Inventing the Computer Mouse | Douglas Engelbart | Talks at Google

What people said

8bitsrule · 2018-05 · Recommendation

One video on the /islandweller channel is this: [VIDEO] a 56-minute visit / presentation with Doug and several others at Google. Inspirational ideas (unfortunately displayed with slides instead of Hyperdoc demos) and perplexed reactions in the ending Q&A session. These ideas are so different; ordinary presentations are clearly incapable of selling them. (As Nelson, too, found out repeatedly.) Looks like job#1 is bootstrapping Hyperdoc presentation methods. Guess the 'Mother of all Demos' needs a 'Mother-Squared'. Another reaction: the video I saw had very low resolution, and the audio was recorded in a terribly noisy environment. I'm completely unable to process how this could -ever- have happened. TV did better in the Ted Mac era.

Read the original HN comment ↗

icc97 · 2018-08 · Reference

Thanks for the reply! It's a really interesting piece of research. Yes, you're quite right, the browser alone can't interact between all the programs, I was purely thinking of low hanging fruit for the browser plugin. I watched a Google interview with Douglas Engelbart [0] where people asked him a couple of times if Wikipedia was what he'd envisioned for hypertext, he was very polite about it and said it "was a good start", but he'd clearly wished that we'd got much further by now. What you're suggesting is definitely a step forward. [0]: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Detrus · 2014-07 · Reference

Sure but you can't re-allocate workers in a capitalist economy with a paper idea and a signature. You have to convince thousands of people. You have to convince investors to start new companies where new types of workers are doing something new on the web. You probably can't re-educate millions of the current designers, code monkeys, content farmers and clients to do new types of work that has nothing to do with their old work. There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit and HN. HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell. For reference [LINK] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗