[HN Gopher] A new video captures a 1968 demo of IBM's Executive ...
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A new video captures a 1968 demo of IBM's Executive Terminal
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 306 points
Date : 2024-12-13 02:30 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| calrain wrote:
| Recording the history of computing for future generations will be
| so important for a wide range of studies.
|
| It's great people collect, restore, and publish valuable
| historical pieces like these.
| 10729287 wrote:
| That messsage taped on the box was so moving to read. I felt so
| proud and thankful toward the man
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I love that people properly document important stuff like
| that. My grandma died last year aged 94 or so, and in her
| inheritance was a load of stuff that she wrote tiny notes on.
| I've got a plastic ibex head with a barometer on my wall now
| from the 60's or whatever with a tiny handwritten note taped
| to the back when and where it was bought. I mean it's
| worthless in both collectability and sentimental value, but
| the little note gives it a bit more personality.
|
| I should do the same with anything I think is collectible /
| not trash / may end up in someone else's hands. For example,
| I bought some LPs over time, I should document when and where
| I bought them from at least. Maybe print out some information
| about the band / artist and include it, as the music themself
| is only part of the "product".
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not necessarily convinced there's
| real value "for future generations". I love nostalgia, but it
| seems pretty useless beyond the entertainment value.
|
| What benefits do you, or others, see in looking back at these
| computer systems?
|
| Thanks.
| nxobject wrote:
| I think history is worth mining for future ideas for
| producitvity software - especially when we finish mining
| everything LLMs and RAG can do, we might go back to past
| experiments in information retrieval. We might know the
| history now that we're reading this thread... but who's to
| say that a developer in 2030 who's never read HN has?
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| it must be recorded, otherwise it will seem like magic
| mongol wrote:
| This is no different to me than other historical artifacts.
| Old furniture, cars, clothes, books and so on tell a lot
| about the time they were created, and the people that lived
| during those times. It is not just about nostalgia. It is
| about knowing about the past. History and archeology are
| scientific disciplines where this is crucial.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreed on the first sentence... I like history too (now I'm
| middle-aged). I see some benefit, but mostly that seems to
| be entertainment too. One perhaps can't separate the useful
| bits from the other bits.
|
| Like, those who don't study history are doomed to repeat
| it. But, those who do are mostly doomed to watch from the
| sidelines as other people repeat it. And even the things
| that are possibly obviously bad ideas without historical
| analogues get done...
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| Can someone explain why the font looks so disjointed on the
| presentation screen?
| K0balt wrote:
| I am also curious about this.
| pulvinar wrote:
| It's clearly a vector display, and my guess is that the beam is
| being turned off a little too early at the end of each
| character's final stroke, leaving it lopsided.
|
| The bar over a letter must mean that it's true upper-case.
| Cheesy, but it's what we did when characters were expensive.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I visited the Computer History Museum this year during Vintage
| Computer Festival West. When not only can you tour the museum,
| but the upstairs rooms are crammed full of hundreds of amazing
| personal collections of vintage computing hardware all powered up
| and usable. It was a religious experience.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| It will be interesting to see the durability of print vs
| digital content of time.
|
| Many web properties are no longer accessible due to M&A
| activity and Small/solo publishers unable or unwilling to
| maintain their assets. Archives like WayBack Machine mitigates
| some of the loss of digital content so long as the archives
| themselves are still maintained.
|
| Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| > Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?
|
| Not sure how long microfiche lasts for but someone posted a
| link here not too long ago about how record companies had
| embraced magnetic hard drives in the 1990s to store music
| masters and are starting to find that the drives are no
| longer readable.
| kevindamm wrote:
| It depends a lot on the humidity and heat or light in the
| environment where the microfiche are being stored. But they
| should be able to retain their data for 500 or so years.
|
| CDs and Laserdiscs are also seeing bitrot. The layer of
| material that is etched does degrade over time. Error
| correction helps some, but if it's a writable CD or DVD
| it's only likely to last a decade or two. M-Drives are CDs
| that are designed to retain their data for about 1000 years
| and can be writable by specific consumer drives. Not sure
| how long the professionally pressed CDs last but it's not
| that long.
| sgc wrote:
| Googling from your comment led to M-Discs, which are
| available in dvd or blu ray, up to 100gb discs. That
| looks extremely useful.
| kevindamm wrote:
| ah, thanks for catching the typo, it was getting late for
| me, I should have pulled up a link or something because I
| haven't worked with these discs in a decade or so..
|
| yeah those are the ones I'm referring to -- if you're
| archiving something like family history or data that
| needs to be good for centuries (without having to re-copy
| and juggle), those are a better choice than just about
| anything else.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
| tom_wilde wrote:
| What beats M-Disc? Genuinely curious just having bought
| one.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Nothing comes to mind that you can interface with a
| computer, but when I wrote the phrase I was thinking of
| projects on the scale of Long Now [0], requiring physical
| etching on materials and very careful storage.
|
| Alternatively, tell people that they can't store
| something and you're likely to find it robustly mirrored
| by many.
|
| [0] https://longnow.org/ideas/very-long-term-backup/
| tom_wilde wrote:
| Well that was a fascinating diversion. This is bonkers!
|
| https://norsam.com/products/buddhist-nano-film/
| rhplus wrote:
| We can all help in a small way. Archive.org is a non-profit
| and always needs financial support.
|
| https://archive.org/donate
| ghaff wrote:
| As photography was largely switching to digital, I sometimes
| wondered whether--whatever the preservation possibilities
| that digital offered--to what degree photos would really be
| preserved in practice relative to prints and slides.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most photos are terrible. Colors can start fading in at
| little as 10 years if they were hanging on your wall that
| long. B&W can last longer, but still will fade. Of course
| there are different process, if you use the best process
| photos will last longer, but still they are not very
| stable.
|
| Digital makes it cheap and easy to have multiple in many
| locations. While any one media may fail, you still have a
| copy - I have on this computer all the data from whatever
| computer I was using 15 years ago. (most of it I have not
| looked at in 20 years and I could safely delete, but it is
| still here, and on other backup systems I have)
| ghaff wrote:
| My point was there's the capability to do all this backup
| preservation but it doesn't just happen. And it's less
| visible in many cases than the proverbial shoebox full of
| photos will be.
| bluGill wrote:
| What is the difference between photos on a crashed
| harddrive, and photos in a shoebox that that just burned
| in a house fire? Photos are vulnerable to many different
| attacks just like digital data.
|
| These days your photos are probably backed up by
| facebook, google, or are such major players. (there are a
| lot of privacy concerns with the above, but they do tend
| to have good backups)
| ghaff wrote:
| There is a lot of serendipitous backing up with social
| media. There was also a lot of serendipitous passing on
| to relatives of physical media. Not sure which better
| stands the test of time. (And I'm sure it varies.)
| bluGill wrote:
| Often passing on to relatives is done with the only copy
| (well you retain the negative). School pictures come in
| packages of many, but otherwise you typically only print
| one copy.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Some of those screen images seem incredibly modern, like a
| Windows 2000 machine attached to a CRT with a BW filter.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most of what we do with computers (maybe with the exception of
| the current AI and ML stuff) was invented or prototyped in the
| 1970s or earlier. It's just gotten faster, a bit more polished,
| and a lot more affordable.
| Animats wrote:
| That's an early version of the system. I've seen pictures of a
| later version, which was an IBM 3270 display with a phone
| handset, but no keyboard. The idea was that the executive would
| pick up the phone and be connected to someone in a call center
| who would then do spreadsheet-type operations for them. Don't
| know if that was deployed much.
| snthpy wrote:
| Very prescient! That's pretty much how my execs work with MS
| Teams and my Excel models - they call me and I manipulate them
| on the screen for them :-D
| Animats wrote:
| I'm trying to find a reference for this. I remember it from
| some ancient IBM ad. The system in the article sounds fancier
| but more like a one-off demo. The later system was just a
| second remote display plus a voice line; more deployable.
|
| The concept comes from NASA's Apollo Mission Control in the
| 1960s. These screens on the consoles were all just TV
| receivers. All the display data went onto a cable TV network.
| Any console could view any source. The network was remoted
| out, and displays outside the control room could look, too.
| Any display could be routed to the big screens, too.
|
| The same technology was still in use in some USAF facilities
| well into the 1980s. (Long story. Short version: the 1970s
| upgrade project failed.)
|
| That kind of switching remains a feature of military command
| and control centers. Some display may suddenly become
| important, and others need to look at it.
| boulos wrote:
| The Cronkite one?
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BsCkaAuikGY
| pastage wrote:
| I think Asciinema live streaming is a new feature I used it
| this summer to share terminals from one of my jumphosts.
| For the security part I only did "anyone can watch" which
| was usable but felt a bit lacking when I tried to use it.
| There are lots of UX gotchas with doing screen recording of
| terminals worst one is that a good broadcast is always a
| small screen, but when I work I want lots of data.
|
| Kubernetes is awful at displaying secret stuff when sharing
| live terminals for showing ops.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I work at a TV station and we use something like these [1].
| Basically hundreds of video ins and outs that you can mix
| and match with the press of a button.
|
| [1]: https://www.grassvalley.com/products/routing/vega-100-
| series...
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| Many high energy physics/accelerator institutes have public
| accessable status dashboards online, if one want to see
| this concept in action. For example the one for CERN:
| https://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/
| canucker2016 wrote:
| In the early 1990s, I was working on GUI email software. Not
| much different than the email software at university, just
| the pixel resolution was higher with GUI.
|
| The dev team went out "into the field" to help roll out the
| software to the company. This also allowed us to see how
| others used the software.
|
| At the end of the day, one of the devs reported back that one
| personal assistant would maximize the email app's window
| (back when 17" CRT monitors were large) and after each email
| was processed, she'd print out the email and file it the
| appropriate spot in a filing cabinet.
|
| All the devs were, "But... But... she can just file the email
| in an email folder in the program. Why does she need
| hardcopy? Email was supposed to save trees!"
| ido wrote:
| In the early 90s (maybe '92 or '93) my elementary school
| had a program where we'd go to the computer room and email
| kids in another school. There was nothing else to do on
| those computers that involved the internet (no web
| browsers), these were (relatively) state of the art 386s
| running DOS.
|
| Anyway I remember we used to write our weekly emails on
| paper first and then type them into the computer- your
| quote reminded me of that!
| a2tech wrote:
| Right after graduating college my wife was looking for work
| and ended up taking a job as a secretary shared between two
| chairs at our local university. They thought it was super
| important that their secretary had a bachelors degree for
| some reason.
|
| One of the chairs would read emails on his iMac, then would
| handwrite a return message and give it to my wife who would
| type it into email and send it as him. He didn't want to
| type anything. This was around 2008 to give you an idea of
| timing. My wife didn't stay for long, but my understanding
| is he was doing this until he retired sometime in the 20
| teens.
| ghaff wrote:
| 2008. Wow.
|
| But I do remember going back to the 90s that there was at
| least one senior exec at a computer company I worked for
| who basically didn't touch his terminal as I understand
| it. His admin printed out and typed everything.
| dublin wrote:
| This attitude is still presenet among doctors, and is one
| reason why electronic Medical Records _still_ suck, and
| why Obama 's "Affordable Care Act" has made American
| healthcare simultaneously the most expensive in the world
| as well as among the worst in the world. Doctors consider
| their time too valuable to be used in slow and fiddly
| data entry, so they offload it to additional staff.
|
| They're not entirely wrong in this regard - modern EMR
| web UIs are arguably inferior in many ways to some light
| pen driven systems of the 1970s-80s (I'm thinking
| especially of the old TDS system, which nurses (and the
| few docs that used them) _loved_ because it was so easy
| and quick - replacing or "upgrading" it was like pulling
| teeth, and the nurses fought hard to keep it in every
| case I ever saw.)
| ghaff wrote:
| The younger docs seem more amenable but there still seems
| to be a ton of electronic paperwork for the benefit. That
| said, my "community hospital" got bought by one of the
| two big systems in my area and, from a patient
| standpoint, things like prescriptions and labs especially
| seem much more automated than in the past.
| nradov wrote:
| Physician time _is_ valuable. There is essentially a
| fixed supply and other bottlenecks in the healthcare
| system make adding more doctors a very slow process. That
| 's why forward-thinking health systems employ medical
| scribes to offload data entry.
|
| https://www.scribeamerica.com/what-is-a-medical-scribe/
|
| The TDS Health Care System had some unique advantages but
| unfortunately it was tied to obsolete technology and
| ultimately a dead end. Web UIs aren't necessarily a
| problem. Some of the most popular EHRs such as Epic use
| native thick client applications. The fundamental issue
| is that healthcare is inherently more complex than almost
| any other business domain, with every medical specialty
| needing a different workflow plus beyond the clinical
| stuff there are extensive documentation requirements
| imposed by payers and government regulators. Sometimes
| clinicians and administrators insist on certain
| functionality even when it makes no sense due to ego or
| ignorance. EHRs can be improved but I know from painful
| experience how expensive and time consuming it is to get
| everything right.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/89482.89511
| ddingus wrote:
| Old school status statement right there.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A contemporary of my parents was a research chemist, he
| wrote all his research papers longhand and had a
| secretary type them up for publication.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| In 2012 I was at a company that entered data into a custom
| program backed by sql. The user would then take a
| screenshot of the main card after saving it. They would
| then print the screenshot, hole punch it, hand write names
| and reference numbers and then file it in cabinets in the
| file room.
| cess11 wrote:
| I do work in public sector archiving, mainly retirement of
| software systems that have been replaced but hold
| information that needs to be stored for archival purposes.
|
| The archiving software in this area is quite obnoxious and
| user unfriendly, so it happens every now and then that
| counties or government agencies decide to just print the
| lot of it on paper and put it in physical archives.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Why does she need hardcopy? Email was supposed to save
| trees!
|
| Old habits take a while to change. Managers and executives
| were used to reports and memos on paper. So when email
| arrived, it was very common for secretaries to print emails
| for their bosses to read. Even at one of my early jobs in
| the 1990s, changes deployed to production had to be
| documented in memo form, and a copy of the memo printed,
| along with diffs of the code changes, and filed in a filing
| cabinet.
|
| We got there eventually. I'd say that for all but the
| oldest generation still working, printing any kind of
| document to hardcopy has become pretty rare, at least where
| I'm working.
| bluGill wrote:
| Paper is a lot easier to read than a screen, even a
| modern 4k monitor is harder on the eyes than paper (I
| have no tried epaper displays). Paper also provides a lot
| more resolution, sometimes when the code is tricky the
| only sane option is to print out all 3 chains worth of
| that class (you can should turn that into sensible
| measurements via your favorite unit converted to get a
| sense of scale, but I think you will agree chains is the
| correct measure), spread it out on the floor with a pen
| and start reading and cross referencing things.
| smcleod wrote:
| I once met with NEC who was wanted to hire some consultants
| to help them on your cloud journey. They wanted to become a
| cloud managed services and hosting provider - but had never
| done anything in 'cloud' before, this seemed odd to me and
| as I dug deeper things got weirder.
|
| They demanded that their 'engineers' must be able to build
| out and manage both their own and their managed infra on
| AWS but never write any code - in fact they thought
| automation was outright dangerous, they said their
| engineers would never write any terraform, cloud formation
| or similar and that they wanted to become a MSP of cloud
| services preferring to write everything down in runbooks...
| and print those runbooks out.
|
| The managers would turn up to meetings with huge stacks of
| paper that were just AWS documentation converted to pdf and
| printed.
|
| We refused to work with them and essentially walked out.
| I'm sure this is something that someone like an Accenture
| or Deloitte would and probably did jump on.
|
| This was 2019.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I worked at large retail store, massaging excel files for
| sales dept. One day I got to their floor, only to see their
| A3 printers working all day long. They made all excel
| sheets into paper because the screen aren't large enough,
| then write down fixes with a pencil and later update the
| spreadsheet on computer. 2010. (learned about cultural
| inertia and corporate "efficiency")
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of time and money was wasted over the years on
| communications concepts. It wasn't until the mainstream
| collaborative editing tools and PC-based video conferencing (as
| accelerated by COVID) that, for now at least, everything sort
| of came together.
| airstrike wrote:
| _Huge_ "Control" vibes from this article. If you like the
| aesthetics, action gaming, and the paranormal...yet for some
| reason have not played this game yet, definitely give it a try.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More like CONTROL from _Get Smart_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart
| moomin wrote:
| I remember getting to the end, "Fear of a Blank Planet" starts
| to play and I was "Yes, that's exactly this game's aesthetic."
| airstrike wrote:
| I didn't know that song before playing the game (honestly
| before reading this), but it's _exactly_ the game 's
| aesthetic indeed. Thanks for mentioning it!
| moomin wrote:
| Oh, there's a LOT more where that came from. One of my
| favourite bands. I saw them play live last year and
| Porcupine Tree have so much great material (and yes, they
| played Fear of a Blank Planet).
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| 'If you like action gaming' would actually be a
| contraindication here. Control's gameplay is utterly
| unremarkable, and I suspect you'd actually recommend it to
| someone who's never played a 3rd person shooter before, so the
| pedestrian shooting isn't so noticeable.
| airstrike wrote:
| Hmm... consider instead the possibility that it is actually
| remarkable but just isn't your cup of tea, as reviews for the
| combat system have been overwhelmingly positive.
|
| I will concede that the aiming specifically isn't S-tier, but
| then again this is an "action-adventure" game, not a shooter,
| and everything else in the combat system more than makes up
| for that one less-than-perfect feature. Not to mention the
| fact that the game is much more than just the combat system.
| "Action" was just one of the characteristics I listed. The
| aesthetics and paranormal lore are reason enough to play it
| _regardless_ of any combat.
|
| It's incredibly satisfying to destroy the environment, throw
| objects and enemies around, levitate, dash in mid air... just
| thinking about it has me wanting to replay the whole thing
| even if I already know the mystery.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I think you may be thinking of a different game? There's
| nothing that really plays like Control. You can even nerf the
| shooting difficulty entirely if you want -- I don't
| personally like the combat particularly, but it isn't the
| primary thing happening in the game.
| doomlaser wrote:
| Cool.
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| Looking at this it is absolutely amazing and almost
| incomprehensible how far technology has advanced in the years
| since then.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think the biggest "shock" is how quickly these things got
| normalised, but this is in part down to how we used to see this
| stuff; back in the 90's I first saw stuff on TV about video
| calls and computers and the like (but turns out that was
| decades after that kinda thing was first presented and probably
| a hundred years since it was used in sci-fi), but the way it's
| presented is all in marketing fashions, like, very
| intentionally sitting at a desk, dialing a number for a very
| formal conversation.
|
| "real" video calling sort of snuck in through the back doors
| once people got webcams and MSN / Skype, and became mainstream
| / common in the 2000's with always-on internet, remote work,
| etc. And at one point the smartphone and mobile internet got in
| people's hands and (video) calls became casual.
|
| I think the other part there is that it's normal people using
| them. What I mean by that is that in these videos, it's all
| very formal corporate people. And then the first people that
| really get interested in this kind of technology or who have an
| interest in futuristic stuff are / were the "nerdy" types. (I
| am probably living in a bubble though). But it was the average
| joe that normalised this technology.
| mylastattempt wrote:
| tl;dr when normal people start using things, it becomes
| noramlised!
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| This was not even "the technology" of then.
|
| This was what engineers were barely capable of, with the
| technology that did exist, but even most executives who were
| the type of user it was envisioned for never knew anything
| about it, much less had anything like this much desktop
| technology ever.
|
| Everybody else in the non-executive category, even more of a
| complete fantasy.
|
| IOW the difference between what you see there vs now is minor,
| compared to the real "backward" state back then.
|
| Even though things like transistor radios were already common,
| you have to realize that in a huge percentage of dwellings in
| the US, and way more in the rest of the world, there was still
| not yet a single transistorized product.
|
| I was a young math & electronics geek and was aware of more
| stuff like this than average.
|
| Along with all the much more mature people, like the extremely
| rare engineering students who might want to work for IBM or
| something, this was exactly the kind of thing that was
| inspiring the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" which came out the
| next year.
|
| Anyone who had any clue something like this was already
| possible, could basically agree how cool it would be and was
| really looking forward to the 21st century when it would be
| here.
|
| If the world was not destroyed by nuclear war before the 21st
| century got here :\
| unit149 wrote:
| -Dunlop saw the opportunity to run another experiment in 1967-68,
| which he called the "Executive Terminal."
|
| Accessing Dunlop's archives on the Xerox Star that would not have
| been a stand-alone system ended up requiring a Memorex machine
| that was accessed through multiple time-sharing CRT models.
| Piecing together the original audio in archival footage moved
| restoring the tape in an information management system to
| Englebart's accelerated NLS database.
| bitwize wrote:
| I find it interesting how Dunlop was trying to solve the same
| kinds of problems Engelbart was, with the added constraint of
| preserving the _shifgrethor_ of the top IBM executives. The fact
| that late-20th-century businessmen viewed such things as typing
| to be subordinates ' work has had a more profound effect on the
| adoption of computer technologies, their development, and their
| marketing that we in modern times could guess without having
| known.
|
| I'm also reminded of the Ashton-Tate software package Framework,
| which is one of my favorites from the 1980s. It's what they used
| to call "integrated software", which was a package of several
| productivity applications: word processor, spreadsheet, maybe a
| communications program or database or graphing capability,
| bundled together and sold as a unit. Unlike, say, Microsoft Works
| or DeskMate, Framework featured powerful versions of these tools
| and the ability to create composite documents, as well as a
| programming language with Lisp-like semantics to automate
| workflows. Because of this, Ashton-Tate pitched Framework as an
| executive decision-making tool, which was quite a bit different
| from how competitor programs like Lotus 1-2-3 were marketed:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMc0yIbvDg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIx-TGUkiSg
| Nition wrote:
| Not related to this discussion but, it's fun to see a word from
| The Left Hand Of Darkness here.
| bitwize wrote:
| Near as I can tell, _shifgrethor_ means something like
| personal dignity, prestige among peers, legitimacy, autonomy,
| and authority -- all at once. King Argaven considers Genly Ai
| 's existence (and his offer of union with the Ekumen) a
| threat to his sovereignty as king, because of that Karhide's
| sovereignty as a nation, also because of that his worth as an
| individual. He can't separate these concepts because they are
| all one, they are all _shifgrethor_.
|
| This insight helped me understand the mindset of the IBM
| executives, which I wouldn't have before; just dismissed it
| as wrongheaded pre-boomer silliness. The executives saw
| demeaning themselves with the scutwork of looking things up
| for oneself as an attack on their position, their dignity and
| worth as individuals, and the organization as a whole --
| perhaps even _society_ as a whole. Those filthy hippies with
| their (sissy voice) "collaborative work environments" and
| their "interactive terminals". They're working for the Reds,
| I tell ya, trying to unravel the nation from the inside!
|
| I owe LeGuin a profound debt for opening my mind to
| mentalities vastly different to my own, yet still essential
| to the history of the computing world I live in.
| Nition wrote:
| Absolutely, I think you used the word perfectly.
|
| Have you read Stranger In A Strange Land? The alien word
| "grok" from that book has a similar way of being useful,
| and that one actually managed to make it into general
| speech somehow - at least by hacker types. In the book it's
| an alien word that literally means "to drink", though it
| really means something like "attain a real understanding
| of."
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Executives still consider being able to tell subordinates what
| to do in person more important than the work itself. See Back
| to Office vs Work from Home.
| ghaff wrote:
| Lotus Symphony was a (later?) incarnation. Basically things
| evolved to more loosely coupled incarnations of office suites
| which ended up being pretty much from Microsoft (OK,
| LibreOffice) and then Microsoft and Google online. The end
| result was pretty much the same. If you weren't in a dominant
| office suite, you pretty much didn't exist except for
| specialized users.
| db48x wrote:
| > Once the results were assembled, the information specialist
| conveyed all this information to the executive, cutting from one
| video feed to another, guided by the executive's interest and
| direction.
|
| Anyone else reminded of A Deepness in the Sky?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of pair
| programming but with the boss sitting behind you.
|
| I wonder if it failed it practice due to no boss having the
| patience of watching a programmer slowly writing out a program.
| Like, the video reminds me more of scifi computer interaction
| than actual programming. The boss voice sounds like the robot
| cops when beating the protagonist in TXH123 or whatever it is
| called.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| > Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of
| pair programming but with the boss sitting behind you.
|
| I definitely cannot imagine a more wonderful vision of going
| about my day job as a programmer :-D
| adamc wrote:
| I love that one of the examples is a shopping list for groceries.
| Given the cost of the system...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Honeywell Kitchen Computer
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296485
| robocat wrote:
| AN EXAMPLE is "An Example".
|
| Uppercase characters are represented using a bar/macron over the
| top - I was a bit slow to work that out and I don't remember
| seeing that convention before.
|
| Link just to video: https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k
|
| Edit: pulvinar said "It's clearly a vector display". You can see
| a graph using vector lines at 24:13, zooming at 20:50, and
| there's graphic lines mixed with text at 28:36.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, it was a vector display in front of a raster camera. The
| same arrangement was used throughout the Gemini and Apollo
| mission control and up to the early shuttle program - images
| would be rendered in the RTCC (real-time computer complex(?))
| and piped to the slow-scan CRTs in the panels. At the panel the
| operator could select which video stream they wanted to see.
| One of the streams was a "channel guide".
| IAmKozAMA wrote:
| It's comforting to know the demo gods have been cursing us since
| the 60s.
|
| https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k?si=lDjot4Ie6EiQ_IOW&t=573
| wrs wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of Chile's Project CyberSyn room. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
| mrandish wrote:
| Very interesting contrasting visions between IBM's hierarchical
| approach and Englebart's Mother of All Demos. The IBM vision
| isn't really even computing based. it's obvious from the video
| which shows an on-demand point-to-point analog video link between
| a senior executive's office and a central reference library. The
| video is only from the library to the executive but the audio is
| bi-directional allowing the researcher to receive requests,
| assemble materials which could include documents placed on a
| video camera stand, transparencies, microfilm or the display
| output of a video terminal and then display them on the video
| feed using a video source switch box. It's really more a demo of
| a dedicated corporate video calling system.
|
| > Dunlop's 1968 video demonstration of the Executive Terminal and
| the Information Center proceeds in three acts.
|
| The article doesn't make this clear but the linked videos are not
| a video demonstration but instead unedited B-roll shots without
| audio probably captured to be cut-aways edited into a narrated
| video demonstration. Unfortunately, that video demonstration
| isn't part of this collection (or was never created).
| vincent-manis wrote:
| One very small correction: QUIKTRAN wasn't a "mathematical
| utility", but an early timesharing system, I think running on a
| 7044 (coincidentally, my first mainframe). It offered an
| interactive Fortran system, with editing and debugging
| facilities. IBM's later CALL/360 system was a successor to this,
| adding PL/I and Basic.
|
| Interesting UX fact: IBM researchers looked at user satisfaction
| on this system. They found that it wasn't poor response time that
| bothered people, but variability of response times. If users
| couldn't predict how long an operation would take, that bothered
| them. So they inserted delays so that average response times were
| maybe longer, but variance was lower. And users were happier.
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