The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo | Hacker News Reader

The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo

doug-50.info

218 pointsmxfh42 comments

Just yesterday I watched an hour-long interview [0] from 2002 with Doug Engelbart.

On finding a wife. Engelbart moves to a university town, ditches a male-focused hobby, and finds a more gender neutral hobby in folk dancing. Echoes of Noyce and choir.

He turns down an offer from HP after asking whether he would be able to work on computers and being told "no".

He claims during his 12 or so years working at SRI before the '68 demo that most of the support for his ideas came from outside of the institution. He says that later he learned about paradigms (but claims not from Kuhn), which allowed him to understand the resistance he kept facing.

He gives credit to people with tangential skills that made the presentation possible: The machinist mouse-maker who was also a wood carver, the colleague's wife who was also a theater director.

He laments the fact that the easiest-to-learn tools out-competed tools that gave the greatest return on learning.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM

Tomorrow at Somerset House in London there is a salon style event themed on the Mother of All Demos:

> A day of talks, performances and workshops marking the 50th anniversary of internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart’s original 1968 presentation of the key elements that would shape modern computing.

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mother-all-demos-k...

Oh cool! The mentioned Computer History Museum celebration site is online: https://thedemoat50.org/

The symposium is this Sunday in Mountain View: https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/ I'm looking forward to it! It seems it won't be live streamed, but other events will be: https://thedemoat50.org/events/

Ted Nelson's eulogy for Doug Engelbart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg

Wow - well worth a watch.

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

If I remember correctly Bret Victor was considering making a public demo of their investigations around this date to conmemorate this 50 anniversary.

Is the chorded keyboard commercially available? I've always thought that it might be a very handy gadget.

There's this one https://twiddler.tekgear.com (not cheap though)

Corsair has a mouse with a keyboard built-in that could be used for the same things. Even though I have one, find I just use Ctrl keys like everyone else. https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Color/scimitar-pro-config/p/CH...

Somebody sent me this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8za_4g5zCOM -- sure, not the same, but somewhat related. I guess there are people at the Doug Engelbart Institute who know more and better chorded keyboard offers. At one point, there was work going on to produce them again, related to the HyperScope project.

Bill Buxton's chording keyboard collection: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/type.aspx?t=Chord...

There is the Tap[1] which is not only a chord keyboard, but a really neat piece of wearable hardware.

[1] https://www.tapwithus.com/

One can also chord on conventional keyboards. A cheap keyboard with 2KRO (2-key rollover) and 4 modifiers, might be held upside-down, providing Shift/Ctrl/Alt/Meta plus a key or two. And a 2KRO with 8 modifiers (left and right aren't merged) might be used two handed. Some keyboards special-case common key sets like WASD. A 6KRO keyboard permits one-handed chording with arbitrary keys. USB boot-mode keyboards are limited to 6KRO plus 8 modifiers. :/ Full n-key rollover (NKRO) USB HID keyboards exist, but last I looked some years ago, it was a niche mess.

A half-century on, an we still can't play keyboards like pianos... "if your customers aren't complaining loudly of being crippled, you're overbuilding".

Perhaps its overkill, but I've always wanted to see more UI's re-purposing midi controllers (which certainly reproduce chorded functionality!):

https://www.amazon.com/Korg-NANOKEY2BK-Slim-Line-Keyboard-Bl...

https://www.amazon.com/Korg-nanoKEY-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Contr...

I use a ErgoDox with a custom layout which uses chords for programming symbols.

Unless I misunderstood, these guys were trying to build something to show today. Did anything come of it? I ask because our startup is working on some of the same things: http://mimix.io

Since Engelbarts death in 2013 or even the 40th anniversary of the great demo, there is a diverse group of people who for most of the time were unclear whether the human system side or the tool system side should get focus and come first, but in anticipation and preparation of the 50th anniversary, it got more practical and several separate, individual demos were created and will be demoed in a separate event today and during breaks between the celebrations tomorrow. They're listed here:

  - https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/demos/

Some of the history can be found here:

  - https://www.youtube.com/user/frodehegland/playlists (Future of Text playlists, 2014 is on Vimeo)
  - https://ualr.edu/jdberleant/URLtable-DB.html
  - https://soundcloud.com/samhahn/tracks
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQw8OcRQ0Ws&list=PLYbSlBxcChOJ4KV2XIyR9oydfGzbvm1ai
  - https://doug-50.info/journal/
  - https://jrnl.global/journal/

There's more, spread all over the place.

I created a public wiki style Jupyter notebook on Google's Colab platform where anyone with a Google account can edit and run:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640656

Since it is a shared programmable (Turing complete) environment, I hope people in the community might find it interesting and would like to contribute and share their expertise and creative insights.

I personally don't like Google, they constantly mess up my writing/publishing and a lot more of bad/evil things. I don't have their software/code, can't selfhost it (not libre-freely licensed), and believe that things should always work offline just as well. Still, do you have a link?

Others in the community usually don't have such reservations/objections, or don't care enough about their own work and capabilities available to them.

The file is just a generic Jupyter Notebook (JSON with .ipynb extension). The link to colab is just an iframe wrap to allow authenticated user to change it.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k4oC2bzjgUOiU9vdadj...

Functional wise, it works just like a wiki.

It can be hosted on any Jupyter platform (such as google colab, Azure notebook, your own Jupyter instance) or a Jupyter viewer platform if you do not want to run he code. But you will lose the capability of pushing the update back to the shared copy.

Here is an example of saving it to a github gist and viewed in nbviewer:

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447...

Due to the restrictions of GitHub, the YouTube video is not rendered in gist

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447bdd60782ef...

Audio recordings of the separate, dedicated demo event on the 2018-12-08 are linked on this page:

    - https://www.thefutureoftext.org/8-december-2018.html

Engelbart’s keyboard is discussed in this chapter on chorded keyboard boards:

http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

It's strange to witness what is essentially a working version of Google Hangouts and Google Docs ... from fifty years ago.

We're definitely doing something wrong.

Innovation always seems 2 steps forward one step back... I wonder if we will look back at Steve Jobs' iPhone launch in 07 as something similar (if not already).

That launch is already considered an innovative turning point.

What he shows is basically what exists now in phone tech (apps, good internet, GPS...), and it's the same only-screen device (today's are equal, only larger). And it's now owned by more than 2 billion people.

I know Jobs was seen (probably correctly) as a jerk. But this was such a huge achievement that I can't help admiring it.

This strikes a nerve.

I had the good fortune to be able to work with xBase languages (predominantly CA-Clipper) when I began programming. I made software for retail outlets: pos, inventory, accounts, all the jazz. The most memorable thing to me was the Phone Directory we shipped with it. It did one thing right: `set filter to cSearch $ upper( rtrim( ltrim( name + phone ) ) )`. This is a case-insensitive regex match over both name and phone. Customers used it all the time, and they held that db close to their hearts. It was 50 lines of code written in an afternoon and just worked ever after.

Creating a phone directory with that affordance is a lot of work today. However user interfaces are different today. 80s DOS text mode only had a keyboard input, a 16-color palette, 80 columns over 25 rows, and just text, text, text. Modern web UI is event-driven, has millions of colors, works across screen sizes, and is networked by default.

Though with this essential complexity, there is so much accidental complexity. It shouldn't be this hard to build software. The essence of a double-entry bookkeeping software 30 years ago is the same as one we build today. A new framework is probably not the answer. New languages (or old giants) and formal systems might be. Ballerina, Unison, Dark, Ur/Web, Elm, Reason and so on.

There is also the point of familiarity. Those old cli apps were hard to learn but crazy fast. I recall much grumbling about replacing good, but hard to use tools with web pages back in the 90s. If someone spends a decade getting good at a system, they really hate it when the ui/ux changes. I think we’re a little quick to throw out crufty but well understood systems.

It also seems like most modern UX theory values discoverability and ease-of-first-time-use far more than ergonomics for everyday users. At my work the UX/design team often evaluate new features by putting people in front of them without telling them anything and expecting them to work everything out on their own (often while they're being watched). A lot of our product is something that our customers interact with many times per day, yet we don't spend 1% the time optimizing workflows for the people who know what's going on compared to what we do for first time users.

You know, I also got my (official) start in an xBASE language (FoxPro), and while I am obsessed with the history of inventors like Englebart and his successors, those xBASE environments had more going for them than I tend to remember.

"Ordinary" people could use those tools to make useful things. We seem to have gone backwards from there.

What was different about those systems?

They were integrated usage environments. Batteries included. In FoxPro, you got:

    - built-in database
    - built-in documentation
    - built-in UI for editing data
    - built-in UI for editing schema
    - windowed environment (even in DOS)
    - oh yeah and a scripting language

This was first and foremost a usable environment immediately. "Development" was an advanced usage.

Emacs is this way. Smalltalk is this way. What they get is that programming languages are useless by themselves.

Contrast with now: the apps we build involve wiring together a database from here, a compiler from there, just figuring out how you're going to make pieces communicate and finally, you know, get something on the screen. Sure, there's an upside to composing systems a la carte. But the learning curve is far more prohibitive.

(Also, those xBASE systems just will not die. Just this morning I got an email question about a system that's been in service for 25 years now. How many of today's apps do you think will still be used (indeed, sold!) in 2043?)

You can still get close to this experience on Android, .NET, Java, Cocoa.

Because as you say, grammar and semantics (aka language) are not enough.

Hence why when I analyse how suitable a programming language is for a given project, I always consider the whole ecosystem, and not how easy it is do FP, immutability or whatever is cool this year.

Check out picolisp. It has a built-in database and can call existing C libraries and Java (using reflection) without any fuss.

Though apparently, it doesn't have lexical closures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16981170

I keep regularly pointing out at work that the platform I'm building is basically dBase III+, with the form designer etc. There are improvements, of course - the networking etc. But at the core we're building a platform to let our internal users quickly build new forms and capture data that's pretty much about doing what the dBase form designer etc. did.

It's crazy to me that even the tools that are trying to capture this space today have not managed to beat the usability of that.

E.g. tools like Airtable are great as long as you're trying to do something simple, but then you hit their limits, and suddenly the step up in complexity to do what you need is too large. Whereas with tools like dBase you could start with "just" a database with the default entry, and the steps up to gradually build up to a full application were small in comparison.

It pains me a lot of the time to see people basically try to reinvent tools we had in the 80's and do it poorly because they're just not aware of the lessons of those systems.

That's exactly what I have been pointing out at every innovation conference or meeting where I speak. Where is the innovation? Where is the technology? We think that what we use today is advanced and works better, but it's just not true.

A lot of it is about price and ease of adoption. My mother used a video phone at the worlds fair in the 60s. I’m fact, she loved it so much she kept on waiting in line to do it over and over again. She only started using one again 50 years later to see her grandkids over FaceTime. And the quality of the experience after 50 years? Well I believe the cameras used in the worlds fair setup were closed circuit broadcast grade tv cameras, so I think the quality was much better (albeit in color.)

The cost and ease of use however? Already in something she owned and a single button to answer the call.

And a better working version of skype!

There's definitely something wrong with the Engelbart demo: where's the monetisation? Where's the adverts? How could it be sold for ten billion dollars at IPO? Where's the in-app purchases? How can it be sold as a service with appropriate lock-in?

I don’t think this is sign we are doing something wrong as opposed to a reminder that big changes in technology usage take a long time to develop and process. The first self propelled passenger vehicle demoed in 1808- more than 100 years before the model T. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Steam_Carriage). The concept was proved early, but it took the development of the internal combustion engine and a century of manufacturing improvements and economic development before society was ready for mass adoption (and even then it was not overnight adoption.)

Innovation is typically more lucrative than invention. Creating whole new ideas and experiences drives the our body of knowledge further, but the rewards only start to accrue to society when those ideas are combined together with an advanced ecosystem that allows mass adoption.

I remember watching Russian TV from the US broadcast over the dial up in 1998, probably on realplayer. This was an amazing experience, magical even. I then and went back to my (CRT) TV because, well, an audio and video stream transmitted over 56k sucked.

It took another 8 years and billions of broadband infrastructure investment before YouTube launched.

I actually wonder more where are the amazing demos of today that aren’t yet economically feasible, but might get mass adoption in 40 years of infrastructure build out.

In re your last paragraph:

Quantum computing, cryptocurrency (Bitcoin with its 10tps vs Visa is analogous to Engelbart's GUI vs MacOS), lots of AI stuff that can kind of just barely be intelligent today, the Boston Dynamics robots, self driving cars, and last but definitely not least early DIY bio hacking / anarcho-transhumanist stuff and DIY medicine (search for Four Thieves Vinegar).

The things I listed are at varying levels of maturity and gravity but they are all things I expect to look back upon as "wow" moments that revealed new things that will be big in the future.

I'm sure others can think of more.

I'm thinking some of the stuff that will pushed for climate change mitigation will generate a lot material for new revolutions. If researchers and engineers manage to get efficient, cheap carbon capture at scale what sort of consequences does that have? What materials get super cheap and experiences common?

Can we get to a point where battery tech gets cheap enough that electric personal transport gets even cheaper than ICE cars? Does that bypass mass transit? We've seen futuristic visions of how that plays out, so not quite the reality yet.

At some point, nations at risk will start seriously exploring geo/climate engineering solutions. If adopted, what are the potential side effects and side products?

Coming back to Engelbart and his invention of the mouse and UI (besides other things): He made it clear that human-machine interaction happens mainly with our fingers, and in particular with our index finger. This kind of fact of human behavior takes generations if not 100’s of years to change. Once an invention demonstrates that all following inventions need to stay within such boundaries, adoption of new inventions seems to be much faster (what is an educated guess without scientific proof).

To come back to human-machine interaction, we think that the successor of the mouse (also for mixed reality for office) sees a much faster adoption rate than the mouse in the last 50 years. At least, we have bet a few years of our life on it with https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/coolest-mouse-ever We can tell you in a few years, whether our assumption was correct :-)

Bret Victor highlighted that conundrum in his great talk, The Future of Programming.

https://www.programmingtalks.org/talk/the-future-of-programm...

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