[HN Gopher] Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo
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Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo
Author : gjvc
Score : 168 points
Date : 2023-12-09 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dougengelbart.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dougengelbart.org)
| ck2 wrote:
| hug of death
|
| https://google.com/search?q=cache:https://dougengelbart.org/...
| orangepurple wrote:
| Doesn't work. Try https://archive.is/dLvnF
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Also many other submissions here over the years about Doug
| Englebart and the famous 1968 demo. Use this HN search link:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| userbinator wrote:
| I was expecting something about the demoscene.
| unleaded wrote:
| Dont think that existed in the 60s mate
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| We had oscilloscopes in the 60's. It could have.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| In a ''For All Mankind'' sorta way, I suppose.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Don Lancaster talks about "quadrature art" in his Active
| Filter Cookbook from 1975 -- so it was a thing by then.
|
| https://www.radiolocman.com/shem/schematics.html?di=151800
| codetrotter wrote:
| Also, in the scene events they often have ANSI art
| competitions on the program but even before colors and
| computers people were using typewriters to make character
| based artwork. So in a sense, the ANSI art art form
| predates computers. Somewhat.
| userbinator wrote:
| The name doesn't necessarily need to be the date it was
| created on.
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| While not technically a demo scene demo, in 1952 Sandy
| Douglas pushed the EDSAC to play a game of noughts and
| crosses (OXO) on its cathode ray tubes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OXO_(video_game)
| mikewarot wrote:
| The DemoScene has existed forever... well before computers,
| lathes, etc... all the way back to "Look at the way these
| pictures come to life and dance around when the torch
| flickers inside this cave"
| vidarh wrote:
| The "scene", no, but demos? Arguably, yes. The demo scene was
| little but the evolution of demonstrations of tech or art
| from doing it as e.g. part of a product demonstration or
| research to doing it as art or for reputation.
|
| E.g. the IBM 7094 "singing" Daisy Bell in 1961
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk
| qwertox wrote:
| No reason to downvote. For many of us this demo is well known,
| but there's no reason for us to expect that everyone must be
| aware of its existence.
|
| You're one of today's lucky 10,000.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Just as telephones were a step backwards from telegrams, every
| other HCI mode has been a step backwards from the Xerox Alto :P
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| In what sense were telephones a step backwards from telegrams?
| That seems completely wrong to me.
|
| Unless your whole post was sarcasm...
| ThalesX wrote:
| Signal to noise ratio maybe.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| They probably mean synchronous vs async communication as well
| as the compactness of text versus audio in terms of
| information density.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| I think this is about the stage we are at in regard to
| decentralized finance at the moment.
|
| I often think about how strangely archaic our financial system
| is.
|
| For example when you start a new job and the first payment comes
| in after 4 weeks on the job. In the future, the payments will
| flow realtime.
|
| Or when I want to check the price of some stock and the stock
| market is closed, like it is most of the time. In the future,
| prices will be set on a global market with no downtime.
|
| Or when I talk to people who run online businesses and the
| plethora of problems they have with credit card payments. Because
| a credit car payment is not a payment. It's a something where the
| receiver of the money is held responsible when the one who pays
| plays dirty tricks on them. In the future, an electronic payment
| will be simply a payment.
|
| Let's hope we don't need over 40 years from theory to reality
| like it took for the internet.
| themerone wrote:
| I thought we are at the stage of DeFi where most people
| realized it has flaws that can only be fixed with
| centralization.
|
| Most crypto users are already using online exchanges and
| wallets, so from their perspective it already is centralized.
|
| True decentralized crypto only has niche applications outside a
| small number of enthusiasts.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| only has niche applications outside a small number of
| enthusiasts
|
| Like the internet in 1968.
| themerone wrote:
| The internet didn't exist then, and it's still an Apples
| and oranges. Billions of people have access to crypto
| technology now, and there are no gatekeepers preventing
| them form participating.
|
| Arpanet was started 1969 and you had to be part of a small
| number of institutions to have access.
| nyolfen wrote:
| speaking more broadly than defi, there is an intrinsic
| tradeoff between decentralization and efficiency that is
| probably something like natural law or tautology. the promise
| of decentralized tech built on cryptography, to me at least,
| is that it offers a working alternative where there
| previously was none at all; almost everyone will probably end
| up using centralized and custodial systems due to their
| benefits, but the breakthrough is that you don't have to. you
| can always choose to trust in the presence of trustless
| system, but you can't choose trustlessness in its absence.
| gemstones wrote:
| Do you think that most businesses have the consistent cash
| flows needed to pay out wages every hour?
|
| I'm not sure this is a technical problem, I guess. Maybe a
| financial engineering problem but is the demand there?
| fragmede wrote:
| Most businesses have loans from banks and have some sort of
| line of credit (a business credit card, if not an actual line
| of credit at a bank) to draw from that could be used to pay
| employees from.
| brazzy wrote:
| >Or when I talk to people who run online businesses and the
| plethora of problems they have with credit card payments.
| Because a credit car payment is not a payment. It's a something
| where the receiver of the money is held responsible when the
| one who pays plays dirty tricks on them. In the future, an
| electronic payment will be simply a payment.
|
| That last sentence indicates you have failed to understand the
| problems. A payment that is "simply a payment" is a huge step
| backwards from those credit card systems. If fraud prevention
| and legal recourse to undo fraudulent payments is not baked
| directly into your system, that system is worthless.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| You mean worthless like those trillions of dollars worth of
| cash out there?
|
| Worthless like anything people used to trade for thousands of
| years before credit cards arrived?
|
| Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit cards.
| That's what I said. Sellers hate credit cards because they
| have to deal with all that fraud:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=credit+card+fraud
| brazzy wrote:
| > You mean worthless like those trillions of dollars worth
| of cash out there?
|
| ...which is getting used less and less in the developed
| world. In an increasing number of countries, carrying cash
| is a thing of the past, or done as a rarely-used backup.
|
| > Worthless like anything people used to trade for
| thousands of years before credit cards arrived?
|
| And which have fallen or are falling out of use when
| competing with systems that better serve the needs of the
| users. And safety from fraud and theft is a pretty big
| need.
|
| > Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit
| cards.
|
| Admittedly it's more bolted on than baked into (since the
| system is so old), but it most certainly is there.
|
| > Sellers hate credit cards because they have to deal with
| all that fraud
|
| Which doesn't mean there's not fraud prevention, just that
| it often fails. As it always will in every system, because
| it's a really hard problem. And a human problem, not a
| technical problem.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Please dont pollute this video demo with the degeneracy of
| "crypto"
| usefulcat wrote:
| > In the future, the payments will flow realtime. Aside from
| not having to wait four weeks before the first payment, what
| would be the advantage of that?
| smurpy wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231209174528/https://dougengel...
| layer8 wrote:
| And the associated YouTube channel:
| https://youtube.com/@engelbartinstitute/videos
| teddyh wrote:
| The reason for the downfall of SRI, the company led by Engelbart
| to develop NLS, can be discovered in _The Network Revolution -
| confessions of a computer scientist_ (1982) by Jacques Vallee,
| specifically in chapter 5, " _Knowledge Workers of the World,
| link up!_ ":
| <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97>
|
| It contains a partial and anonymized (all names have been
| changed) retelling about the initial decline of SRI. To
| summarize, they all became entranced with the cult-like Erhard
| Seminars Training, except the smart people, who left because they
| didn't like it.
| wisemang wrote:
| Interesting! This is the same as the "EST" sessions depicted in
| the TV series The Americans, for those familiar with it. Didn't
| realize it went back so far.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >Erhard Seminars Training
|
| My understanding of EST training was that it gave people
| permission to be self centered assholes, and had no redeeming
| value.
|
| No wonder SRI went downhill. 8(
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
| leoc wrote:
| The well-funded (and comparatively highly sane) Xerox PARC
| also specifically set out to scoop up people from SRI from
| its beginning.
|
| EST seems to have been influenced by other, slightly older
| post-war groups with their own kinds of struggle session such
| as the drug-rehab community gone bad Synanon
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon and our old friend
| Scientology, and in turn to have influenced later "large
| group awareness training"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-group_awareness_training
| orgs like the "wilderness training" camps. At least Synanon
| helped to make the name of one fairly-big jazzman, Joe Pass:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_of_Synanon
| bmitc wrote:
| Thank you. I wasn't aware of that particular book and will
| check it out.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Interesting. The seminal personal computer history book __Fire
| in the Valley__ blames IMSAI's downfall on EST. Basically
| substituting wishcasting for business sense.
| kragen wrote:
| engelbart was never the head of sri, and sri didn't have a
| downfall; they're still around and extremely highly respected.
| i worked on a darpa contract last year where sri was another
| performer on the contract, delivering
| http://spw20.langsec.org/papers/parsley-langsec2020.pdf and
| related work
| pcurve wrote:
| I had seen the video before but completely missed the video
| conference capability. I wonder what network line they used for
| that. Simply amazing
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There's a great book that details this event in one of the
| chapters, "What the dormouse said", iirc they used a television
| broadcast van sitting at the top of a hill to bounce the signal
| from where the machine sat and where the conference was.
|
| Stewart Brand was also behind this demo and it was his idea to
| pipe audio from the machine to the conference, so that any UI
| lag was accompanied by all the disk seeking noise instead of
| awkward silence.
| ftio wrote:
| +1 for _What the Dormouse Said._ Truly fantastic.
| skibz wrote:
| I'd absolutely love to have a small chorded keyboard for macros
| like Doug is using with his left hand here...
| melling wrote:
| How many chords did he have? I'd prefer going with body
| gestures. Google Soli looked promising:
|
| https://youtu.be/r-eh2K4HCzI?si=aIVasKkvm5wtO3tu
| engfan wrote:
| Someone once said to Doug: "I don't know what Silicon Valley will
| do when it runs out of your inventions."
|
| I had the pleasure of working with him. He was brilliant and
| kind. The world just wasn't ready for him.
| bmitc wrote:
| There are so many systems thinkers from that time that
| basically understood how the world works and how it could or
| should work that basically no one today knows of or considers.
| It's a shame.
|
| This demo us one of the most mindblowing things I've seen and
| especially so if you consider its date of arrival. I truly
| think the audience didn't really understand it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Who's to say there aren't just as many such people know but
| we still have trouble recognizing them until well after the
| fact.
| bmitc wrote:
| My point was more that these people wrote about things that
| predicted where we were headed but no one listened to them
| then, and no one listens to them now.
| tomcam wrote:
| Username truly checks out. And yes, a prophet far ahead of his
| time.
| planewave wrote:
| I met Mr. Engelbart once as a child when my mother worked at
| SRI in the 90s/early 2000s. At the time I had seen the mouse
| prototype while wandering the halls and on some open house day
| I was introduced to him. He listened to me, a young kid, talk
| excitedly about technology for what must've been awhile and was
| very encouraging and kind. While I was excited about computers
| at the time I had no idea the significance of his ideas until I
| was an adult.
|
| Looking back on it, I am awed by the kindness he showed to some
| random kid.
| leoc wrote:
| It's an alan-kayism:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-...
| "I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of
| Doug's ideas."
| swagempire wrote:
| Ah yes -- the Mother Of All Demos. Impressive!
| cliffwarden wrote:
| Often, i will go to science fiction (Rudy Rucker) to "drink from
| the well" and generate some inspiration for new ideas, projects,
| etc. This is one of the real-life sources that gives me that same
| feeling.
|
| It's just amazing and awe inspiring to see something that felt
| truly "out of the future". You can probably draw lines to
| existing inventions and research but to me, this felt like he
| lived in the world where this technology already existed and was
| giving us a glimpse.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| One of my favourite bits is how embarrassed he sounds about
| calling it the "mouse".
| dang wrote:
| Here are the past threads I found - seems like there should be
| others (anyone?):
|
| _The Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36704885 - July 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445 - June 2022 (82
| comments)
|
| _The Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467751 - Sept 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Mothers of the Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231 - Aug 2020 (12
| comments)
|
| _Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535853 - June 2020 (47
| comments)
|
| _The Mother of All Demos (1968)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20717835 - Aug 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _50 years on, we're living the reality first shown at the
| "Mother of All Demos"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646445 - Dec 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _How Doug Engelbart Pulled Off the Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640784 - Dec 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart 's
| Great Demo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640656 - Dec
| 2018 (13 comments)
|
| _The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart 's Great Demo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626215 - Dec 2018 (42
| comments)
|
| _Mother of all demos: Life as we know it turns 50_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18605185 - Dec 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Watching and Re-Watching "The Mother of All Demos"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366039 - April 2015 (24
| comments)
|
| _' The Mother of All Demos' Is 45 Years Old, Doesn't Look a Day
| Over 25_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879 - Dec
| 2013 (59 comments)
|
| _The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996695 - July 2013 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996246 - July 2013 (4
| comments)
|
| _The Demo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987780 - July
| 2013 (36 comments)
|
| _The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5337425 - March 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _Douglas Engelbart : The Mother of All Demos (1968)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011864 - Sept 2011 (2
| comments)
|
| _1968, Douglas Engelbart gives the Mother of All Tech Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942687 - Nov 2010 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Mother of All Demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939458 - Nov 2010 (10
| comments)
|
| _The mother of all demos_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138879 - Feb 2010 (16
| comments)
|
| _The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393653 - Dec 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _1968: Engelbart demonstrates the mouse, email, collaborative
| work, hypertext, video conferencing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116121 - Feb 2008 (1
| comment)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think that's the most entries I've ever seen in such a list.
| Solvency wrote:
| It'll get posted again by Monday.
| pvg wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37921113
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I met Doug once at a Singularity event at Stanford where I showed
| him how to ride a Segway. What a boss.
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(page generated 2023-12-09 23:00 UTC)