by Yr. Obed. Svt., J. Walker
Who the heck is Englebart? Apparently, he invented, or at least midwifed:
way back in prehistoric times. And apparently he hasn't stopped yet, and he's in his seventies now. Because of him, we mouse and window and do all this stuff that the marketing people call "intuitive".
- The mouse and pointer cursor
- Display editing
- Outline processing
- Multiple remote online users of a networked processor
- "Linking" and in-file object addressing
- Multiple windows
- Hypermedia
- Context-sensitive help
- *
I went just cause i had some free time and i thought it would be cool just to see for real the movers and shakers of the biggest cultural revolution since the printing press. But it was even better than that. I got to see *why* this thing is so big: This is one bunch of major heavyduty folks. Audience was about 1500 people. Being in that room was like floating on a sea of intelligence, good sense, and good will.
Sure wish the rest of life was like that. And they seemed to think that with the revolution, it will. But don't all us revolutionaries think that way?
My Notes
Html-ized, but pretty much as entered in my palmpilot during the conference. When i have time i'll make them intelligible.
- Englebart demo'd so much more than what we actually have. [My inference: the 'forces of the marketplace', touted as encouraging innovation, don't. --jrw] As someone did say: he hopes it will not always be true that the inferior technology wins [implying Microsoft. i also think of beta vs vhs video. --jrw]
- Everyone's biggest fear was loss of privacy.
- Things are still changing - we've only just begun.
- Integration (not competition) - Good that people have different ideas - we can share + grow
- The People:
- Englebart :
- collective intellignce
- tool systeml cob1ous), human system (not obvious).
- 'integrating visible futures'
- Ted Nelson
- web needs version mgmt and intellectual pro mgmt, but it's like grafting arms and legs on a hamburger.
- Van Damme
- education is the killer app.
- Terry Winograd
- comments, expansions, on englebart, general issues (social)
- Brand
- bitrot - 'forward compatibilty'
- Lanier - (So hot i couldn't stop to take notes.)
- Alan Kay
- squeak: smalltalk(?) language
- web rev system
- Everyone
- social issues, social implications - a Good Thing.
A nice ending: One of the biggest sponsors of this thing was LogiTech. They make mice (oh duh). Somewhere in the middle, our fearless moderator announced that Logitech had made up a bunch of posters of Englebart and a quote of his. And that attendees could go to Logitech's site and sign up to get one mailed to them. Well later on, turns out enough people went up and said, 'we want to go home with our posters!' and Logitech arranged to have them delivered to the conference. And we could pick it up as we left. Nice, eh?