Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo
dougengelbart.org
dougengelbart.org
It contains a partial and anonymized (all names have been changed) retelling about the initial decline of SRI. To summarize, they all became entranced with the cult-like Erhard Seminars Training, except the smart people, who left because they didn’t like it.
My understanding of EST training was that it gave people permission to be self centered assholes, and had no redeeming value.
No wonder SRI went downhill. 8(
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
EST seems to have been influenced by other, slightly older post-war groups with their own kinds of struggle session such as the drug-rehab community gone bad Synanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon and our old friend Scientology, and in turn to have influenced later "large group awareness training" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-group_awareness_training orgs like the "wilderness training" camps. At least Synanon helped to make the name of one fairly-big jazzman, Joe Pass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_of_Synanon
Fun fact: Trump is a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale. This is why he constantly repeats superlatives and refuses to admit any form of failure or loss. He’s basically “manifesting.” You could sort of say he was our first New Age president. The mass conversion of a bunch of New Agers to the Q cult makes more sense if you look at it that way.
Also I highly recommend finding a good history of the I AM cult. It’s some of the most bonkers shit. This intellectual lineage gave birth to a bunch of looney cults like Church Universal and Triumphant, Synanon, EST, and some alien channeling cult I forget, but I AM was the OG. I think NXIVM belonged to the same family too.
It’s all this will creates reality stuff, sort of like a religion that worships con artistry as a holy path.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit to hear that this stuff was around SRI. It had a big moment in the 70s.
I had the pleasure of working with him. He was brilliant and kind. The world just wasn’t ready for him.
Looking back on it, I am awed by the kindness he showed to some random kid.
This demo us one of the most mindblowing things I've seen and especially so if you consider its date of arrival. I truly think the audience didn't really understand it.
It's just amazing and awe inspiring to see something that felt truly "out of the future". You can probably draw lines to existing inventions and research but to me, this felt like he lived in the world where this technology already existed and was giving us a glimpse.
The Xerox Alto appeared in 1973. The first integrated microchip CPUs were created in 1969 and the Altair launched in 1974. The Web was created in 1989 and Netscape Navigator launched in 1994. GPT based LLMs began in 2017 and hit the mainstream last year...
Maybe these are cherry picked examples, but it seems like a pattern.
Stewart Brand was also behind this demo and it was his idea to pipe audio from the machine to the conference, so that any UI lag was accompanied by all the disk seeking noise instead of awkward silence.
Google "The Mother of All Demos"
One fascinating thing to me is that he is explaining things with clarity that we take for granted - for example, the mouse - for the first time. He explains the mouse here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY#t=31m07s
"The tracking spot [cursor] moves in conjunction with the mouse. As it moves up and down and sideways so does the tracking spot."
The Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36704885 - July 2023 (1 comment)
50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445 - June 2022 (82 comments)
The Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467751 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
The Mothers of the Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231 - Aug 2020 (12 comments)
Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535853 - June 2020 (47 comments)
The Mother of All Demos (1968) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20717835 - Aug 2019 (2 comments)
50 years on, we’re living the reality first shown at the “Mother of All Demos” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646445 - Dec 2018 (2 comments)
How Doug Engelbart Pulled Off the Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640784 - Dec 2018 (2 comments)
Show HN: Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640656 - Dec 2018 (13 comments)
The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626215 - Dec 2018 (42 comments)
Mother of all demos: Life as we know it turns 50 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18605185 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)
Watching and Re-Watching “The Mother of All Demos” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366039 - April 2015 (24 comments)
'The Mother of All Demos' Is 45 Years Old, Doesn't Look a Day Over 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879 - Dec 2013 (59 comments)
The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996695 - July 2013 (2 comments)
The Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996246 - July 2013 (4 comments)
The Demo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987780 - July 2013 (36 comments)
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5337425 - March 2013 (1 comment)
Douglas Engelbart : The Mother of All Demos (1968) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011864 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)
1968, Douglas Engelbart gives the Mother of All Tech Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942687 - Nov 2010 (3 comments)
The Mother of All Demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939458 - Nov 2010 (10 comments)
The mother of all demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138879 - Feb 2010 (16 comments)
The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393653 - Dec 2008 (1 comment)
1968: Engelbart demonstrates the mouse, email, collaborative work, hypertext, video conferencing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116121 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)
Unless your whole post was sarcasm...
You say it “looked” promising - past tense - did Google kill it?
Is anyone else working on anything similar (Apple, MS)?
https://deepdeck.co/ - Open source, programmable mini keyboard
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You're one of today's lucky 10,000.
The thing to keep in mind is that computers originated as very experimental calculating machines for the military about twenty five years earlier. It would take years for people to imagine the true potential of these machine. The successive developments were not simply a matter of waiting until the underlying technology was good enough to implement preexisting ideas.
To put it in concrete terms: the concept of programming languages would have to wait until the development of the concept of stored program computers, since the notion of a programming language doesn't have much meaning in the world of plugboards (literally wiring subsystems together to tell the computer what to do). More relevant: the notion of interactive user interfaces would have been inconceivable when the sole means of interacting with a computer was via a teletype. Even once graphical displays were introduced, it would take time to go from simply representing something visually to conceiving of how the technology could facilitate HCI.
Even then my examples are highly simplified. We like to view the history of computers as a mostly linear progression. It wasn't. There were many twists and turns and abandoned paths as we learned how to make useful machines. (For fun, try researching computer memories.) A lot of the early work in computers was presented in demos that reflected the figuring out of things. While those demos may not appear as fun and the scene wasn't as culturally cohesive as the modern idea of the demoscene, the underlying spirit seems to be quite similar.
E.g. the IBM 7094 "singing" Daisy Bell in 1961
I often think about how strangely archaic our financial system is.
For example when you start a new job and the first payment comes in after 4 weeks on the job. In the future, the payments will flow realtime.
Or when I want to check the price of some stock and the stock market is closed, like it is most of the time. In the future, prices will be set on a global market with no downtime.
Or when I talk to people who run online businesses and the plethora of problems they have with credit card payments. Because a credit car payment is not a payment. It's a something where the receiver of the money is held responsible when the one who pays plays dirty tricks on them. In the future, an electronic payment will be simply a payment.
Let's hope we don't need over 40 years from theory to reality like it took for the internet.
Most crypto users are already using online exchanges and wallets, so from their perspective it already is centralized.
True decentralized crypto only has niche applications outside a small number of enthusiasts.
only has niche applications outside a small number of enthusiasts
Arpanet was started 1969 and you had to be part of a small number of institutions to have access.
I’m not sure this is a technical problem, I guess. Maybe a financial engineering problem but is the demand there?
That last sentence indicates you have failed to understand the problems. A payment that is "simply a payment" is a huge step backwards from those credit card systems. If fraud prevention and legal recourse to undo fraudulent payments is not baked directly into your system, that system is worthless.
Worthless like anything people used to trade for thousands of years before credit cards arrived?
Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit cards. That's what I said. Sellers hate credit cards because they have to deal with all that fraud:
...which is getting used less and less in the developed world. In an increasing number of countries, carrying cash is a thing of the past, or done as a rarely-used backup.
> Worthless like anything people used to trade for thousands of years before credit cards arrived?
And which have fallen or are falling out of use when competing with systems that better serve the needs of the users. And safety from fraud and theft is a pretty big need.
> Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit cards.
Admittedly it's more bolted on than baked into (since the system is so old), but it most certainly is there.
> Sellers hate credit cards because they have to deal with all that fraud
Which doesn't mean there's not fraud prevention, just that it often fails. As it always will in every system, because it's a really hard problem. And a human problem, not a technical problem.
Of course individual merchants dislike cards, they create a wedge between consumer and merchant -/ but that wedge also enables people to freely spend more than they’ll ever extract from falsifying things, thereby benefiting all merchants.
Crypto logic ignores that the modern banking system is actually far more logical than it sounds at first blush when you just take the perspective that not everyone should be trusted all the time.
As an example, let's start with the very first step of a transaction.
The payer puts some "secret" numbers into the website of the payee.
With those "secret" numbers, the payee contacts some middleman and says "Heyho, your customer agreed to pay $12345 to me. Here is proof of this: The secret numbers". This is already absurd, as the payer gives those "secret" numbers our all the time. So they are not secret. And the $12345 could be completely made up.
The way this is handled is that the middle man tries to cope with the clusterfuck that is the result of this. And everybody suffers along the way.
The payer has a bad user experience. What is the latest UX ploy to get fraud under control? Was it 3D-Secure-Name-Your-First-Dog-Name-Plus-Another-Secret-Number-Or-Hey-We-Have-An-App-For-You-That-Creates-Random-Card-Numbers-Each-Time-You-Pay-Oh-And-Hello-Do-You-Support-Apple-Pay? I lost track.
The payee has to constantly tinker with fraud detection and fraud handling.
Just like the middleman, although the middle man likes it this way because they get paid for it.
So a "card only" announcement at a shop is perfectly legal.
As for the reason they do it - it's because it's more expensive handling cash than handling cards, and much more hassle (i.e. the opposite of what the comment I originally replied to was alluding to). So, by accepting cards only they cut costs, and by that they also gain an unfair advantage to competing establishments, which is why they want to continue despite being fined, though this is of course not liked much by said competitors.
This is straining away from the original thread, but the essence is that cards are considered a pretty efficient and safe payment method. Crypto I wouldn't touch. It's got everything wrong.