William English, Engineer Behind 'The Mother of All Demos', Dies at 91 (msn.com) 18
An anonymous reader quotes The Los Angeles Times:
On Dec. 9, 1968, the then-small world of computer engineering was shaken to its core by a presentation of new technologies projected onto a screen in a San Francisco hall. The attendees at the historic event saw demonstrations of video conferencing, the first public use of a computer mouse, hyperlinking in which clicking a word in a document transported the user to an entirely new document — and more. The man who was the star of the hands-on show seen in the hall was Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the research center SRI in Menlo Park, California, had been developing them for years.
But the man who had designed what is known now as "The Mother of All Demos" and was working behind the scenes to make sure they all worked was William K. English, who died Sunday at the age of 91. Bill English played an indispensable role in more than Engelbart's demo... In 1965 the lab received a NASA grant to invent a technology for moving a cursor and selecting an item on a display screen; Engelbart developed the concept, but it was English who designed the first prototype &mdash the mouse...
English essentially choreographed Engelbart's presentation. Just as important, he made sure there were no technical glitches. That was a challenge, since Engelbart would be in San Francisco demonstrating a system that was being operated 30 miles away in Menlo Park, the two sites connected via a microwave relay. The event went off virtually without a hitch, and a new world was born. "Doug wasn't doing it," recalls Roberta, who had worked as Engelbart's secretary. "It was all Bill." Engelbart died in 2013.
English also participated in an early research project "into the psychological effects of LSD," according to the article.
But a few years after the legendary demo, English was recruited for Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, "where he helped midwife PARC's invention of the personal computer and other innovations... He subsequently left Xerox to join Sun Microsystems and later the pioneering electronic game console maker 3DO."
But the man who had designed what is known now as "The Mother of All Demos" and was working behind the scenes to make sure they all worked was William K. English, who died Sunday at the age of 91. Bill English played an indispensable role in more than Engelbart's demo... In 1965 the lab received a NASA grant to invent a technology for moving a cursor and selecting an item on a display screen; Engelbart developed the concept, but it was English who designed the first prototype &mdash the mouse...
English essentially choreographed Engelbart's presentation. Just as important, he made sure there were no technical glitches. That was a challenge, since Engelbart would be in San Francisco demonstrating a system that was being operated 30 miles away in Menlo Park, the two sites connected via a microwave relay. The event went off virtually without a hitch, and a new world was born. "Doug wasn't doing it," recalls Roberta, who had worked as Engelbart's secretary. "It was all Bill." Engelbart died in 2013.
English also participated in an early research project "into the psychological effects of LSD," according to the article.
But a few years after the legendary demo, English was recruited for Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, "where he helped midwife PARC's invention of the personal computer and other innovations... He subsequently left Xerox to join Sun Microsystems and later the pioneering electronic game console maker 3DO."
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and the scroll lock key.
Re: !-- Huh? (Score:2, Funny)
That was the mouse's name. They wanted to call him Mickey, but for obvious reasons didn't. So they just called him "M--" which is pronounced "mdash."
The ampersand is just a typo.
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Not to be confused with the em dash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Worth your time to watch! (Score:5, Informative)
While the mother of all demos is Legendary, not 100% of it is worth watching. But Eberhards presentation of the mouse, the gui, the mosue selectable text editor, the picture in a picture, the shared editing of the same document remotely, and the general ideas are just jaw dropping.
basically he outlined the next 40 years of what computing would eventually look like. It just took us time to catch up.
The real gist of this though isn't what he we demoing. He was talking about something entirely different. a big concept. He was talking about living in the future to see what it would be like. That is, they were yes doing a lot of engineering and inventing to make the future early. But the objective was to not just create these things but to experience what having them would be like.
That is not, creat this cool chat app. but instead try running an organization what chat is just there like it was always available. How would your life change. And then what would be the next thing you'd want to do. Actually visit and live int he future to explore what would be needed.
They invented such a full ecosystems compared to what existed at the time that it wasn't like just one cool thing. say a mouse. But shared cocument editing. with Undos (!) (who had ever heard of "undo" back then??? I laugh when I think about that. But how would you live without UNDO now?)
TO give you just a glimpse of the times. A relative of mine was employed as a teletypist for AP news. She could type 100 words a minute without a single letter error for pages at a time. This was important because in a teletype when you press the letter it is sent to the reciever and printed on the paper output page and scrolled up, then read by the raido announcer off the page in real time.. SO no undo for the news then. No line buffers.
SO here is eberhart using electret mikes that few had seen, video conferencing not as a demo but just as a causal zoom to the your co-worker.
And how do you manange Picture-in-a picture video over word processor when no one has invented the "window" or GUI yet? Well they did.
So go wathc it. there never has been a more imporant demo.
But the best part of it is this: No one in the right mind at that time would ever have done a live demo of even one of those let alone all of them. even three decades later, few people would risk doing a power point presentation live. (acetate slides were the only reliable method even into the late 90s)
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A major blow to the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
The attendees at the historic event saw demonstrations of video conferencing, the first public use of a computer mouse, hyperlinking in which clicking a word in a document transported the user to an entirely new document — and more.
By packing so much prior art into this one demonstration, he undoubtedly wiped out countless billions of dollars of dot.com-era patent IP.
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Apple, et all (Score:1)
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Microsoft did too, but at least Gates admitted it. Jobs for years denied knowing anything about PARC, but then someone went back and looked at the visitor logs and there he was.
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And how was that the case when Xerox was paid for that tech? It's so strange to see such blatantly wrong tech history on a tech site. Jobs was very open about taking Xerox's tech, which they had no idea what to do with, and getting out as a product. He talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yraBG1s4gm8
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Except Apple gave Xerox about $175,000 worth of Apple stock for it. Xerox sold it promptly because they didn't know what to do with stock.
And because of Apple, windows overlapped. The demo Jobs saw didn't allow overlapping windows. This was a Woz invention.
Who would've thought? (Score:1)
Just like the English (Score:1)
We're using articles from the automated MSN News? (Score:2)
Oh, so we're using articles from the automated MSN News now?
Say it isn't so.
I thought this was about the scene. (Score:2)
Demo scene. I wonder who started that.
1968 also the year of HAL (Score:2)