Watching and Re-Watching “The Mother of All Demos” | Hacker News Reader

Watching and Re-Watching “The Mother of All Demos”

arstechnica.com

70 pointsshawndumas24 comments

I don't think that re-enacting the mother of all demos can be done, the whole power of it was the fact that it was something that nobody had seen before. In a world where functional computer mice are found in household garbage, where interactive screens are found on every desk the people that haven't seen the original are going to be underwhelmed and those that have seen (or even experienced, what I wouldn't give to have been there) the original are going to be upset by any embellishment or 'artistic license'.

What would a modern day 40 years into the future 'mother of all demos' look like?

What would a modern day 40 years into the future 'mother of all demos' look like?

I don't think it'll ever happen, not because of the technology required, because people have realised the value of 'teasers'. There's more benefit to announcing things that build on previous work than there is holding back for a big reveal. We (the audience) are more sophisticated and understanding; we don't need to see the final product to grok what the demo is telling us. Showing a single feature is often enough.

I agree. There is also a danger in big, monumental releases in that they take big, monumental development efforts to create. It took Engelbart, et. al. 6 years to build this demo. Can you imagine any company today spending 6 years, in the dark, building something?

In our current financial and business climate, I just can't imagine anyone agreeing to that, and even if they did, there is a chance a small, plucky upstart could eat your lunch independently developing and releasing piecemeal everything you intend to release. But even worse, if you were working on something that was so cutting-edge that no competitor independently thinks of it and thinks it's a good idea to develop it, then you might lose the market when you release--they just plain might not understand the significance of what you've created.

Then, 5 years after you release, Facebook will copy you, but automatically post everything you do to your timeline, and everyone will love it and forget you had anything to do with it. The best you can hope from getting together a dedicated team of skilled, motivated individuals and giving them a long time to make something incredible is that you get to show up in The Verge and Ars Technica in 50 years as being "the first".

It's not that hard to imagine, Apple apparently spent $2,678,000,000 and five years on iPhone R&D, in the dark.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/f17e5186-51c1-43aa-8c...

>What would a modern day 40 years into the future 'mother of all demos' look like?

I'm thinking a demo of an advanced brain-computer link. The next step forward in human computer interaction as major as this was.

Something like the Oculus (VR) or Hololens (AR) IMHO.

Problem with the "future mother of all demos" is that it seems the viewers need new hardware to experience it. How do you do an "AR" demo that's not distinguishable from movie FX (i.e. a fake example).

This was my first thought too, however when I think about it more. Oculus/hololens are really the same applications with a different perspective. It's a damn cool demo to be sure, but not life changing in the same perspective.

The great demo showed a future with a brand new category with brand new applications. AI seems more likely to me AI is the only tech I know about that could produce a demo on the same level.

Maybe we'd show video chat in color and other derivative ideas while not wearing a lab coat? Maybe show people making money off of derivative ideas? Maybe bring back some good derivative ideas like that chording keyboard?

Edit: Things haven't changed that much really.

I don't know, I'm always amazed out how much comp sci was already pioneered in the 50s and 60s. This demo blew my mind, particularly considering the tools they had to work with and invent.. I would have preferred an article exploring the significance of the tech on display though rather than the surface treatment and coverage of the "reenactment".

He shows a chorded keyboard for shorthand typing, how did that not catch on! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

Strange feeling watching the first computer mouse demo, first TODO list tutorial, code folding, auto numbering etc. According to Wikipedia he never received any royalties for his mouse invention.

> a chorded keyboard for shorthand typing, how did that not catch on

I think it's coming back with smart watches. They can sense the ligaments in your wrist and know what letters you're "air typing"

> According to Wikipedia he never received any royalties for his mouse invention.

That's accurate. In recognition of his contributions Logitech Inc (the American branch) offered him and his institute space on their grounds.

The idea is still around; it comes and goes.

Emacs supports them for example. You can buy hardware chorded keyboards like the Bat.

I think the problem is they come with a large learning curve for prose--just imagine learning to touch type again--but then multiply that by a few factors to do programming with all the symbols to be efficient. Ye olde 101 key keyboard is about the fastest thing there is right now, balancing keyboard size and key-to-semantic entropy.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord

http://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html

One reason they don't catch on is that a keyboard is like $20. I always wanted to get a DataHand but they were over $1000. Buying one for home and one for work made it even worse.

For those interested archive.org has a much higher quality version of the recording [1] as well as a recording of the 1969 followup demo that explains in greater detail how the text editor works [2].

I really wish we could try NLS/Augment on an emulator but sadly it seems that it has been doomed by the god of copyright to forever rot in the archives of the Computer Museum.

[1] https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn... [2] https://archive.org/details/XD301_69ASISconfPres_Reel1

Here's an NLS/Augment screencast and demo from 2006: http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/hyperscope_scre... . I'm not sure what happened to the Hyperscope project to reimplement NLS since 2006 http://hyperscope.org/ http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/12/ann-hyperscope-11... .

The Hyperscope project died, apparently. I had to use the wayback machine to retrieve the source code but it builds on a couple of obsolete technologies (client side xslt and a javascript framework that's evolved well beyond the point of backwards compatibility).

You can run a NLS/Augment in the emulator made available by the Computer History Museum, I think. I did. It was fun.

What timing. I'm currently reading "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" by M. Mitchell Waldrop. And when I got to the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference this weekend, I went and watched Engelbart's presentation. The book gives great context for the demo.

As a side note, I know quite a bit about the early history of computing, and I was amazed how carefully Waldrop navigates these murky historical waters. Highly recommended.

If you haven't, it's worth picking up "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by Markoff and "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Stephen Levy as well. The three combined come at roughly the same material from sufficiently different angles to complement each other quite nicely without getting too repetitive.

Also in 1968, Telefunken in Germany had their "rollkugel" mouse http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/misc/telefunken.shtml

I wonder if the German inventor(s) knew about Englebart's mouse idea (which had been around since 63) or if they came up with the idea independently?

Take an amazing and interesting demonstration given by a brilliant man, and play bad electronic music over it.

I'd have gone to see a screening of the Demo un-modified, but this thing looks rubbish.

Did anyone go to this opera performance at Stanford last week? What did you think?

I really thought this was going to be about the demoscene.

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