
Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88 - stevewilhelm
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html?ref=technology&_r=0&pagewanted=all
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Vivtek
"Albert Einstein, explainer of Brownian motion"...

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networked
I'd go with "computing pioneer". Then again, that headline could be less
likely to encourage people to read on and find out what Engelbart actually
did.

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bowerbird
i'd say "brilliant visionary of the computer's potentials."

that still misses the fact that the world failed to develop those
possibilities in any meaningful way, but that kind of myopia would be hard to
address no matter what one said...

-bowerbird

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matthewmacleod
>that still misses the fact that the world failed to develop those
possibilities in any meaningful way

I don't know about that. I'm frequently engaged in realtime collaborative
editing of rich, interactive datasets with people on the other side of the
planet. The specific mechanisms Engelbart pioneered underlie most of that
infrastructure.

In under 50 years, we've progressed from the relatively abstract methods he
developed, to actually seeing systems developed on those principles in the
wild, in frequent use by literally billions of people.

I think you do a disservice to all of those who have helped to bring this
about by discarding their work as "myopic".

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bowerbird
i'm sorry if you feel personally offended, but if you think that today's
computers (which are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that
engelbart was working with) are -- to use his phrase -- "augmenting human
intellect", then i would certainly like to have you tell me how.

because i see society using these supercomputers to exchange pictures with
their high-school chums on facebook, and instagram photos of their lunch.

and (let us not forget) to _track_ those people, so we know the best
advertisements to serve up.

all of which might be acceptable trade-offs _if_ we were also augmenting human
intellect as well.

but we're not.

so it certainly appears to me that the only things we are "augmenting" is our
stupidity and our greed.

and if you bring this to the attention of anyone, they'll turn the blame on
you for "being negative".

sheesh...

-bowerbird

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matthewmacleod
> if you think that today's computers are ... "augmenting human intellect",
> then i would certainly like to have you tell me how.

Isn't it obvious? I have immediate access, in almost every physical location,
to a data store which, while not quite the sum total of human knowledge, is
pretty close to it. It's meticulously organised, indexed, hyperlinked, and
easy-to-use.

The fact that many people (including me) use this for social interaction too
does not detract from that at all.

You are essentially writing off the entire Web as nothing more than Facebook,
Instagram and Google Adsense.

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bowerbird
i'm not "writing off" anything.

i'm saying we have failed to actualize a very huge potential.

and oh yeah, sure, we've taken some 49 steps on the journey. (and 27 of 'em
actually moved society forward! imagine that!) and we could pat ourselves on
the back for our "progress"...

but that ignores the fact that the journey is a thousand miles.

nor do we seem to realize that the journey has become a race, a race against
time, because the greed and stupidity that i talked about above is turning our
planet into a place that will all-too-soon become one on which humans can not
survive. (shortly after all the other large mammals on it go extinct.)

so, like, dude, enjoy your "social interaction" while you can.

-bowerbird

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estreeper
I was just listening to one of Douglas Crockford's talks which discussed the
contributions Engelbart made to computer science. What really stuck with me
was the sheer number of new concepts he showed in his demo, which, though made
in 1968, would showcase features not seen for decades, and some of which are
still not effectively in use. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth the hour
and forty minutes.

I think this is also a good moment to reflect on how incredible it is to be
involved in a science which is still so much in its infancy that seminal
figures in its development are still alive and well. Let us not forget their
contributions, and most importantly, not overlook the concepts that, if
employed today, can advance us far beyond where we are now.

Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

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adventured
Engelbart was nearly 40 when he and his team invented the mouse. A rather
dramatic testament against the more recent agism in technology.

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osmsiberiano
He was not just an inventor of the mouse, but of almost all things we use in
development today: collaborative editors, video calls, hypertext, versioning.

A Great Man he was.

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cpursley
Click in peace

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keithpeter
Also at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307)

See jgrahamc's post :)

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rbanffy
Moving. Thanks for pointing it.

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dbin78
We will forever be indebted to Mr. Engelbart. Thank you sir!

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rnl
lol steve jobs maded the mous

