Doug Engelbart Passes Away 124
lpress writes "If you use a mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, WYSIWYG word processor, multi-window user interface, shared documents, shared database, documents with images & text, keyword search, instant messaging, synchronous collaboration, or asynchronous collaboration, you can thank Doug Engelbart, who passed away today."
The Mother of All Demos (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe this is something that should be mandatory for all computer engineering/science students should watch, along with getting a bit of a history lesson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a11JDLBXtPQ [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61oMy7Tr-bM [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNXLK78ZaFo [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zz1SwCTCEE [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dVNxlLYTsQ [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiJA7_Sw9aM [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI8LZKW5Lwk [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYDg2wr2QfI [youtube.com]
The concepts for the time, in my opinion, are mind blowing. I hope there are some people in this world who are considering some equal mind blowing ideas for these times, although I do not think they could ever get pulled together into one demo like what Doug Engelbart did.
a live debt (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd never heard of Doug Engelbart when I unboxed my first Atari ST in June of '89. In that first year I'd learned of him, SRI, Xerox PARC, DRI, et al. From then on, from time to time, it would strike me out of the blue, often in the wee hours, just what a tremendous debt I owed Doug and the others for what could so easily be taken for granted. It is dangerous, I think, to become so blasé that we forget that it wasn't some 'force of history' or whatnot that has provided us so much; even if that were entirely true, it's still down to the particular people who actually had the ideas, devised the techniques, and built the devices.
And, if you'll trouble to read them, Doug's thoughts on the what and how and why have continual relevance. Even these days, in the midst of my 'desktop as appliance' and laptop as 'a convenience' daily whatever, some little thing will hit me and I have to stop a bit and say, "Wow."
Thank you, Doug.
Chord Keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
I met Doug and spoke with him a few times when we were both at Tymnet, which was purchased by McDonnell Douglas in 1985. At the time, Doug had a shock or white hair but was still cranking out ideas. At that time, he was working very hard to sell his idea of a chord keyboard -- you had five keys for each hand and you "played" them to control the computer. Doug was amazing with them -- he code program and write documents extraordinarily fast with them. He thought that DEC might buy the idea and turn it into a product, but obviously that didn't happen. Doug was always thinking a generation ahead -- recall that at that time, we had not really accepted the mouse yet. But from Doug's perspective that was old news from almost twenty years ago. Talking to him was amazing -- just trying to get into the frame of mind he was in was challenging and fun. I wish I could have spent more time with him. Thanks for everything, Doug -- we still haven't caught up with you.
Damn (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn. This guy did way more than Steve Jobs ever hoped to. :(
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot really messed up and could apologize (Score:4, Interesting)
Or is it about fourteen years I've been reading slashdot now that I think about it? Since around 1998-1999?
But one other point -- for anyone reading slashdot for so long, there is less and less that is new. And you know more and more other news sources, so stuff on slashdot is more often stuff you've seen before. So, it might seem less interesting, but to others, it may still be fascinating.
For example, I'm not a systems administrator except for my own equipment and projects, and I don't follow those trends that closely in other ways, but it seems like many hang out here, and I am still learning a lot about such stuff in various discussions that is close to cutting edge. It might be possible that there are less programmers overall though, as stuff like StackOverflow occupies a lot of programmer attention these days (but without the meta level discussions or tangential discussions possible on slashdot)?
I don't think I've looked up Slashdot on Wikipedia before, but from there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot [wikipedia.org]
"As of 2006, Slashdot had approximately 5.5 million users per month. As of January 2013, the site's Alexa rank is 2,000, with the average user spending 3 minutes and 18 seconds per day on the site and 82,665 sites linking in.[1] The primary stories on the site consist of a short synopsis paragraph, a link to the original story, and a lengthy discussion section, all contributed by users. Discussion on stories can get up to 10,000 posts per day. Slashdot has been considered a pioneer in user-driven content, influencing other sites such as Google News and Wikipedia.[65][66] However, there has been a dip in readership as of 2011, primarily due to the increase of technology-related blogs and Twitter feeds.[67]"
In a way, there may be some parallels to Doug Engelbart's life. He pioneered (with others) some amazing things, and then others took them and ran with them in different directions, and he began to be slowly forgotten. As an analogy, when you wake up in the middle of the night and turn on a lightbulb, it can seem glaringly bright, but then when the sun comes up, you may not even notice it is still on. Slashdot contributed in a variety of ways to the dawn of the web by supporting all the people who made it happen.
Ultimately though, I feel the answer may not be so much as to find better sites (and I still think it is hard to compare with slashdot), as to reinvent knowledge sharing such as with a social semantic desktop.