A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

https://www.righto.com/2025/03/mother-of-all-demos-usb-keyset-interface.html

by zdw • 1 year ago

321 86 1 year ago

kens4• 1 year ago

Author here if there are any questions...

Thank you for this, wonderful break down of some amazing history. I have watched that demo many many times in my pursuit of human computer interface thinking.

I often wondered what happened to this piece of hardware… I still hold a deep belief that our current input methods are flawed(as amazing as they are) and we are in need of another leap forward.

Anyway great read - thank you again.

xkriva112• 1 year ago

How did Engelbart render black text on a white background during his 1968 Demo, considering that the display technology at the time was based on vector CRTs, which typically produced glowing light rather than dark areas?

kens4• 1 year ago

Output was displayed on 5" CRTs. High-resolution TV cameras (875-line) transmitted the CRT output to 17" monitors at each work station. By flipping a switch, the video could be inverted, so you could get either black lines on a light background or white lines on a black background. In other words, Engelbart invented dark mode :-)

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken!

I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth!

The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print toy), but then refine it to make a high quality hybrid version with the exact same weight and feel and materials and electronics using resin printing and off the shelf hardware like the wheel, so it feels as realistic as possible and actually works!

I think reproducing the actual weight and feel of the original is really important, the klunky feel of the wheel attached to the potentiometer hitting the rotation limit, how it scrapes across the table, etc. It's really amazing to hold and feel in your own hand, and it belongs in a hands-on museum like the Exploratorium, but it would quickly get destroyed. So it would be great if anyone who wants could 3d print their own quick and easy plastic replica, or assemble their own high quality functional replica too.

I want to release the simple model and detailed plans to make your own for free, and think it would be a great kit or pre-assembled gadget that the Computer History Museum could sell in the gift store.

It would also be cool to include an accelerometer and gyro in it so it would also work as a gestural game controller -- why not: it would be so cheap and easy to add!

Here are some parts I'm considering using, but I'm new to this stuff -- what do people with more experience think?

  Microcontroller: ESP32-S3 module (USB + Bluetooth capabilities)
  Motion Sensor: MPU6050 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope
  2× 10KΩ potentiometers for X/Y tracking wheels
  3× tactile buttons with pull-up resistors
  3.7V LiPo battery (350-500mAh)
  TP4056 charging module
  USB-C connector (for both charging and wired mode)

I'd love to discuss the project with you, a free open non-profit labor of love, and I hope we can collaborate! I just invested in a Bambu 3d printer and Raptor 3d scanner just for this project, so I'm ready to get started scanning and printing. Please drop me an email at: don@donhopkins.com

bch2• 1 year ago

Hi Don. I think this stuff is great, and applaud your work, so don’t think of this as a slight (depending on the answer, of course): how practical is this? Again, if the answer is approximately “not at all practical”, that’s fair, but I guess I could also see it fitting somewhere on a spectrum like emacs vs vi, QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc…

Joel_Mckay3• 1 year ago

I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them

Cool, the artifacts should be preserved for people studying new haptics device designs.

The MPU6050 is not a great IMU, but the cost might be your best option.

USB-C connector

One can force the interface into legacy USB 2.0 HID mode, and I would highly recommend that approach if you are excluding a USBC device PMIC. The TP4056 also have some weirdness about entering charge modes, and exiting trickle mode.

Would recommend contacting some museum staff if additional hardware is missing:

https://vintagegeek.com/

Best of luck =3

jdboyd• 1 year ago

I would suggest being sure to use a cpu platform well supported by ZMK to make your HID software easier. The esp32-s3 doesn't appear to have Bluetooth support in ZMK yet. People who want Bluetooth support are being encouraged to use the nrf52 platform. People who want usb only might be better with a rp2040 as there is better support in ZMK for that platform than anything esp32.

ChrisGammell• 1 year ago

I always drop everything to read when there are new articles. Keep up the great work Ken!

thakoppno• 1 year ago

Are there any opportunities for the local community to help preserve this history?

There’s a new development planned for the SRI site and I was hoping there’d be some honorary for that hallowed ground.

kens4• 1 year ago

Christina Engelbart is working to preserve the history at the Doug Engelbart Institute: https://www.dougengelbart.org/

kragen8• 1 year ago

Thanks for writing this!

You misspelled "eidophor".

Brad Neuberg (the founder of coworking) worked with Doug about 15 years ago to hook up one of these keysets to a then-current computer to use Augment. Any idea what happened to that work?

kragen8• 1 year ago

(I see that "eidophor" is fixed.)

bsindcatr• 1 year ago

It’s amazing to me not only how much things haven’t changed (many still use mouse, joystick, keyboard) but how much things have changed.

A dedicated keyset for frequent functions like this is certainly cool, and there was a time where it was cool to have num pad and function keys, but then most users started to use modifier keys (shift, ctrl, option, later added cmd) on their keyboards. We started with joysticks, then mice, then some trackballs, haptic joystick, light pen, touchpad, then haptic touch screen. And we have some voice interaction, then some immersive VR and augmented reality, then interaction with AI that can hear and see things, and we have some movement in brain interfacing over the years.

What is next?

(I apologize for leaving many things out and getting them in the wrong order. Just going on memory.)

andrehacker• 1 year ago

Fascinating read as always Ken. It seems that the concept of a “Chorded Keyboard” from Douglas then spawned several relatively successful successors later on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 80s it was hard to not be aware of the “Velotype”: it had more keys and supposedly made it easier to learn the “chords”.

Your reference to the book Nerds 2.0.1 is great, the book is a companion to the excelent PBS 3-part series from 1998

https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection&query=Nerd...

rwmj3• 1 year ago

Back in the mid '80s our school was given a small number of Microwriter chorded keyboards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter) for our BBC Micro lab. Even as 12 year olds we were already crazy good touch-typists, so the Microwriter felt very clunky and unintuitive to us. I don't know what the lesson is from that. Just because it seems a good idea doesn't mean that it is. Or typewriter-style keyboards have survived over a century and a half for a reason.

Cpoll• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced either of those are the lessons. I think the reason for the keyboard's success is that it has a smooth learning curve. A neophyte can hunt-and-peck with a keyboard. Not so with a chorded keyboard.

jhbadger• 1 year ago

In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. People like Steve Mann would give talks where he demonstrated how he could use his wearable computer (basically a laptop he strapped to himself with a clunky goggle-mounted display) that he controlled with a small chorded keyboard he operated with one hand. Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't already in the 1990s) but some people really did think this was the future at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)

nine_k2• 1 year ago

The killer feature of a chorded mechanical (not on-screen) keyboard for me is that one can use it without having to look at it. To literally touch-type (not necessarily text).

This is why such keyboards are used where this advantage is material, e.g. in jet fighters.

_emacsomancer_• 1 year ago

There's a 1990s Alan Alda video interviewing Thad Starner with these elements: https://youtu.be/X7DM1mT8r7c

zozbot234• 1 year ago

In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. ... Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't already in the 1990s) but some people really did think this was the future at the time.

Well, we have portable computers with chorded key-sets now: we just call them handheld consoles instead. I'm quite sure that the button set on something like Valve's Steam Deck or ASUS's ROG-Ally consoles could be repurposed for some sort of reasonably ergonomic chorded-text input.

totetsu• 1 year ago

I guess this was an inspiration for this character https://lain.wiki/wiki/Nezumi

kragen8• 1 year ago

As Animats mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43455514, Doug's team didn't invent chorded keyboards; Émile Baudot did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#/media/File:Clavie...

You can see that he designed his character code, like Morse, to make the most common letters easier to send: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#/media/File:Baudot...

jarpineh4• 1 year ago

I sometimes wonder if chorded keyboard would be better for controlling the computer and keeping better posture against RSI issues. Not to mention more compact space compared to full keyboard. I seem to remember from a recording of the demo (and few writings on subject) that the keyset and mouse were used together for more powerful effect than either one alone.

What I haven't found out is how well a multilingual writer could use these. Do the chords rely on properties of particular language, like English. Does the chord order follow from how often you write letter a instead of x. Would another language be adaptable to same chords, or do you need to make an optimized version?

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

Douglas Engelbart used a straightforward binary encoding scheme for the chord keyset:

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43454343

The commercially available "TapXR" input device also functions as a mouse and gestural pointing device! It's a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I haven't tried it yet though, but it looks really cool.

https://www.tapwithus.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdm8FcsKeoM

A WRISTBAND THAT REPLACES Your Keyboard, Mouse & Handheld Controller TapXR was designed to help humans adapt to the next generation of personal computing.

A Unified Way To Interact With Your PC, Smartphone, Tablet, SmartTV, Projector, VR, AR & XR

80+ Words Per Minute

Input up to 10 characters a second with just one hand or go even faster with two.

150+ Customizable Commands

Remap any finger combination into your favorite shortcuts, triggers, key-binds and commands

2500+ Tap Layouts

Enjoy thousands of user-created Language, Utility, Coding, Production & Gaming TapMaps - or make your own!

8 Hours of Battery Life

Get a full day of input on a single charge. Only 1 hour to recharge from zero to full!

----

My previous post about an earlier version from about 7 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122717

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

enobrev on May 22, 2018 | parent | next [–]

LinusTechTips posted a decent review of the Tap a few weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/8za_4g5zCOM

jarpineh4• 1 year ago

Whoa. Thank you for the info dump. I'll see about making use of these.

That Tap device has moved from fingers to wrist, I see. Sadly it's out of stock. Plus getting niche devices outside US is expensive and warranty probably doesn't work.

[1] https://www.tapwithus.com/product/tap-xr/

Edit: that LTT video makes a good case for the device, if only in typical 'tube fashion.

rhet0rica• 1 year ago

As Don Hopkins sort-of says—the original chording keyboard (and most later units) just had you inputting a binary number, which would be added to 64 to get an ASCII codepoint. No attempt was made to optimize for letter frequencies in English at this stage of design—A was one key (00001) but E was two (00101).

Engelbart's style of chording keyboard barely escaped the Anglosphere. But a related invention, the stenographic keyboard, did; these are used for court reporting and live television captioning. They introduce a very different strategy for inputting text—operators of these input one full syllable at a time, phonetically, and the machine interprets the pronunciation according to a dictionary; thus in English the most common errors are homophones, which can be revised later from context. It requires quite a lot of training and practice to be proficient with them, and they are extremely language-specific.

6SixTy• 1 year ago

Braille typewriters are also very much like Stenography, except Braille is actually designed to replace reading & writing rather than transcribing speech.

Though Braille does use two dots for E and one for A, with mostly the same letter frequency in both it's native French and English.

Also very much surprised his keyboard didn't fit into either ASCII nor EBCDIC encoding. Granted, both of those barely existed at the time but still.

jarpineh4• 1 year ago

Yeah, I have probably conflated the two technologies somewhere along the way. And if I had read all the way to the footnotes of the original article I'd have found the keyset's chords. They do are counting in straight binary, going from a-z in order. Add mouse buttons for modes to get uppercase, numbers and what not. Interesting really that such a simple scheme worked.

ipv6ipv4• 1 year ago

I would hazard a guess that it would make RSI worse because it minimizes the kinds of hand motions to operate it. Alleviate RSI with a keyboard by constantly changing the position of your hands on the keyboard - the exact opposite of touch typing dogma. Pecking at your keyboard is healthier.

jarpineh4• 1 year ago

I'm no health expert, only an expert practitioner of my hands. Mostly I keep changing keyboards and positions. That small chorded keyset can be set to more natural positions and moved at will to wherever you can reach. You ostensibly don't need to even look at it. I'd assume you would be looking between the chord sheet for directions and what you're actually writing... A device like this Tap thing, which is attached to your fingers or wrist, allows even more freedom.

As for mouse, well, I guess a trackball is easier to move about, stick to chair arm or something. Touchpad might work also, but you require more estate for precision and gestures.

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

Doug Engelbart's advice to a young software developer [video] (youtube.com)

183 points by DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 39 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121629

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

I found this incredibly interesting stuff on Valerie Landau's youtube channel of Douglass Engelbart, her mentor. The videos have apparently been viewed only a few times, but they deserve much more attention, because the ideas presented are so important and relevant today!

She was a long time friend and collaborator with Doug Engelbart, and she was responsible for transferring the 1968 film of The Mother of All Demos from film to video so it could be preserved. She tracked him down and interviewed him, and after airing the interview, he asked her to help him articulate his vision to share with the world, which she's been working on since then.

https://www.youtube.com/user/islandeweller/videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Landau

Valerie Landau is an American designer, author and educator. She serves as Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University where she designed a software application that facilitates analysis and assessment of how effectively an organization is meeting their goals and objectives at course, program and institutional levels.

She has filed two patents along with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes multitouch interface for chorded text entry. The new patent is inspired by Engelbart's early work developing the Chorded keyboard. They also released an application for the iPhone for chorded texting called "TipTapSpeech".

Engelbart and Landau also collaborated on writing the book "The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" along with co-author Eileen Clegg.

Landau is also a co-founder of Program for the Future, a non-profit organization that promotes Engelbart's vision of Collective Intelligence. She also is author of the seminal book on online education "Developing an Effective Online Course" and earned the "Online Pioneer" award.

Landau, also known for her work in multimedia at Round World Media and for her work mentoring students in a three-year project studying and applying the Engelbart Hypothesis. and created an online archive of Engelbart related events and videos.

She is an instructional and interaction designer and has worked on many award-winning projects, educational games and online courses.

In addition, she leads high level research delegations to Cuba.

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

----

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

----

Engelbart Using HandWriter. Douglas Engelbart demonstrates early prototype of The HandWriter with Valerie Landau.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wAD2aji3Q

Q: So whose ideas was the glove?

Engelbart: I invented actually a separate keyset with the five keys, and her idea, you can make a glove to do that.

Q: And what's the advantage of using a five key chording system?

Engelbart: Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input.

And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too.

Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word.

Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words.

All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it.

----

iChord: Clips from video of Eric Matsuno & Valerie Landau showing their new iPhone app to Douglas Engelbart. To Douglas C Engelbart and Bill English, and to Karen Engelbart, Roberta English and Mary Coppernoll. Present in spirit but not in molecules were: Evan Schaffer and Dr. Robert Stephenson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXdnu5n9vI

So we're going to be able to be configurable for whoever's hand. [...] Go ahead and give it a try: so swiping it down puts it in the history, and swiping it left takes the last ...

----

Andres Types His Name

Andres writing his name on TipTap late on a Saturday night. I arrived home after a party and found him typing on TipTapSpeech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WI88q7coEY

----

This final silent video is chock full of photos and memories of Douglass Engelbart's friends and family, drawings, whiteboards, posters and brainstorming sessions!

Memories with Douglas Engelbart: Photos from my work with Douglas Engelbart creating a Educational Networked Improvement Community Engelbart and working with Eileen Clegg on the writing of the book the Engelbart Hypothesis: Diaglogs with Douglas Engelbart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnsWKikS_w

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122591

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

I'll write a blog post about it soon, but I was hoping to benefit from other people's comments and links from discussing it here first. (You could accuse me of "crowd sourcing" my blog post, but I'd like to think of it as applying collective intelligence! ;) ) "The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed." -Douglass Engelbart, Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 9/19/05

https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/great-doug-eng...

Or as the great philosopher Linda Richman said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw&feature=youtu.be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121632

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Q: Some people will have to change their normal method of thinking?

A: I think today, Aday really summed it up, that one of the things about collective intelligence means that we really have to start looking at ways that we can collectively share knowledge. And one of the problems with that is there are no good tools for sharing massive quantities of knowledge. So it's very hard to stay on top of things. So Doug's methodology creates maps and new ways of displaying data that we have not explored. So that we can really see large amounts of data, large amounts of knowledge, put them into structured arguments, so what he means by structure -- and maps, so that people can literally see what exists now and create very rapidly stragies -- both long term strategic planning, as well as tactical planning -- to address the issues that are confronting us.

Q: Does this assume that if people have the same information they'll all come to the same conclusions?

A: No, not at all. What it means that you will be able to look at data and make intelligent conclusions based on the best data we have currently. Because right now there is a lot of good data that is currently not available to the people who are making the decisions. He was saying that this was a dynamic knowledge repository and it was about allowing people to have an intelligence quotient. In other words, he saud that the infrastructure that you have to support a society determines the capability of that society. Just because we have all these capable tools doesn't necessarily mean that we'll behave intelligently, but it does allow us the chance to behave intelligently. So by improving our infrastructure, we're improving our intelligence QUOTIENT, not our actual intelligence. Just like the same people who are intelligent sometimes make bad choices, even though they're capable of making a better choice.

Q: Now you say that Doug was interested in solving the most urgent problems of humanity. What type of problems was he referring to?

A: He was definitely referring to things like Global Warming, issues around water, food, hunger, war, corruption was very high on Doug's list. He also followed very closely the work of the Millinenium Project, and so often times he would cite whatever they had cited. He would often cite those same issues.

Q: Do you think his vision was going to become a reality at some point?

A: I think yes, if I didn't I don't think I would have spend the last 30 years following it.

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet... In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic, ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121705

Douglas C. Engelbart: A Profile of His Work and Vision: Past, Present and Future. Prepared by Logitech, October 2005.

https://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/Engelbart_Backgrounder.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122581

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

Valerie Landau recommends this web site about Douglass Engelbart's life and work, with chapters from her book: The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/

Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg spent years in dialog with Douglas Engelbart and wrote a book distilling those dialogs. It is available as on ebook on Amazon

In addition, the book chapters are on this blog.

Today, we invite you to share your thoughts and memories of Douglas Engelbart who passed away last night.

Add your stories to the Remembrances: Doug Engelbart page

----

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

https://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-Dialogs-eboo...

Centuries of silo thinking and win-or-die ideological and economic competition have finally generated a global crisis. Now either we collaborate on a global scale to solve the new global problems, or we won't survive. The technology is available to do so. Billions of intelligences are waiting to participate. How do we bring the two together? We are at a decision crossroads. And as this book vividly demonstrates, Doug Engelbart as been there all along, waiting for us with the answer.

Emmy-Award Winning Historian James Burke --Email to the authors

jntun2• 1 year ago

I've recently been reading lots of books about 50/60/70s computing & especially the San Francisco element of it, so I've been watching Engelbart's demo myself on and off for the last few weeks. It really is amazing being "close" to all this time of history, even if the only way we can interact with it is over USB nowadays!

Tiniest footnote correction but not only were the desk & offices designed by Herman Miller; the chair Engelbart is sitting on during the demo was also specially designed by Herman Miller!

dfc• 1 year ago

Can you share some of the titles about computing in the 50-70s?

ecliptik• 1 year ago

I've been reading The Innovators[1], which includes early computing history, just finished the section on The Mother of all Demos yesterday coincidentally.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)

jntun2• 1 year ago

Of course!

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry [2005]

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age [2000]

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date [1996]

Palo Alto [2023] (This is more for capturing the full scope of San Francisco / Palo Alto since the founding of California as a state)

Those are some off the top of my head right now being away from my library, probably also the most impactful to me in no specific order.

pmcjones• 1 year ago

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo Ornstein - https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...

neilv• 1 year ago

Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on.

Chording keyboards were popular among the "wearable computing" researchers (who then went on to work on things like Google Glass). For example, the Twiddler.

One advantage of them is that you only need one hand to operate it.

And some designs mean you can simultaneously hold it with that same hand, without a steady surface.

miki123211• 1 year ago

chording keyboards are still extremely popular among the blind, after all, chording is how you type Braille. They appear on everything from mechanical Braillers of the 1950's[1], to modern, electronic Braille displays and notetakers. Input methods based on this concept and adapted for the touch screen are even built in to both iOS[2] and Android[3].

[1] https://wecapable.com/perkins-brailler-braille-typing/

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101637

[3] https://blog.google/products/android/braille-keyboard/

DonHopkins8• 1 year ago

[...] but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on.

I'm sad that he and others like Ted Nelson and Brett Victor would rightly say that his most important innovations have so far failed to catch on. But there's still time to raise awareness and make them real!

Ted Nelson's Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg

Ted Nelson's emotional and moving eulogy for his friend Douglas Engelbart. Given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on December 9, 2013.

An Homage to Douglas Engelbart and a Critique of the State of Tech:

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/1...

You don’t need me to tell you that Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time. We gather today, in pretense of unanimity and concord, to croon over Doug’s ashes and grab for scraps of his robe.
Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.
Some are no doubt here to cheer and march behind the mouse, as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of yore. Let them be happy in that celebration.
But the real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration.
Don’t get me wrong, the people who gave us all those fonts were idealists too, in their way — they just didn’t necessarily hold a very high view of human potential.
I used to have a high view of human potential. But no one ever had such a soaring view of human potential as Douglas Carl Engelbart — and he gave us wings to soar with him, though his mind flew on ahead, where few could see.
Like Icarus, he tried to fly too far too fast, and the wings melted off. [...]

Doug and Karen Engelbart marry Marlene and Ted, May 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsKFbwLeS1k

Poignant ceremony with sweet pledges, at the Marin Civic Center. Ann and Bill Duvall are co-celebrants. Underexposed and streaky, but the event is the important thing. (Battery ran out before the final verdict. Other camera was far away.)

A few words on Doug Engelbart:

https://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain.
Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers' interviews with Engelbart, I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter.
Here's the most facile interpretation of Engelbart, splendidly exhibited by this New York Times headline:
"Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88"
This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil. (This analogy may be more apt than any of us are comfortable with.)
Then there's the shopping list interpretation:
His system, called NLS, showed actual instances of, or precursors to, hypertext, shared screen collaboration, multiple windows, on-screen video teleconferencing, and the mouse as an input device.
These are not true statements. [...]

Animats3• 1 year ago

The original chording keyboard was from Baudot, around 1897.[1] The original plan was for the sender to send 5-bit teletype characters with a 5-bit keyboard. This was deployed, not just a prototype.

[1] https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co33197...

pests2• 1 year ago

Here is a great run down of that history:

https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html

Early versions had to be mechanically synced at the sending and receiving side. The typists had strict timings so the other end could receive it. This led to a version of punch cards that could be pre-typed and then fed in automatically, reducing the skill needed of the operator. The linage to teletypes were almost obvious.

Very good read, don't want to spoil too much.

Animats3• 1 year ago

The form of a keyboard had to be invented. Early printing telegraphs used a piano-like keyboard, with white and black keys.[1]

(Keeping both ends in sync was a huge problem. The machine shown was synched by having the sending operator send AAAAAAAAA while the receiving operator made adjustments. If the machines got out of sync, the receiving operator opened the line switch, which stopped local echo at the sending end. Then both ends had to repeat the AAAAAAAAA drill.

It took a long time, from 1846 to 1907, until Howard Krum finally came up with a mechanism that didn't have sync problems. Krum had the advantage that steel and stamping were available. The clock industry had figured out how to mass-produce mechanisms. Mechanism design then got out of the handmade brass era. This was, in its day, an advance comparable to going from tubes to ICs.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJCfhbPAv9c

Animats3• 1 year ago

Mandatory XKCD.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1234/

KennyBlanken• 1 year ago

Chorded keyboards always seemed like an ergonomic nightmare - every keystroke is now multiple fingers having to move. You're multiplying the repetitive action...

adminm2• 1 year ago

I'm sure there's a (mythical at the moment) device just waiting to "disrupt they keyboard industry"

It's crazy that most of us are effectively using a fancy typewriter. Qwerty layout dates 1874, clocking in at just over 150 years of age.

brandonmenc• 1 year ago

We already did.

It's called the mouse.

adminm2• 1 year ago

You type faster with your mouse than keyboard?

GregDavidson• 1 year ago

I regularly use my Twiddler with my Android phone. It allows me to fully operate all the applications I use on my desktop computer, e.g. Emacs. https://www.mytwiddler.com/

nanna• 1 year ago

Even Emacs? Do say more...

mcshicks• 1 year ago

I have a twiddler and tried doing this a long time ago i.e. emacs with a twiddler. For me I really needed to use a sticky cntl and alt key because I just couldn't press the cntl button on the top and chord at the same time. And I couldn't figure out how to make the sticky cntl work on the phone. But that was a very long time ago. Now I just use a mini bt keyboard and termux to run emacsclient over ssh and that's good enough for what I want.

vagab0nd• 1 year ago

It's cool. But it's missing the 411/305Hz sawtooth. Last year I tried to setup my vim to play these beeps in normal/edit modes and on some key presses. It was quite fun but I wasn't able to play a long lasting sound like in the demo.

peteforde3• 1 year ago

I urge you to consider using an RC network with a hex inverter to debounce your switch input without resorting to a 100ms delay. I've wasted enough hours to know that the best kind of software debounce is a few resistors and capacitors.

https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/d...

kragen8• 1 year ago

I feel like the diode in this schematic is the wrong way around for a normally open switch: it speeds up the keyrelease event when the switch opens instead of the keypress event when it closes.

But I think the 100ms delay Ken mentions was intended for a different purpose: to wait for all the fingers in the character to be detected. I think a much better approach would be to wait for one of the keys to be released before registering a character. Isn't that what Engelbart did? I suspect this timing-based approach explains why Ken found it so difficult to use.

As I understand it, Baudot's original chording keyboard instead mechanically locked the keys down until the character was transmitted over the telegraph line. The telegrapher had time to enter his next character while the system was transmitting the characters of his colleagues, interleaved with his own at a fixed baud rate.

peteforde3• 1 year ago

Oh, that (waiting for all fingers to be detected) does indeed change how I would approach the scenario, and blew past me in my initial reading.

That all said, even with 100ms cycles I would hardware debounce the inputs, capture the keystrokes with an ISR to set some semaphore variables, and then create a 100ms loop that checks the current value (and resets) those semaphore variables.

Eliminating switch bounce allows far more elegant software handling of the values you're reading, so Ken could turn his attention and development energy towards things like sliding time windows (100ms starting from the first keydown, for example) instead of trying to boil the ocean cancelling bounces.

spit2wind• 1 year ago

Obligatory mention of the Plover stenography engine: https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

So far most boards seem to be made in the US. Anyone making them in Europe or elsewhere?

piyushgupta53• 1 year ago

this is such a great read!

vietjtnguyen• 1 year ago

Custom mechanical keyboard firmware like QMK [1] and ZMK [2] support custom chords called "combos". Basically if the combo's set of keys is hit (within some timeout which defaults to 50 ms) then a specific keycode is sent. You then get a fun game of identifying low probability combos and mapping then to useful keycodes. You also start realizing there's some prime real estate to take advantage of. Two-key combos require some thought cause bigrams can be surprisingly common. Three-key combos are basically open though.

In migrating from the ZSA Voyager to a 36-key keyboard (Chocofi) I've relied on combos as I don't like overloading keys with tap-versus-hold behavior as I can never get the timing down. For example my left index, middle, and ring finger mashed down on the home row (resting position) is escape in my current layout (Colemak mod DK which means keys R, S, and T). It's three fingers but hardly any extra effort. I've managed to do away with a symbol layer and have been quite happy with the result. If anyone is curious here is my "36-key training layout" for the ZSA Voyager [3] and my current Chocofi layout [4].

1: https://docs.qmk.fm/features/combo

2: https://zmk.dev/docs/keymaps/combos

3: https://configure.zsa.io/voyager/layouts/d7L0v/latest/0

4: https://github.com/vietjtnguyen/zmk-chocofi/blob/main/config...

imcritic• 1 year ago

The site is infected with CloudFlare.

A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

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