Bill English has died
latimes.com
latimes.com
They demonstrated what's happening in 2020, video conferencing, real time collaborative word processing, and etc. Truly amazing.
From Bret Victor's "A few words on Doug Engelbart"[1]:
> Almost any time you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder", you end up missing the point. [...] If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart's design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart's intent. [...] If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent.[2]
The NYTimes headline for Engelbart's obituary read "Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88". In response, Victor writes, "This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil." That is to say: English, Engelbart, and the other folks working on NLS had a much larger goal: augmenting human intellect. The mouse (along with the chorded keyboard and other mechanisms for interaction) was one component of that. An important one, but one nonetheless. It has been transformative, yes. But perhaps the most important aspect of the legacy of Bill English and his colleagues is not in what they built, in what they shipped, but rather in what their goals were.
I highly recommend reading Bret Victor's piece (as well as his other writings). There's also a really solid book on the era in which NLS was created, the ups and downs of building (and funding) it, and its impact. It's called _What the Dormouse Said_ [1] by John Markoff.
[0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
https://www.quora.com/How-important-was-William-English-to-t...
I like the flexibility, but I really really don't like people to hear what I'm saying. Imagine three people in a room trying to do this. It'd be total nonsense. Subvocal commands would be really nice, if that's a thing that is actually possible.
Or maybe constant chattering from everyone around you becomes the new normal. I can totally imagine old me (38 now) being completely overwhelmed by this technology and all my grandkids wondering why I'm having such a hard time, and rolling their eyes when I say I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! Everything was simpler back then! I didn't have to listen to all this yabbering all the time and I could just tell the dang computer what I want it to dang darn do!
About the same age, and I feel this way about mobile devices/touchscreens already!
I can't stand touchscreens for anything other then placing calls, and maybe controlling music playback. Anything more complicated I miss dedicated hardware for input.
I have tried to more or less replicate this setup, but found it less satisfactory. Aside from it demanding near-perfect audio quality to work remotely well in general (as well as a heavy time investment, initial and ongoing), you frequently run into edge cases where it just doesn't want to understand something you're saying. After the 5th or 6th mis-transcription of some specific phrase, you tend to just give up and reach for the keyboard, RSI be damned. (And this as a native English-speaker, with a relatively neutral accent.)
I can definitely imagine better fleshed out solutions to either voice recognition for programming, or programming languages whose syntax lends themselves to easier and more productive voice recognition. I could see some definite productivity enhancements if it were achieved.
Currently our programming is optimized for keyboard input. If sub-vocal instruction becomes "a thing", I suspect we would spend some collective effort to create a programming language optimized for that mode of input.
I think the only reason we don't have real languages using touch input is because of the lack of bandwidth for that signal.
Ironic now, that probably 50% of my interactions with computers are via command line.
Was that acronym in common use at the time that the book was written? How about the movie? Which way does that causation go, if it exists at all?
Sorry for the off-topic question, but it really does haunt me. Modern HALs are like rat nests, and I imagine it was worse in decades past. So it must be a pun...right?
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Plus, talking all day is exhausting. Why would you want to do that?
I knew he had been at PARC but it wasn't until the Computer History Museum Fellows dinner for Englebart that I found out his part in that demo.
[1] A quick way to write Internationalization which has 18 letters between I and N.
(and same reason why Mission and Market is "M14T" - a small micro-vc fund that I co-founded with two other friends - not a plug, as the fund is fully closed (e.g. raised all the capital intended to raise) and is fully deployed, and we don't need to market it anymore).