Ted Nelson's Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart 110
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
otoh, 40 yrs ago, ageism practically didn't exist. older meant more experienced and wiser. we used to respect it.
now, if you are over 35, its hard to get an interview, let alone get hired.
things have gotton worse, not better.
Re:Too bad he wasn't born later. (Score:4, Insightful)
Using proper punctuation, capitalization and spelling might also be a factor.
Re:Too bad he wasn't born later. (Score:4, Insightful)
Drifting off-topic here, but getting interviews over age 35 isn't hard. Finding a hiring manager who is not a complete tool, now *that* is much harder.
Maybe Engelbart had the same problem, in his career. Compared to him, practically everyone is a tool.
I'm sure he identifies a little with Doug (Score:5, Insightful)
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power. I'd wager that Ted sees more than a little of Doug in himself: an inventor of great things who -- in the end -- was largely ignored and forgotten.
Re:Too bad he wasn't born later. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they've gotten both better and worse, in other words, things are different.
You're right; ageism is much worse these days in computer-related professions (and others). However, OTOH, technology is cheap and easily-accessible today, unlike 40 years ago. Today, if you're brilliant, you don't need some big institution to give you access to their computers for you to do computer-related work; you can buy a laptop for $100-200 on Ebay and do all the coding you want. You can even easily start a business with it: write a brilliant app for smartphones, start your own 1-person company, and sell it on iTunes/Google Play and make millions potentially. Or you can start a highly-successful open-source project and become the next Linus Torvalds or Guido von Rossum. Unfortunately, Engelbart retired about the time microcomputers were starting to become popular, so he was well ahead of his time.
Not just the technological elite... (Score:2, Insightful)
...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.'
And we can also only guess what almost half the world's population might do if they weren't trying to survive on less than $2.50/day.
There are all kinds of huge problems in the world that desperately need solving and there are huge numbers of people who struggle to find meaningful work. But somehow there's not much connection. In part, the people who control the world's wealth are able to isolate themselves from many of the world's most severe problems. And many people think that the purpose of life is competition rather than cooperation (i.e. taking a bigger slice of the pie for themselves rather than making more pie so everyone has enough).
But, regardless of whether you're lucky enough to count yourself among the technological elite or you're wondering whether you're going to eat today, the world is far from perfect.
Audience confused by pauses, sincerity (Score:4, Insightful)
If you watch the video, the audience reaction is remarkable. Basically, it appears to be composed of people who
1) cannot interpret or perceive when *real* human emotion is on display before them , or what it might mean.
2) react chiefly to the *form* of his sentences, and not the spoken content. Specifically, when Ted pauses, they interpret this as they're being given a pause by the speaker to process some joke which they were just told, and in response laugh politely.
The laughter is entirely inappropriate. Ted's pausing because he's overcome with emotion. That choking sound, that's where we get the phrase "getting choked up". That sniffling sound? That's Ted repressing tears and not a cue that you just heard a Louis CK -style joke which somehow went whizzing over your head.
Here's a guy -Ted Nelson - himself a luminary on par with Engelbart and Knuth, whose own vision for Xanadu :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu [wikipedia.org]
has largely been ignored and forgotten IMO, honoring us with his actual, uncensored thoughts about the life and passing one of his fellow greats, and people don't get it, at all. This is how the world is. The vacuous - yet ambitious ! - (lived there, know them ) residents of Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Palo Alto don't even know it's them he's ripping when he says:
"Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil."
a quote that reminded me of a line from Bilbo Baggins' speech at his "eleventy-one" birthday party:
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
The fact is the gentle, humane, inclusive and egalitarian visions of saints is an quiet and unassuming brute force of nature, provably irrepressible and the thing upon which every other owes its existence; it's like water. It is continually being reborn and reintroduced into the world over and over again, indefatiqable never driven out, never depleted, never defeated or even much deflected, unstoppable unstoppable unstoppable, having its way on the field of historical time, which is its only concern.