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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I had the change to meet him in SF. He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz.

But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been. Nobody would fund him. Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget. Who knows what he might have invented? He had that rare ability to see into the future. The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?

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What do you mean? He was funded by SRI for a long time, and spent time visiting other people and spreading the word. I first met him when he visited PARC, probably for the upteent time but I’d just joined.

He was full of interesting ideas, not someone who just had one big insight long ago, and was great to talk to about your own work.

His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades. Mind boggling how that works — quite different from a fully remote world. We talk about WFH vs office, but less about the value of running into Doug engelbart or don knuth while walking down the street.

> His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades

I was at that service and several people spoke about how his ideas did not really get the backing they deserved, Ted Nelson not the least of them.

This makes more sense when you realize that what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked far more than he wanted to invent cool new tech, but while people were happy to have him as a member of staff he needed to be given freedom to play with organizations and no one was ready to try anything as radical as he had in mind.

I remember there was a period where Google was trying to make him a permanent fixture and he said in a private conversation something to the effect of it feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue, not engage with his ideas.

> what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked

Yeah, people were at the center of his thinking, not machines. Again, crazy farsight by today’s standards.

> feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue

This is hard: classic imposter syndrome makes ppl feel afraid to ask a dumb question.

> not engage with his ideas.

A separate problem; some of the drivers of this I touched on in another comment; would be interesting to read what you think.

I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does. Ted’s good, radical, and farsighted ideas didn’t get the attention they deserved either, but I feel a lot of that was self inflicted. And the amount they deserved might have been less than he thought.

Come to think of it, Ted should recast trans Lu soon as a web3 idea. His charge-for-everything approach would fit right in.

> I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does.

I'm quite confident he was talking about both Doug and himself. Ted definitely saw Doug as a kindred spirit with a great vision for how the world could be different who was ignored.

This 3-day old comment, quoting a description of his time at Tymnet, fits all too much what I'd expect of a starlings middle/late career, of talent being unsupported.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31633395

Our streets are digital in fully remote world. On HN for e.g. I've seen creator of DLang casually chimes in on a conversation. A big piece from past hits front page and the author simply joins and answers questions.

While we've evolved to value in-person interactions higher, let's not forget the fact that even non-sonic non-visual near-real-time conversation with actual creator would be simply impossible for someone sitting in a third-world country, like me :)

It really isn't the same. It is the random encounters in silicon valley. At a birthday party my child was attending, I had a great conversation with the head of AI from a self-driving company, a bio-chemist and a engineering manager trying to scale up mentorship at Apple. I've never had that in any other area I have lived.

How many places on earth can you meet people of the calibre of Engelbart on the street?

I contend that there are two Hard Problems in building shared digital places: Discovery and Enabling Serendipity. And of the two, Discovery is probably the easier.

> probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget. Who knows what he might have invented?

This is perhaps the defining sadness that most saps at me. This is a world of such potential that does such expensive vast things. I really wish there were more room & space for people to go off & explore, try testing new novel spaces.

Dont we have some surplus, to feed the promising with, to give them a couple allies to go boldly sally forth with?

The corporation as a model has such deficiencies, has such need for alignment & concensus & purpose. Humanity is just so much greater when there's some permissionless innovation, some real testing & pushing things just to find out, to try & see, to go further. Our models of labor & vue seem so unable to make small but long bets on so many bright stars.

Almost everything is FOR PROFIT NOW in the western system. This kind of thing is more likely to be happening in China. R&D departments have been downsized in most cases (maybe not in bio/pharma, which still has a long lifecycle). We have few Musks who can go out and do interesting things.

According to his personal wikipedia page (which are never entirely reliable):

> "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity by the mid-1970s. As early as 1970, several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and ideological: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon."

Now both concepts have become more-or-less fully developed with a wide variety of small personal computers from RPis to desktop powerhouses, as well as rent-space-in-the-cloud client/server approaches. However, you do need to have a lot of faith in the overall power structure not going down some authoritarian rat hole to rely solely on the latter.

His ideas are certainly interesting and still relevant today:

> "Consider a group's Collective IQ to represent its capability for dealing with complex, urgent problems – to perceive and understand them adequately, to engage the stakeholders, to unearth the best candidate solutions, to assess resources and operational capabilities and select appropriate solutions and commitments, to be effective in organizing and executing the selected approach, to monitor the progress, to be able to adjust rapidly and appropriately to unforeseen complications, and so on."

https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/194/

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