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Comment by ravi-delia | Hacker News Reader

Douglas Englebart is the proof to me that even if you could go back in time, it isn't necessarily true that you could leverage your knowledge of future technology. Poor guy messed up the timeline so much that even his stock market knowledge was useless!

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>Poor guy messed up the timeline so much that even his stock market knowledge was useless!

Without the time available to go down the Englebart rabbit hole can you distill the story down some and share?

Englebart famously demoed possible ways of interacting with computers that are now ubiquitous decades before they were actually popularized. I made a joke about him only having those ideas because he was a time traveler from the future, but tried to implement them too early. Then, after he already didn't make billions from his ideas, he couldn't use his future knowledge of investment because his demo was still big enough to change which companies got wealthy (explaining why he didn't make billions investing in the companies that actually invented those ideas in his timeline).

The explanation might make the joke sound rather cryptic but if it any consolation I did get it, and it did make me smile.

I also watch far too much Sci-Fi so my brain is wired to assume people are time traveller and such like :D

Watch the aforementioned Mother of all Demos and compare it to what you're watching it on.

That's a wonderful way of putting it

> even if you could go back in time, it isn't necessarily true that you could leverage your knowledge of future technology.

Relatedly:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard H. Aiken

"No Douglas, I don't know where you can buy that. What the hell even is a Bitcoin?"

I feel like there's an untapped reserve of jokes along this line. XKCD, this, and that's it! There could be so much more!

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