ DonHopkins

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Q: Some people will have to change their normal method of thinking?

A: I think today, Aday really summed it up, that one of the things about collective intelligence means that we really have to start looking at ways that we can collectively share knowledge. And one of the problems with that is there are no good tools for sharing massive quantities of knowledge. So it's very hard to stay on top of things. So Doug's methodology creates maps and new ways of displaying data that we have not explored. So that we can really see large amounts of data, large amounts of knowledge, put them into structured arguments, so what he means by structure -- and maps, so that people can literally see what exists now and create very rapidly stragies -- both long term strategic planning, as well as tactical planning -- to address the issues that are confronting us.

Q: Does this assume that if people have the same information they'll all come to the same conclusions?

A: No, not at all. What it means that you will be able to look at data and make intelligent conclusions based on the best data we have currently. Because right now there is a lot of good data that is currently not available to the people who are making the decisions. He was saying that this was a dynamic knowledge repository and it was about allowing people to have an intelligence quotient. In other words, he saud that the infrastructure that you have to support a society determines the capability of that society. Just because we have all these capable tools doesn't necessarily mean that we'll behave intelligently, but it does allow us the chance to behave intelligently. So by improving our infrastructure, we're improving our intelligence QUOTIENT, not our actual intelligence. Just like the same people who are intelligent sometimes make bad choices, even though they're capable of making a better choice.

Q: Now you say that Doug was interested in solving the most urgent problems of humanity. What type of problems was he referring to?

A: He was definitely referring to things like Global Warming, issues around water, food, hunger, war, corruption was very high on Doug's list. He also followed very closely the work of the Millinenium Project, and so often times he would cite whatever they had cited. He would often cite those same issues.

Q: Do you think his vision was going to become a reality at some point?

A: I think yes, if I didn't I don't think I would have spend the last 30 years following it.

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet... In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic, ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

⬐ DonHopkins

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

⬐ hoodoof

I love the weird, awkward social situations in the video at the tapwithus website, featuring people interacting with the tap keyboard secretly while they are talking to other people - magnificently strange.

The police will arrest you for wearing brass knuckles if you are caught using this device.

This seems to be capturing finger movements that would otherwise map to a keyboard. I wonder if there is an even more optimal way to capture finger movements and map them to input, if the idea of mapping to keyboard finger movements is discarded.

⬐ tapwithus

Hey! The Tap is made with soft-touch TPU and it looks more like rings than brass knuckles. If an officer did ask to see it, they would be more interested than concerned.

⬐ DonHopkins

I'd be interested to know more about the background and history of your company and its founders, please?

And what's on the roadmap -- any plans for tactile feedback?

Are they available and shipping now? Do you ship to Europe?

Thanks for dropping by!

Did you know there used to be a magazine named Tap? And have you seen the movie "The President's Analyst?" ;) I bet the Woz would love to play around with one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNv8m2Gl3Ec

⬐ yipbub

Actually, the tap uses finger tap combinations that are mapped to keys. Ex: tap middle-finger and pinky for 'x' (no idea of what the actual key is.

Single finger taps are reserved for vowels, and trickier finger combinations are aliased to double-taps and other tricks.

⬐ seltzered_

Worth also checking out the google glass researchers that used one-handed keyboards: Computer history museum - 'if the computer fits, wear it' - https://youtu.be/sk7cjmYrKck?t=8m7s

(oh wow, it's you again Don)

⬐ DonHopkins

^I've had^I haven't had

⬐ enobrev

LinusTechTips posted a decent review of the Tap a few weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/8za_4g5zCOM

⬐ DonHopkins

Sounds like a fair review.

One thing that appeals to me is the ability to control the cursor and keyboard on your PC or TV (or whatever) from across the room, since it replaces two devices that take up a flat surface and can get lost in the shuffle in a dark living room.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the product evolves (and becomes cheaper -- and more fashionable).

It doesn't seem to have the Douchebag Factor that Google Glass had. (Maybe Liberace or Michael Jackson could have gotten away with studding it out with diamonds and rhinestones.) I just hope nobody posts photos of themselves using it in the shower.

If they added a mic and a speaker, then you could "talk to the hand"!

⬐ rmason

I met Dr. Engelbart at a conference in the mid-nineties. A totally fascinating individual with lots of great stories. Although our interaction was brief you couldn't help becoming convinced he was totally motivated by his sincere desire to make the world a better place.

What has often baffled me is that the poor man spent the last twenty five years of his life looking for funding with neither the government or Valley companies willing to support him. Hard to imagine what else he might have created.

⬐ teddyh

As I understand it, he did get a lot of funding for a while, but nothing much came of it. After that happens, further funding tends to dry up.

For futher reading, see The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982) by Jacques Vallée, chapter 5, “Knowledge Workers of the World, link up!”: (https://books.google.nl/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97)

It contains a partial and anonymized (all names have been changed) story about the initial decline of SRI, the company led by Engelbart to develop NLS. Reportedly, they all became entranced with Erhard Seminars Training.

⬐ DonHopkins

Valerie Landau recommends this web site about Douglass Engelbart's life and work, with chapters from her book:

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/

Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg spent years in dialog with Douglas Engelbart and wrote a book distilling those dialogs. It is available as on ebook on Amazon

In addition, the book chapters are on this blog.

Today, we invite you to share your thoughts and memories of Douglas Engelbart who passed away last night.

Add your stories to the Remembrances: Doug Engelbart page

----

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-Dialogs-eboo...

Centuries of silo thinking and win-or-die ideological and economic competition have finally generated a global crisis. Now either we collaborate on a global scale to solve the new global problems, or we won't survive. The technology is available to do so. Billions of intelligences are waiting to participate. How do we bring the two together? We are at a decision crossroads. And as this book vividly demonstrates, Doug Engelbart as been there all along, waiting for us with the answer.

Emmy-Award Winning Historian James Burke --Email to the authors

⬐ doomlaser

Modular: good advice. Look at a game like Doom, which survives and thrives to this day because of the open documented WAD format.

Another example is Unity. Despite some of its own shortcomings, the developers made a very open plugin system, and fantastic tools have been developed and integrated into the Unity IDE that fix some of these problems and give it huge amounts of power: ProBuilder (the in-IDE mesh editor) and TextMeshPro (the font dynamic texture system) being two great examples.

Or, think of iOS without the app store, or any OS without third party applications. What's the Lao Tsu saying? Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful, etc

⬐ gonzo41

And look at eclipse, modular as all hell and everyone hates it. ;)

⬐ DonHopkins

And of course there's X-Windows: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035419

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

X-Windows will never die, they'll just keep trying to fix it! (Just like the cute little baby in Eraserhead.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-kI4Qzj9U

⬐ readingnews

While we can all bash it, I am reading this on X right now. So the modular idea still holds to some degree. :)

⬐ doomlaser

I learned to write X-Windows UI code ages ago, and the boilerplate required to do simple things is what got to me

⬐ yosoyubik

There seems to be some controversy over the book that's mentioned in the video (Engelbart Hypothesis)

http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/books-unauthorized.html

"This book is unauthorized. Douglas Engelbart was not an author on this book. Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau were the sole authors of this book. Listing Doug Engelbart as lead author was one of many problems with this book"

⬐ DonHopkins

Douglas C. Engelbart: A Profile of His Work and Vision: Past, Present and Future.

Prepared by Logitech, October 2005.

https://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/Engelbart_Backgrounder.pdf

⬐ s16h

I've put a bunch of the videos mentioned here into a Highlight list: https://highlight.app/stajbakhsh/doug-engelbart

Feel free to add more to it.

⬐ DonHopkins

Augmenting Human Intellect. A Conceptual Framework by Doug Engelbart.

http://www.1962paper.org/

In 1962 Doug Engelbart published what may be the most important paper in computer history and in human augmentation.

This is where he laid out his concept of interactive computing and which would lead to him and his team to invent the mouse, word processing, email, and most of what we today consider personal computing. We still have far to go to live up to the dreams and ideas presented here:

Read Augmenting Human Intellect

http://www.1962paper.org/web.html

This presentation of the paper hosted and presented by The Liquid Information Company, makers of richly interactive text, inspired by and in dialog with Doug Engelbart whom we were honoured to make a webomentary on as well: Invisible Revolution, The Doug Engelbart Documentary.

You should also see the 1968 Demo this paper resulted in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

⬐ EdiX

It's a shame that the Computer History Museum never finished its NLS restoration project [1] just because the copyright holder could not be nailed down.

[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/nlsproject

⬐ DonHopkins

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

The Mother of All Demos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on 9 December, 1968.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.

⬐ jdonaldson

I once was in Manhattan with Dr. Engelbart during the NIME conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). We were riding the subway together. I think he must've seen the poster (presentation) I was carrying and we struck up a conversation. It ranged over all kinds of topics: ergonomics, performance/audience interpretation, mechanical vs. gestural control, etc. I remember us being pretty sharply critical over each other's ideas, and just being skeptical of "good" solutions in general for the problems of modern musical control.

Of course, I didn't realize who he was at the time. I only had seen grainy old videos of him from decades ago. I'm really glad I didn't recognize his face at first. You see, he had always been a huge hero of mine, and a big motivation for me to go to grad school. For a brief moment, we got to argue over small technical details as if we were any old pair of jaded researchers. It was a totally normal exchange in any other context, and a highlight in hindsight.