The world Doug Engelbart was trying to create

There's a term I use, demoware, which I use to specifically refer to things that are easy to demo, but hard to convert into real systems.

Another observation I need to set this point up is that there are three numbers in computer programming: 0, 1, and "many". In particular, once you've done the work to generalize from 1 to 2, you might as well just generalize from 1 to n. But this is often a huge leap.

So, combining the two points: It's demoware to create a single program that can accept multiple input sources and do something sensible with them. It's a STONKING ENORMOUS change to go back over the entire past 45 years of computing history and ask absolutely everything, from the kernel drivers up to the end-user programs, to generalize from a 1-source-of-input model to an n-sources-of-input model. Even beyond the mere driver programming and the mere task of getting the OS layer and beyond to handle this, you're doing things like asking every program to include UI-level locking and change conflict resolution policies, which is an incredible degree of complication to add to things. (Text editors have some moderately simple answer to this, that doesn't particularly generalize.) It isn't even as simple as pushing the capabilities down to the OS level, you need massive modifications to end-user programs as well.

That's why this was ignored for 45 years. If someone just handed you a system that did this on a silver platter, you might find it fantastic to use, but the multiplicative cost of trying to make this work on the systems of the past would be prohibitive; what was easy to write in a demo is freakishly expensive when multiplied out over all the relevant code bases.

(Note I am aware that some progress has been made on this front, with multiple USB keyboards and such, that Linux distro that runs 4 XWindows servers off of one system, etc. Obviously this is still not exactly pervasive functionality, though.)

This is the right way to sell me on your product.

I hadn't heard of Screen Hero before this. If my first exposure had been through a features & benefits list, I might have said "hmm, seems neat, maybe I'll try it later." And that might have been the end of it, as I go on with my day.

This blog post shows something far more valuable than a feature set. It shows people who believe in something. It invites me to decide whether I believe in that same thing. When I read something like this, I don't just see a product with a market opportunity, I see a group of people on a mission.

As a result, I downloaded Screen Hero, and if it does what it says on the box, I'll be passing along that same feeling of purpose when I share it with others.

Well done.

Well said. I hate that it took the passing of Doug Engelbart to remind so many people of his work, his vision and his legacy, but I am at least heartened to see the renewed interest in what he had to say and his vision.

I also can't claim that everything we're building at Fogbeam Labs has been built with those ideals in mind, although I wish I could. But what I can say, is that we think there is significant overlap between our vision of a world where computers do more to help people solve problems, and the world Doug Engelbart was trying to create. And now, having been reminded of his work and legacy, we will be trying even harder to incorporate elements of what Englebart (and others such as William Ross Ashby, J.C.R. Licklider, Norbert Weiner, etc. ) were trying to create.

I think that sometimes the best way to find the future is go to back to the past, and now, going back and revisiting the writings and teachings of Engelbart, Licklider, Ashby, Weiner, et al., seems like a positive step forward to me.

"How do we make it feel like you’re sitting in the same room as another person across the world?"

It's not really/only in the same room, it's "next to each other", side by side. I think the problem you are solving is one that many have even when sitting in the same room across from each other...

I'm not sure it compares to the mother of all demos, but I've been using screen hero in combination with sqwiggle and it works fantastically well. I can drop into a quick video chat with another developer on my team, share my emacs editor, we can edit code together, check it in, and drop out. It's really smooth... I just wish the two could be combined into a single environment.