
A few words on Doug Engelbart - llambda
http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/
======
akanet
I found that the quip about how the document that they are sharing while
having a conversation is not screensharing as we commonly understand it in
modern parlance to be pretty illuminating. That modern screensharing is in
several ways worse than a demo that came out decades ago is frankly amazing.

I've tried to recapture a bit of that early magic with
[https://coderpad.io/](https://coderpad.io/) (multiple cursors, realtime
editing/execution of code), but I can only imagine how jaw dropping that demo
must have been when it came out.

~~~
jonahx
It really is amazing.

I feel like there is a similar mismatch and almost backwards progress when you
look at the concepts and tools behind smalltalk and the concepts most working
programmers today reason with and are familiar with.

~~~
xradionut
I think the huge focus on web development set CS back at least two decades in
certain areas. The industry has been so intent on reinventing applications
through the browser, it's lost ground in what can happen in areas like
Engelbert's or Smalltalk or real hypertext.

~~~
chime
If you think of technology progress as a global simulated annealing problem,
it is ok to step back a bit to get out of the local maxima. Web Dev may have
taken us back 20-30 years in certain areas but once caught up, it can take us
much further than the previous methods could have ever expected us to. The
previous methods in this case being, compiled software that require specific
devices/OSes and require a very high level of competency in all aspects of
development.

~~~
weland
Web solutions also require specific devices and web browsers, really; I can't
think of a single jaw-dropping JS demo around here that didn't meet with
several complaints related to it simply not working under certain browsers
(and a lot more complaints about performance). Aye, if you put enough time and
hacks into it, you get it to run on pretty much any browser. Until the next
update, that is.

> require a very high level of competency in all aspects of development

Crude tools, development methods and principles are a surrogate for
simplicity, not an actual manifestation of it. Barring the fact that you
sacrifice performance, code maintainability and, to a high extent, security, I
also think the question of productivity remains open. I find it stunning that
young web developers are ecstatic about how their tools allow you to get from
idea to result _so quickly_ , when they are pretty much on-par with where
Motif was in the mid-'90s. Not to mention the truckload of CSS hacks you need
to make something that looks like a button (but without native looks) out of
an anchor-that-really-shouldn't-be-a-button-but-it's-the-closest-thing-html-
has-got. I don't think that can take us much further than compiled software
could have taken us -- and slowly, but surely (with stuff like asm.js), it
looks like a lot of people are rediscovering that.

~~~
ehsanu1
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bu...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/button)

~~~
weland
I think we both know that's not what I was referring to. It's stuff like this
one (PhoneGap, but really, it's like this almost everywhere): <a href='#'
class="button header-button header-button-left">Back</a>. Unless I am mistaken
and you can build the whole UI out of form elements (perhaps you can, but I'm
not sure I've actually seen that done anywhere), that's simply not sufficient.

~~~
ehsanu1
I took your comment to mean that no button element exists, but I suppose that
was not your intention. But I did realize you were referring to links being
abused as buttons.

I think the issue is simply that buttons tend to have more default styling you
need to override, which is more likely to vary across platforms since the
default style is generally chosen to mimic the system's native buttons.
Whereas default styling for links is quite simple across all platforms.
Besides that, there is no particular problem with using real button elements
instead of link elements as far as I'm aware, just a matter of habit and
convenience.

------
kaptain
I found this article by Bret enlightening. The expectation, though, that
Engelbart's legacy could be communicated clearly by the New York Times in the
obituary is too high.

The headline reads like this:

> Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88

Imagine, then, if the headline read:

> Douglas C. Engelbart, Augmenter of Human Intellect, Dies at 88

The former is much clearer and understandable, especially taking into
consideration the audience of the New York Times. Bret's article has the
luxury of expounding and explaining to an audience that is sympathetic to his
values; I myself was ignorant of Englebart's contributions as well as his
personal ideology when it came to this life mission, and so greatly appreciate
Bret's writing.

But, while the NYT article might seem untrue or ignorant to those who knew
Engelbart and understood him, for most people, the appreciation for Engelbart
comes out of the more 'mundane' things that were the side effects of his
vision: the mouse, hypertext, etc. Most can appreciate the significance of
these inventions, though the value of Engelbart's core works might escape
them.

~~~
msutherl
Douglas C. Engelbart, Computer Visionary, Dies at 88.

------
lukasb
"Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals."

reminds me of

"Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek what they sought."

------
kaflurbaleen
This book, "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter culture Shaped the
Personal Computer Industry" is by the same guy who wrote the NYT obit with
"the most facile interpretation of Engelbart" headline. It goes into far more
depth about Engelbart's goals of augmenting human intellect.

------
juretriglav
I found this article to be very thought provoking with regards to Engelbart's
work, but I can't help but read Bret's own worries in it. As if he himself
fears being presented/remembered purely based on his inventions (Bret Victor,
the inventor of the iPad interface) and not his goal (intends to invent the
medium and representations in which the scientists, engineers, and artists of
the next century will understand and create systems.)

As a side note: why can't we, the general public, appreciate people like
Engelbart with the same fierceness before they are gone? I'm sure they'd like
to know their life was incredibly meaningful.

------
nhamann
> Engelbart __hated __our present-day systems.

I'm not trying to say "[citation needed]" here, but I would be interested in
seeing a source for this. Does anyone know of one?

~~~
glibgil
The citation, in this case, is Doug Engelbart. Bret Victor is reporting what
Doug Engelbart told him about present day systems.

~~~
filipncs
[citation needed]

~~~
glibgil
[http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/](http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/)

~~~
gruseom
I take it you're being sarcastic, but the article doesn't contain any such
information. Or are we missing something?

------
Schwolop
This is one of those times when I can't be emphatic enough without crudity.

That was a fucking excellent eulogy.

------
jonahx
every time i read something brett writes, i learn something new and feel like
my world view has expanded a little bit.

------
Tloewald
This is a good article but it's important to understand that vision doesn't
necessarily trump implementation. Steve Jobs also had a vision of augmenting
human intellect (one at a time rather than collective), but he's remembered
for the things he built in pursuit of the goal, not the goal. Ted Nelson's
vision for hypertext is also more transcendent than what we got from the
world-wide web, but on examination it turns out that hos vision is flawed and
unrealizable (in practice there is never a canonical reference for any text)
while what we've actually built actually works.

------
gruseom
The closest present-day analog to Engelbart's collaborative editing demo
(edit: I mean specifically the document-editing portion, not the video etc.)
is not screen-sharing, but modern collaborative editors (Google Docs,
Etherpad), which do provide multiple cursors. Thus the screen-sharing analogy
is a straw man, and the author hasn't really made his case against "drawing
correspondences to our present-day systems" from Engelbart's visionary work.
He may still be right, but I'd like to know why.

~~~
GuiA
In Engelbart's original demo, the users can see each other, talk,
collaboratively work on a document, and do together pretty much anything that
the computer offers. The full OS, including the GUI, is intended to be multi-
user.

Google Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is
solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document". But say we need to
work on something that involves listening to audio together or watch a video
or use a third party program, we're SOL with Google Docs.

What Engelbart's vision aspired to do was to allow people to work together
through computers, no matter what the work was. Document editing is a
microscopic facet of that.

~~~
gruseom
_Google Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is
solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document"_

Yes, but it's just the aspect the OP criticizes screen-sharing (as a proxy for
present-day technology) for missing. I take your point that these things could
be better integrated, though.

------
andrewflnr
How did I not hear about this guy in detail before? His high-level goals sound
exactly like mine. Where are the people working on this now?

~~~
earljwagner
Look for IA as an reversal of AI, "Intelligence Augmentation" or "Intelligence
Amplification".

------
shoover
I remember watching his NerdTV interview several years ago and being inspired
by how principled and focused his work was. He wanted to apply his capacity
toward solving interesting problems, and he did something about it.

Original PBS page with now broken media links:
[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?ext=mp4&show=011](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?ext=mp4&show=011)

The Archive has it:
[http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011](http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011)

------
phdtree
Anyone knows who was Doug Engelbart's PhD advisor at Berkeley? We have his
profile at phdtree:

[http://phdtree.org/scholar/engelbart-douglas-
carl/](http://phdtree.org/scholar/engelbart-douglas-carl/)

but there is no where to find out info about his PhD advisor.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
John Woodyard

[http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www-
sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html)

More:

[http://www.ee.washington.edu/people/alumni/profiles/woodyard...](http://www.ee.washington.edu/people/alumni/profiles/woodyard_john_r.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robert_Woodyard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robert_Woodyard)

Its also listed on his wiki page directly.

~~~
phdtree
Thanks a lot, updated!

Another question: I figured out John_Robert_Woodyard's PhD advisor at Stanford
was William Webster Hansen, [http://phdtree.org/scholar/woodyard-john-
robert/](http://phdtree.org/scholar/woodyard-john-robert/)

but then I couldn't find out info about William W Hansen's PhD advisor, any
help?

------
mpu
This is a bit needlessly aggressive.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It's called passion.

------
tel
As I began to read his thesis I was reminded _powerfully_ of Conor McBride's
Epigram system [1]. It's a very different kind of system, but the parity
between a user's intent and the computer's ability to interact seamlessly with
that intent is a powerful feature of Epigram.

[1] I can't seem to find the source anymore, but there are many papers like
cs.ru.nl/~freek/courses/tt-2010/tvftl/epigram-notes.pdf‎

------
earljwagner
"'Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88' This is as
if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing
the pencil."

That's what obituary headlines do: connect the dead person's achievements in a
concrete way to readers' lives.

------
shurcooL
Just curious if anyone else here has tried Screenhero? I've found it to be
quite excellent in a handful of situations where I needed to use it.

It's screen sharing where each person has their own cursor. Works surprisingly
well for a small company product.

~~~
Myrth
No 2 text cursors? Meh. j/k :)

------
DennisP
Real-time collaborative text editing based on operational transform, like
Google Wave and Etherpad, is probably a better analogy to Engelbart's system
than screen sharing.

------
biggfoot
Beautiful eulogy. Compels me to read more about the person.

