Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo - 1 of 9

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo - 1 of 9

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

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[jfreijser]

Engelbart is the father of the modern day GUI. His ideas influenced thinking at Xerox PARC, and combined with Jeff Raskin's concepts of humane computing, to produce the Mac. What I regret is that Engelbart's concept of 'augmentation engineering' has received so little attention over the years. The essence of the concept is that we humans must not see computers as machines for automation, replacing human activities, but as machines for augmentation, assisting and enhancing human activities.

[Lightnocyst]

It's like watching sci fi, but it's real. Can anyone match the advancement and scale today that this did then?

[TiagoTiagoT]

Too bad they didn't also record the audience's reactions

[BBQTeach]

Also I think this is the first ever recorded appearance of chip music...

[BBQTeach]

I wonder when typing that he realized that soon someone would be watching that on a computer (which is a under dog for its time) that can run 1 and a half billion calculations a second, store 16 billion 1s or 0s (2 GB) in super fast access memory and just under 2000 billion (250GB) 1s or 0s in persistent memory.

Oh and it outputs to two full color screens, can last for 8 hours on its own power supply and yet fits in my lap.

You know what? I think he might have...

[BlackSwanTactical]

1996-97, my ISP, U.S. Coordinated Networks had on the Internet a Cam Tree (mated to a spider). This abstraction was developed at Xerox PARC. Ap was open to anyone visiting, with a default of indexing all clients hosted, and given a URL would map any web server two dir deep, allowing the full rotation of the objects (web pages). Written in Java. Great for assessing strategic plan for any corp. Worked in Menlo Park, SV 2000-2003.

[phdecora]

jfreijser:

yes... now that we are using computers to enhance intellect, we are making great decisions... like creating collateralized debt obligations based on mortgage backed securities! and doing intelligence work on weapons of mass destruction! surely computers have ushered in a wonderful new age of human decision making.

[nostriluu]

Apple's 1987 "Knowledge Navigator" video implied a central AI, which is contrary to Englebart's ideas of human focused augmentation, and their model seems very top down based on producers and consumers. Google and other companies/outfits much more seem to be working on a unified knowledge worker type model where a set of common tools are used to manage and share information.

[nostriluu]

Bringing Apple in seems rather arbitrary. They don't seem to be intentionally working on any kind of inclusive distributed knowledge worker scenario. For sure Apple's Mac has been strongly influenced or subjected to the GUI and networking, but their current direction, iPhone/iPad seems more based on Raskin's simplified task interfaces where the user only needs the most basic information to accomplish one thing, rather than participating in a model of information sharing.

[jfreijser]

I don't believe there ever was a formal link between Raskin and Engelbart in the sense that they worked together or saw each other on a regular basis at any time in the 60s and 70s. But there runs a clear line from Engelbart's Augmentation Research Centre (at SRI) to Xerox PARC to Apple.

The "knowledge worker" was one of the outcomes of his vision. His objective was to augment the human intellect, so that the world's increasingly urgent and complex problems could be dealt with more astutely.

[nostriluu]

Is there a formal Englebar - Raskin - Apple link? Englebart's idea of the 'knowledge worker' doesn't seem very compatible with Raskin's simplified task driven interfaces, and his ideas seem more egalitarian than Apple's focus on the wealthy.