
The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo - mxfh
https://doug-50.info/
======
amsilprotag
Just yesterday I watched an hour-long interview [0] from 2002 with Doug
Engelbart.

On finding a wife. Engelbart moves to a university town, ditches a male-
focused hobby, and finds a more gender neutral hobby in folk dancing. Echoes
of Noyce and choir.

He turns down an offer from HP after asking whether he would be able to work
on computers and being told "no".

He claims during his 12 or so years working at SRI before the '68 demo that
most of the support for his ideas came from outside of the institution. He
says that later he learned about paradigms (but claims not from Kuhn), which
allowed him to understand the resistance he kept facing.

He gives credit to people with tangential skills that made the presentation
possible: The machinist mouse-maker who was also a wood carver, the
colleague's wife who was also a theater director.

He laments the fact that the easiest-to-learn tools out-competed tools that
gave the greatest return on learning.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM)

------
jarmitage
Tomorrow at Somerset House in London there is a salon style event themed on
the Mother of All Demos:

> A day of talks, performances and workshops marking the 50th anniversary of
> internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart’s original 1968 presentation of the key
> elements that would shape modern computing.

[https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mother-all-
demos-k...](https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mother-all-demos-kassem-
mosse-atau-tanaka-ted-hunt)

------
pronoiac
Oh cool! The mentioned Computer History Museum celebration site is online:
[https://thedemoat50.org/](https://thedemoat50.org/)

The symposium is this Sunday in Mountain View:
[https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/](https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/) I'm
looking forward to it! It seems it won't be live streamed, but other events
will be: [https://thedemoat50.org/events/](https://thedemoat50.org/events/)

------
loevborg
Ted Nelson's eulogy for Doug Engelbart
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg)

~~~
F_J_H
Wow - well worth a watch.

------
miguelrochefort
Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

------
harperlee
If I remember correctly Bret Victor was considering making a public demo of
their investigations around this date to conmemorate this 50 anniversary.

------
sn41
Is the chorded keyboard commercially available? I've always thought that it
might be a very handy gadget.

~~~
mncharity
One can also chord on conventional keyboards. A cheap keyboard with 2KRO
(2-key rollover) and 4 modifiers, might be held upside-down, providing
Shift/Ctrl/Alt/Meta plus a key or two. And a 2KRO with 8 modifiers (left and
right aren't merged) might be used two handed. Some keyboards special-case
common key sets like WASD. A 6KRO keyboard permits one-handed chording with
arbitrary keys. USB boot-mode keyboards are limited to 6KRO plus 8 modifiers.
:/ Full n-key rollover (NKRO) USB HID keyboards exist, but last I looked some
years ago, it was a niche mess.

A half-century on, an we still can't play keyboards like pianos... "if your
customers aren't complaining loudly of being crippled, you're overbuilding".

------
mimixco
Unless I misunderstood, these guys were trying to build something to show
_today._ Did anything come of it? I ask because our startup is working on some
of the same things: [http://mimix.io](http://mimix.io)

~~~
skreutzer
Since Engelbarts death in 2013 or even the 40th anniversary of the great demo,
there is a diverse group of people who for most of the time were unclear
whether the human system side or the tool system side should get focus and
come first, but in anticipation and preparation of the 50th anniversary, it
got more practical and several separate, individual demos were created and
will be demoed in a separate event today and during breaks between the
celebrations tomorrow. They're listed here:

    
    
      - https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/demos/
    

Some of the history can be found here:

    
    
      - https://www.youtube.com/user/frodehegland/playlists (Future of Text playlists, 2014 is on Vimeo)
      - https://ualr.edu/jdberleant/URLtable-DB.html
      - https://soundcloud.com/samhahn/tracks
      - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQw8OcRQ0Ws&list=PLYbSlBxcChOJ4KV2XIyR9oydfGzbvm1ai
      - https://doug-50.info/journal/
      - https://jrnl.global/journal/
    

There's more, spread all over the place.

~~~
ontouchstart
I created a public wiki style Jupyter notebook on Google's Colab platform
where anyone with a Google account can edit and run:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640656)

Since it is a shared programmable (Turing complete) environment, I hope people
in the community might find it interesting and would like to contribute and
share their expertise and creative insights.

~~~
skreutzer
I personally don't like Google, they constantly mess up my writing/publishing
and a lot more of bad/evil things. I don't have their software/code, can't
selfhost it (not libre-freely licensed), and believe that things should always
work offline just as well. Still, do you have a link?

Others in the community usually don't have such reservations/objections, or
don't care enough about their own work and capabilities available to them.

~~~
ontouchstart
The file is just a generic Jupyter Notebook (JSON with .ipynb extension). The
link to colab is just an iframe wrap to allow authenticated user to change it.

[https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k4oC2bzjgUOiU9vdadj...](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k4oC2bzjgUOiU9vdadjrBpEwWGaqJWsA)

Functional wise, it works just like a wiki.

It can be hosted on any Jupyter platform (such as google colab, Azure
notebook, your own Jupyter instance) or a Jupyter viewer platform if you do
not want to run he code. But you will lose the capability of pushing the
update back to the shared copy.

Here is an example of saving it to a github gist and viewed in nbviewer:

[https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447...](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447bdd60782efc1ea6bec9)

Due to the restrictions of GitHub, the YouTube video is not rendered in gist

[https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447bdd60782ef...](https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/f53de6f9ba447bdd60782efc1ea6bec9)

------
melling
Engelbart’s keyboard is discussed in this chapter on chorded keyboard boards:

[http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf](http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf)

------
alsothrownaway
It's strange to witness what is essentially a working version of Google
Hangouts and Google Docs ... from fifty years ago.

We're definitely doing something wrong.

~~~
jasim
This strikes a nerve.

I had the good fortune to be able to work with xBase languages (predominantly
CA-Clipper) when I began programming. I made software for retail outlets: pos,
inventory, accounts, all the jazz. The most memorable thing to me was the
Phone Directory we shipped with it. It did one thing right: `set filter to
cSearch $ upper( rtrim( ltrim( name + phone ) ) )`. This is a case-insensitive
regex match over both name and phone. Customers used it all the time, and they
held that db close to their hearts. It was 50 lines of code written in an
afternoon and just worked ever after.

Creating a phone directory with that affordance is a lot of work today.
However user interfaces are different today. 80s DOS text mode only had a
keyboard input, a 16-color palette, 80 columns over 25 rows, and just text,
text, text. Modern web UI is event-driven, has millions of colors, works
across screen sizes, and is networked by default.

Though with this essential complexity, there is so much accidental complexity.
It shouldn't be this hard to build software. The essence of a double-entry
bookkeeping software 30 years ago is the same as one we build today. A new
framework is probably not the answer. New languages (or old giants) and formal
systems might be. Ballerina, Unison, Dark, Ur/Web, Elm, Reason and so on.

~~~
gavinpc
You know, I also got my (official) start in an xBASE language (FoxPro), and
while I am obsessed with the history of inventors like Englebart and his
successors, those xBASE environments had more going for them than I tend to
remember.

"Ordinary" people could use those tools to make useful things. We seem to have
gone backwards from there.

What was different about those systems?

They were integrated _usage_ environments. Batteries included. In FoxPro, you
got:

    
    
        - built-in database
        - built-in documentation
        - built-in UI for editing data
        - built-in UI for editing schema
        - windowed environment (even in DOS)
        - oh yeah and a scripting language
    

This was first and foremost a _usable environment_ immediately. "Development"
was an advanced usage.

Emacs is this way. Smalltalk is this way. What they get is that programming
_languages_ are useless by themselves.

Contrast with now: the apps we build involve wiring together a database from
here, a compiler from there, just figuring out how you're going to make pieces
communicate and finally, you know, get something on the screen. Sure, there's
an upside to composing systems a la carte. But the learning curve is far more
prohibitive.

(Also, those xBASE systems just _will not die_. Just this morning I got an
email question about a system that's been in service for 25 years now. How
many of today's apps do you think will still be used (indeed, sold!) in 2043?)

~~~
nicklaf
Check out picolisp. It has a built-in database and can call existing C
libraries and Java (using reflection) without any fuss.

Though apparently, it doesn't have lexical closures:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16981170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16981170)

