[HN Gopher] Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo
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Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo
Author : whatrocks
Score : 81 points
Date : 2020-06-16 04:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dougengelbart.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dougengelbart.org)
| dang wrote:
| Many previous posts, of course, but most of the threads have been
| a bit less interesting than you might expect from the classicness
| of the topic. Some of the better ones were:
|
| 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626215
|
| 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366039
|
| 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879
|
| 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939458
|
| 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138879 (Stewart Brand
| shot the video? who knew)
| mrexroad wrote:
| My mind was blown when seeing connections [0] between Stewart
| Brand and many of the folks whose work deeply shaped my
| thinking about computing and systems. In retrospect, the
| influence is obvious and it'd be surprising if worked any other
| way. Which makes me wish CS programs included more courses
| covering history and philosophy of computing. I think we spent
| a a week or two on it --- Alan Kay even did a guest lecture ---
| but I still feel theres tremendous value in focusing on why we
| are doing what we do.
|
| [0] http://www.dubberly.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/10/Cyberneti...
| mrspeaker wrote:
| It's not surprising about previous comments: there's not much
| you can meaningfully add after watching it. It floored me the
| first time, and I've been (just a lil' bit) disappointed about
| modern computing ever since!
| saalweachter wrote:
| One thing I occasionally like to think about -- either in the
| context of writing a program, or just driving down the
| highway when my thoughts are wandering from controlling a
| two-ton vehicle going 65 MPH -- is, What would a computer on
| an alien spacecraft look like?
|
| Not for how it would be different because aliens are aliens,
| but because you're presumably looking at something that is
| the result of thousands of years of iteration and refinement.
| If you're the Asgard from Stargate, you presumably aren't
| just doing OS updates and re-skinning your UIs and throwing
| away your old frameworks every three to five years for the
| fun of it. At some point you presumably figured out how your
| software should work, wrote it right, iterated on it until it
| was essentially bug free, and only extend it as needed within
| the same set of frameworks, languages and UI paradigms your
| civilization has been using for hundreds of years.
|
| What does that software look like?
| noir_lord wrote:
| Possibly nothing like anything we would recognise except at
| the most basic level I think.
|
| It's possible to imagine their equivalent to a GUI is
| entirely unlike ours, flat screens work for us because of
| our visual cortex and narrow field of view/depth perception
| framework essentially been tricked.
|
| A UI for a something intelligent with a compound eye or ten
| eyes or whatnot could be very different.
|
| Not to mention if we give said aliens hundreds of years of
| computers, they would likely arrive at something akin to a
| neural interface, I mean a computer as a direct expansion
| of your cognitive ability has to be the end point in user
| interfaces, you don't even have to think about how to
| translate what's in your head into something the computer
| can understand parse, you manipulate it as easily as
| thinking of a pink elephant in a tutu, it is just _there_.
|
| It would also likely be heavily influenced by their
| psychology.
|
| What would be fun is trying to create a router between our
| systems and theirs down the line.
|
| We've had electric computers for a blink in time compared
| to the wheel, lot of places to go between a Ryzen 3950X and
| computronium.
| the-dude wrote:
| It is called a 'web browser' and programmed in Javascript.
| I am not making this up.
| notkaiho wrote:
| Is this a reference to the SpaceX manned launch vehicle?
| Interesting use of "alien spacecraft" if so.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Could be a reference to the replicator source code from
| stargate which was the html and js from a bank if I
| recall correctly.
| notkaiho wrote:
| Wow, that's ... niche
| noir_lord wrote:
| Whenever code is on screen I pause and google it if it's
| recognisably not total gibberish - have done for years,
| it's always fascinating when it's plausible and funny
| when it is not.
|
| My most recent one was Netflix's Close, though that one
| was gibberish, it was just a html form with nonsensical
| attributes in that case.
|
| Found it, http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Stargate-Code-
| of-the-Replica...
| codr7 wrote:
| Frameworks and standards, definitely. But bug free software
| written do to exactly the right thing won't happen much.
| We're moving faster and faster, I don't think that's going
| to change. What seems to be happening more is designing
| around the fact to avoid disasters.
| server_bot wrote:
| Would highly recommend the "Advent of Computing" podcast episode
| on this topic:
| http://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=3a1d7af237bb48bb985e795c2...
| EGreg wrote:
| How does this compare from 2020?
|
| https://youtu.be/FG93VxqV0EY
| acd wrote:
| "The mother of all demos."
|
| Hyperlinking Computer mouse Videoconference
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
|
| Which influenced Xerox Parc which in turned influenced Apple.
| notkaiho wrote:
| I wouldn't limit it to just Apple. Literally all of modern
| computing tools are influenced, to a greater or occasionally
| lesser extent, by this work.
| whatrocks wrote:
| I'm not surprised this has been shared many times before, and yet
| I'm glad people are still discovering it. My journey to
| Engelbart's demo came through reading "The Dream Machine" book
| about JCR Licklider, which itself is an incredible computer
| history record.
| kps wrote:
| The associated paper is available for free this month.
|
| _A research center for augmenting human intellect_
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1476589.1476645
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