The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley's Sidelined Genius

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/07/the_shocking_truth_ab.php

by smacktoward • 13 years ago

51 12 13 years ago

mattip• 13 years ago

Maybe a more appropriate tribute is actually HN itself as a manifestation of his Collective IQ, from http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html "Collective IQ" is a special set of collective capabilities, built upon our basic human capabilities, such as sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor, etc. Any significant collective capability is achieved by "augmenting" such basic human capabilities by means of training, enculturation, etc. in operational use of: (a) appropriately coordinated systems of artifacts and tools (the "Tool System"); and (b) vocabulary, conventions, roles, organizational structures, values, rules of conduct, methods of cooperation and education, etc. (the "Human System"). Together the Tool and Human Systems comprise the "Augmentation System." The purpose of the bootstrapping strategy is to accelerate the natural co-evolution of our Tool and Human Systems toward ever-more powerful Augmentation Systems enabling increasingly effective Collective IQ

epo• 13 years ago

I can't decide whether this is gibberish or just pretentious. You should give up writing until you have learnt to express yourself clearly (and have ideas worth sharing).

baxter001• 13 years ago

You know he's quoting Engelbart, right?

allannienhuis• 13 years ago

/ignore epo

akadien2• 13 years ago

Did someone hack your account? Because that level of irony just can't be so easily lost.

general_failure• 13 years ago

Well, I am not sure if epo is a troll but he does have a point. If you give the original comment a quick read it sounds like gibberish. The language is very 'heavy' like in academic papers. Academic papers to me are a big turn off and I hardly understand what they say most of the time. It also shows how little of academia reaches the common programmers - they are largely inaccessible. (compare number of papers to numbers that actually end up in real software)

nickvido• 13 years ago

Thank you - please never stop posting because of comments like epo's

mjn• 13 years ago

I'm not sure HN would really fit; he expressed considerable dissatisfaction with message boards, which HN seems to be an instance of (both culturally and technologically).

Here are a few of his thoughts on what would be better:

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/oad-2221.html

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-133186.html

deerpig• 13 years ago

The article is alltoo true. Engelbart's work was an enormous influence on my own. But when I gave credit to him in conference papers, and business proposals I was pulled aside and told that it wasn't a good idea to tie yourself too closely to Engelbart because he was viewed as being too "out there". I always had the same reply. "Have you actually /read/ and of Englebart's papers?" In almost every case the answer was no. And when they did answer yes, it was always along the lines, "well all he was talking about was hypertext which is the same as the Web." Silicon Valley loves to talk about changing the world, but that's largely bullshit. Engelbart is far from the only genius that is being ignored today who will never get funded. You can make obscene amounts of money building another photo sharing or dating app, but try to work on an important problem and you'll starve to death.

gcb0• 13 years ago

He made 2 mistakes. Had more than 30 years and never wrote rockstar ninja on his resume.

The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley's Sidelined Genius

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