Ted Nelson's Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart

theodp writes "Speaking at a memorial event for the legendary Douglas Engelbart at the Computer History Museum, Ted Nelson was pissed-with-a-capital-P. Nelson in effect gave two powerful eulogies — one for his friend Dr. Engelbart, who left this Earth in July, and a second for Engelbart's career, which essentially began 'dying' four decades earlier due to short-sighted organizations' failure to fund the brilliant guy who gave the world The Mother of All Demos in 1968. 'Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA,' Nelson laments. 'Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further...Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.' It's a very moving and passionate speech (despite some oddly inappropriate audience laughter). And, alas, a very sad one in a world that throws $4 billion at the likes of Snapchat and Pinterest."

Re:Too bad he wasn't born later.

[jythie]

Eh, it is a mixed bag. Something that we have gotten worse about today is general research. After the 80s there was an increased focus on short term returns and multiple companies built business models around looking at good ideas other companies took risks on but failed then repackaging them with better marketing, which created a climate where companies became highly research adverse. Everyone hopes some other company (or university) will take those risks and the profits go to whoever does the same thing next.

During Engelbart's time, there were more companies still running research departments. Not that we do not have such places today, but they have become increasingly rare.

Re:Engerlbart's Greatness

[Anonymous Coward]

Engelbart created a lot of the things that we associate with modern PCs, such as the mouse, graphical word processing, and hypertext links, but from what I've read it seemed like he was running out of steam and having trouble managing his projects by the time the funding dropped away from him. He had a great chance to contribute to the history of computing, and he definitely exceeded all expectations. I guess we'll never know what else he would have come up with if given another 40 years to work, or if he had already run out of ideas.

Engelbart truly was a one of the titans of early computer development but he didn't really do anything with this mouse from 1963 until 1967. In the mean time a guy named Rainer Mallebrein and his team at a Telefunken lab created a ball mouse in 1965 for the German air traffic control agency. Engelbart only filed for a patent for his wheel mouse in 1967. There was also a British trackball design that dated to 1947 and a Canadian team who developed a trackball in 1952 for the Canadian navy but it used a five pin bowling ball so it was hardly very practical but they were probably the first, the Germans however, were marketing their mouse even before Engelbart made his demo in 1967. Ironically Telefunken felt the computer mouse was to trivial an invention to bother with patenting it.

Re:In the minds of the curren tech industry

[chad_r]

The internet existed in 1984. Some of us old timers still remember when AOL opened a gate and let their users into the readnews internet community, everything started going downhill about then. :-)

Could you be misremembering the Eternal September [wikipedia.org] of 1993? The name AOL didn't event exist until 1989. Usenet did exist in 1984, but it was over UUCP, and there were less than 1000 hosts.