Douglas Engelbart Interviewed by John Markoff of the New York Times

What people said

amsilprotag · 2018-12 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

vanderZwan · 2018-02 · Reference

> human-machine cooperation is probably where the big money will be. As it has been for as long as machines have existed, really. This reminds me of Douglas Engelbart and his vision for computers. I'll cite the section of his wikipedia page that paraphrases an interview with him from 2002[0][1]. > [Douglas Engelbart] reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and that any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such problems. He was right of course, and his work lead to "The Mother of All Demos"[1]. Machine learning is the next step in using computers as thought enhancement tools. What we still need to figure out is an appropriate interface that is not as "black-boxy" as "we trained a neural net, and now we can put X in and get Y out". EDIT: Now that I read that quoted section of wikipedia again, it's funny to note that computers were "only seen as tools of automation", and how modern fears of AI are also about automation. Automation of thinking. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Detrus · 2015-09 · Reference

Well, some types of buildings are designed to be modular. Cows are not. I'm also in favor of a single system that solves a bunch of problems than a hodgepodge nightmare. That was the vision behind NLS, the Mother of All Demos, SmallTalk, Plan9 etc. And Doug Engelbart can be found favoring the easy to master but complex at first glance approach [VIDEO] instead of the easy to get started approach of Mac GUIs that won out. The problem arises when the system makes too many weird decisions and people fork it to make their own all encompassing systems. Then it takes forever for crippled versions of these system to be adopted. It doesn't help when even the niche audience is divided. Things that can be disagreed on should be minimized. So there is no technical need to throw the complex at first glance syntax at new users these days. You could convert it to a more verbose syntax and back again. Terse syntax looks clean and easy to scan when you use it daily. But what if you don't? Then it's not self documenting, you have to look up commands to read code. If I don't use command line for a few months, I remember the basics like mkdir, ls, cd but I forget the nuances like ls -a and the billion other options. So it becomes a chore of looking things up constantly. Could be fixed with natural language autocomplete for writing code, but not reading. If you considered such use cases, you wouldn't be so sure about the terse syntax. So many made up words are also asking too much. They'll certai

Read the original HN comment ↗