Show HN: Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo

colab.research.google.com

55 pointsontouchstart14 comments

It is very interesting that now we start to see trolling and vandalism on that page. No surprise for a public wiki. I published it here to HN instead of tweet just to limit that kind of publicity but encourage people in the community to experiment in the spirit of Doug. That is the best way to celebrate his legacy.

For those internet trolls, no big deal, they will get bored after 15 minutes. To people who think at a little bit longer time scale, that is just noise.

P.S. This Show HN post was posted yesterday and got no notice. Until it was kindly re-upped

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

Thank you dang!

In 1968 I was 2 years old. When I was about 10 to 12 years old, I forget exactly, I went on a school trip to an ICL data center to look at the punched card readers and line printers. Even a decade later, Doug's work seemed impossibly futuristic.

In 1984, 16 years after the demo, John C. Dvorak famously wrote of the mouse "There is no evidence that people want to use these things."

I was born two days after this demo

http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1969-demo-interactive.ht...

Another anecdote: an expensive training class onsite in 1987 at a new Adobe Systems building in Silicon Valley, with Apple/Mac developers well-represented and a few financially successful developers from other OS. The whole class was halted ten minutes in because one of the non-Mac attendees realized the whole curriculum of "developing drivers for Adobe Postscript" was going to be presented using a point-and-click coursework, and called a senior contact at Adobe in to make a scene.. because, you know, a "mouse" ?

I won't waste time fighting trolls. This is the latest snapshot where we can always reset to:

https://colab.research.google.com/gist/ontouchstart/9acd0280...

I think the community can clean it up when things get out of hand. Let's see how it evolves.

Also worth saying... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg

Are we now, this moment, coming to 5:15-5:34? I suspect, and hope, that the eulogist was pointing this toward ARPA and SRI and not me.

Thanks for sharing. Very touching.

Added it to the notebook

https://colab.research.google.com/gist/ontouchstart/c538817e...

It is best to be watched after watching a few minutes of this cell:

https://colab.research.google.com/gist/ontouchstart/c538817e...

Notice that eulogy was 5 years ago. How much have we progressed as a community since then?

I remember first hearing about this demo in the book "Fire in the Valley." It was amazing reading about what was unveiled in one demo.

Here is a link to a section on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-g5QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT387&lpg=...

Since it is a wiki kind of page that any one can edit. Feel free to explore in the sandbox cell.

Anytime if you want to keep a copy, you can save a snapshot copy as gist, such as this one

https://colab.research.google.com/gist/ontouchstart/2d20c3b9...

For those of you who wants to jump to the mouse demo, here is a direct link (on a saved snapshot):

https://colab.research.google.com/gist/ontouchstart/7ae904ac...

It's 50 years since the demo, and about 18 years later, I wrote short paper introducing the concept of WIMPs to my then boss. Windows, Icon, Menus, Pointers.

Which goes to show the uptake was not that fast.

Boss let me buy Windows v1.02

This post was inspired by a discussion in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635733

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