Doug Engelbart's advice to a young software developer [video]

I once was in Manhattan with Dr. Engelbart during the NIME conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). We were riding the subway together. I think he must've seen the poster (presentation) I was carrying and we struck up a conversation. It ranged over all kinds of topics: ergonomics, performance/audience interpretation, mechanical vs. gestural control, etc. I remember us being pretty sharply critical over each other's ideas, and just being skeptical of "good" solutions in general for the problems of modern musical control.

Of course, I didn't realize who he was at the time. I only had seen grainy old videos of him from decades ago. I'm really glad I didn't recognize his face at first. You see, he had always been a huge hero of mine, and a big motivation for me to go to grad school. For a brief moment, we got to argue over small technical details as if we were any old pair of jaded researchers. It was a totally normal exchange in any other context, and a highlight in hindsight.

I found this incredibly interesting stuff on Valerie Landau's youtube channel of Douglass Engelbart, her mentor. The videos have apparently been viewed only a few times, but they deserve much more attention, because the ideas presented are so important and relevant today!

She was a long time friend and collaborator with Doug Engelbart, and she was responsible for transferring the 1968 film of The Mother of All Demos from film to video so it could be preserved. She tracked him down and interviewed him, and after airing the interview, he asked her to help him articulate his vision to share with the world, which she's been working on since then.

https://www.youtube.com/user/islandeweller/videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Landau

Valerie Landau is an American designer, author and educator. She serves as Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University where she designed a software application that facilitates analysis and assessment of how effectively an organization is meeting their goals and objectives at course, program and institutional levels.

She has filed two patents along with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes multitouch interface for chorded text entry. The new patent is inspired by Engelbart's early work developing the Chorded keyboard. They also released an application for the iPhone for chorded texting called "TipTapSpeech".

Engelbart and Landau also collaborated on writing the book "The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" along with co-author Eileen Clegg.

Landau is also a co-founder of Program for the Future, a non-profit organization that promotes Engelbart's vision of Collective Intelligence. She also is author of the seminal book on online education "Developing an Effective Online Course" and earned the "Online Pioneer" award.

Landau, also known for her work in multimedia at Round World Media and for her work mentoring students in a three-year project studying and applying the Engelbart Hypothesis. and created an online archive of Engelbart related events and videos.

She is an instructional and interaction designer and has worked on many award-winning projects, educational games and online courses.

In addition, she leads high level research delegations to Cuba.

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

----

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

----

Engelbart Using HandWriter. Douglas Engelbart demonstrates early prototype of The HandWriter with Valerie Landau.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wAD2aji3Q

Q: So whose ideas was the glove?

Engelbart: I invented actually a separate keyset with the five keys, and her idea, you can make a glove to do that.

Q: And what's the advantage of using a five key chording system?

Engelbart: Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input.

And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too.

Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word.

Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words.

All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it.

----

iChord: Clips from video of Eric Matsuno & Valerie Landau showing their new iPhone app to Douglas Engelbart. To Douglas C Engelbart and Bill English, and to Karen Engelbart, Roberta English and Mary Coppernoll. Present in spirit but not in molecules were: Evan Schaffer and Dr. Robert Stephenson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXdnu5n9vI

So we're going to be able to be configurable for whoever's hand. [...] Go ahead and give it a try: so swiping it down puts it in the history, and swiping it left takes the last ...

----

Andres Types His Name

Andres writing his name on TipTap late on a Saturday night. I arrived home after a party and found him typing on TipTapSpeech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WI88q7coEY

----

This final silent video is chock full of photos and memories of Douglass Engelbart's friends and family, drawings, whiteboards, posters and brainstorming sessions!

Memories with Douglas Engelbart: Photos from my work with Douglas Engelbart creating a Educational Networked Improvement Community Engelbart and working with Eileen Clegg on the writing of the book the Engelbart Hypothesis: Diaglogs with Douglas Engelbart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnsWKikS_w

----

The key takeaway for me: "Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Q: Some people will have to change their normal method of thinking?

A: I think today, Aday really summed it up, that one of the things about collective intelligence means that we really have to start looking at ways that we can collectively share knowledge. And one of the problems with that is there are no good tools for sharing massive quantities of knowledge. So it's very hard to stay on top of things. So Doug's methodology creates maps and new ways of displaying data that we have not explored. So that we can really see large amounts of data, large amounts of knowledge, put them into structured arguments, so what he means by structure -- and maps, so that people can literally see what exists now and create very rapidly stragies -- both long term strategic planning, as well as tactical planning -- to address the issues that are confronting us.

Q: Does this assume that if people have the same information they'll all come to the same conclusions?

A: No, not at all. What it means that you will be able to look at data and make intelligent conclusions based on the best data we have currently. Because right now there is a lot of good data that is currently not available to the people who are making the decisions. He was saying that this was a dynamic knowledge repository and it was about allowing people to have an intelligence quotient. In other words, he saud that the infrastructure that you have to support a society determines the capability of that society. Just because we have all these capable tools doesn't necessarily mean that we'll behave intelligently, but it does allow us the chance to behave intelligently. So by improving our infrastructure, we're improving our intelligence QUOTIENT, not our actual intelligence. Just like the same people who are intelligent sometimes make bad choices, even though they're capable of making a better choice.

Q: Now you say that Doug was interested in solving the most urgent problems of humanity. What type of problems was he referring to?

A: He was definitely referring to things like Global Warming, issues around water, food, hunger, war, corruption was very high on Doug's list. He also followed very closely the work of the Millinenium Project, and so often times he would cite whatever they had cited. He would often cite those same issues.

Q: Do you think his vision was going to become a reality at some point?

A: I think yes, if I didn't I don't think I would have spend the last 30 years following it.

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet... In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic, ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

I met Dr. Engelbart at a conference in the mid-nineties. A totally fascinating individual with lots of great stories. Although our interaction was brief you couldn't help becoming convinced he was totally motivated by his sincere desire to make the world a better place.

What has often baffled me is that the poor man spent the last twenty five years of his life looking for funding with neither the government or Valley companies willing to support him. Hard to imagine what else he might have created.

Valerie Landau recommends this web site about Douglass Engelbart's life and work, with chapters from her book:

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/

Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg spent years in dialog with Douglas Engelbart and wrote a book distilling those dialogs. It is available as on ebook on Amazon

In addition, the book chapters are on this blog.

Today, we invite you to share your thoughts and memories of Douglas Engelbart who passed away last night.

Add your stories to the Remembrances: Doug Engelbart page

----

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-Dialogs-eboo...

Centuries of silo thinking and win-or-die ideological and economic competition have finally generated a global crisis. Now either we collaborate on a global scale to solve the new global problems, or we won't survive. The technology is available to do so. Billions of intelligences are waiting to participate. How do we bring the two together? We are at a decision crossroads. And as this book vividly demonstrates, Doug Engelbart as been there all along, waiting for us with the answer.

Emmy-Award Winning Historian James Burke --Email to the authors

Modular: good advice. Look at a game like Doom, which survives and thrives to this day because of the open documented WAD format.

Another example is Unity. Despite some of its own shortcomings, the developers made a very open plugin system, and fantastic tools have been developed and integrated into the Unity IDE that fix some of these problems and give it huge amounts of power: ProBuilder (the in-IDE mesh editor) and TextMeshPro (the font dynamic texture system) being two great examples.

Or, think of iOS without the app store, or any OS without third party applications. What's the Lao Tsu saying? Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful, etc

There seems to be some controversy over the book that's mentioned in the video (Engelbart Hypothesis)

http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/books-unauthorized.html

"This book is unauthorized. Douglas Engelbart was not an author on this book. Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau were the sole authors of this book. Listing Doug Engelbart as lead author was one of many problems with this book"

Douglas C. Engelbart: A Profile of His Work and Vision: Past, Present and Future.

Prepared by Logitech, October 2005.

https://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/Engelbart_Backgrounder.pdf

I've put a bunch of the videos mentioned here into a Highlight list: https://highlight.app/stajbakhsh/doug-engelbart

Feel free to add more to it.

Augmenting Human Intellect. A Conceptual Framework by Doug Engelbart.

http://www.1962paper.org/

In 1962 Doug Engelbart published what may be the most important paper in computer history and in human augmentation.

This is where he laid out his concept of interactive computing and which would lead to him and his team to invent the mouse, word processing, email, and most of what we today consider personal computing. We still have far to go to live up to the dreams and ideas presented here:

Read Augmenting Human Intellect

http://www.1962paper.org/web.html

This presentation of the paper hosted and presented by The Liquid Information Company, makers of richly interactive text, inspired by and in dialog with Doug Engelbart whom we were honoured to make a webomentary on as well: Invisible Revolution, The Doug Engelbart Documentary.

You should also see the 1968 Demo this paper resulted in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

It's a shame that the Computer History Museum never finished its NLS restoration project [1] just because the copyright holder could not be nailed down.

[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/nlsproject

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

The Mother of All Demos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on 9 December, 1968.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.