'The Mother of All Demos' Is 45 Years Old, Doesn't Look a Day Over 25

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-mother-of-all-demos-is-45-years-old-doesnt-look-a-day-over-25/282152/

by steveklabnik • 13 years ago

199 59 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

larrybolt2• 13 years ago

December 9, 1968 Douglas Engelbart did something what I believe was a huge leap into the future. He didn't just invent the mouse, but the whole experience and interactivity with a computer which was unheard.

Do that sort of things still happen today? Of course new things get invented and new ways to interact with media and a computer such as Leap Motion, Myo - Gesture control armband, Siri, and I'm sure there are tons of other examples out there. But they seem to be what in Engelbart's presentation was the mouse, just a part of the larger picture.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

This presentation was on par with the likes of Gutenberg's press, whoever first smelted metal, Einstein's relativity, and a handful of other simple concepts with singularity / black-swan level impacts. Great improvements & refinements occurred to be sure, but the base concepts were utterly new and staggeringly impactful.

eru3• 13 years ago

The Chinese had invented printing presses with movable type before (but just didn't have that much use for it, given their writing system). Lorentz and others had worked on precursors to special relativity, relativity was in the air. If Einstein hadn't been there, we might have had to wait a few years more for some lesser minds to come up with a piece of relativity and his contributions to quantum mechanics each, but we would have gotten those achievements in any case.

davepeck• 13 years ago

While it was more commercial in bent, I've always felt that the original iPhone introduction[1] was a spiritual successor to Englebart's demo.

[1] Jan 9, 2007 video in this podcast series: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/apple-keynotes/id2758346...

larrybolt2• 13 years ago

I have to agree with that, I still own an iPod Classic Video and after 2 HD replacements and a new display (I wasn't really smart nor careful the first time I attempted to replace the HD) it still is the best Media device I ever had.

I wonder if Apple will be able to keep pushing devices of such impact out on the market.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

Presumably he was picking the low hanging fruit. By today all the obvious or easy ideas have already been done a hundred times over. It's always harder to make progress in an older field than a newer one.

melloclello• 13 years ago

Would there be a better quality video available anywhere? I've always thought that of the one single copy we do have floating around the net, the quality is garbage. I wanna read the text!

km3k• 13 years ago

Archive.org has it in three parts:

Part 1 - https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn...

Part 2 - https://archive.org/details/XD300-24_68HighlightsAResearchCn...

Part 3 - https://archive.org/details/XD300-25_68HighlightsAResearchCn...

[Edit: formatting]

chas• 13 years ago

Every time Douglas Engelbart is in the news, I reread Bret Victor's reminder of his goals. http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

adamio• 13 years ago

Victor points a software design that can be implemented, two mice, even two text cursors if designed that way.

What about today's tools isn't alighted with Engelbart's vision? Everything? That seems a bit too broad

icegreentea• 13 years ago

Well, it's partly because the article is a bit narrow minded. Well, thats what I feel anyways.

As the article rightfully points out, what matters is intent, not the actual technical means of implementation, or even how it appears. We do have modern "screen-sharing" applications with multiple cursors. Just take a look at Google Docs.

The "problem" of today's tools is that computing technology went through this phase called the "PC" in which single-user interaction was all there was, and we went ahead and found efficient methods of single-user interaction, and then taught entire generations to think based on that metaphor.

nsxwolf2• 13 years ago

He loses me a bit when he starts talking about his intent. Englebart indeed demonstrated precursors to all these modern technologies, despite the author claiming otherwise. So he didn't demonstrate a precursor Skype and screen sharing, just because there's only one mouse pointer to control in Skype? Ok, fine. Then he demonstrated the precursor to Screenhero, which has multiple mouse pointers and embodies Englebart's intent exactly.

asolove2• 13 years ago

The point Bret is making is deeper: Skype and Screenhero shouldn't have to be 'applications' that dig into mucky parts of the OS to try to get screen and pointer sharing to work. And even with those applications, other applications get wonky if they are used via screen-sharing.

"Sharing" (of applications, data, peripherals, and capabilities like network storage) to be a first-level primitive provided by the system and all applications ought to be designed to work with it.

Consider this: we're all connected via networks and bluetooth. So why can't I, in a simple way, let your mouse control my cursor? Or send just part of my screen to part of your screen on the OS level? Or have a photo library on my NAS that smartly caches things I look at often on my iPhone, syncing changes back when I edit a photo? Or share a vim session such that my mouse and keyboard follow my vimrc and yours follow yours? Why do these things have to be built in hacky ways, over and over, specific to individual applications rather than built as reusable building-blocks?

We've gone to so much trouble to bolt sharing on to "personal" computers, when that whole idea is flawed. Engelbart's goal was to create a fundamentally networked system where the combined abilities of everyone would exceed the mere sum of their capacity.

If Engelbart's vision were alive, we wouldn't be excited that we have Skype and screenhero. We'd ask, now that we have these things, how can we build software that uses them to get better outcomes? A medical tool the lets two doctors interact over a patient's EMR and rotate CAT scans together in a way that increases the odds that they get the right diagnosis? A pair programming method that finds more bugs, and gets better designs, more than just one person looking over another's shoulder? A spreadsheet that lets two business founders argue about their core assumptions and business model collaboratively?

Read about the early history of computing to see examples of this. One that comes to mind is the timesharing systems in the early MIT AI lab, where there were no security systems. RMS talks about copying bits of code and configuration that he found in his professors' private folders, and the way that people would snoop on each other and build complex systems out of these shared parts.

mercuryrising• 13 years ago

That's an awesome chord keyboard - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY#t=2039 I've always wondered why more people don't use them. It seems significantly less prone to errors - instead of fat fingers or incorrect placement, you have to coordinate the timing between the fingers.

It's pretty amazing how much that video demonstrates. I wonder what the next version of that video will be. Hopefully it's not computer related.

jerf2• 13 years ago

I'd like to try one, but there appears to be basically no such thing as a bluetooth-enabled one-hand chord keyboard that you are intended to hold in your hand (as opposed to having on a table), and that's the use case I'm interested it... an input device for my augmented reality glasses while I'm walking around. On that note, if they're ever going to make a... well... can't really make a comeback if you never made an appearance at all... an appearance, that's probably the scenario that will drive them. Voice may cover casual usage, but when you really need to go to town you're going to need something more, and no current input device can meet that need.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Port 8pen to the PS3 navigation controller (one-handed joystick device)?

DanBC• 13 years ago

Sadly I think neat keyboards are patent encumbered.

There have been things like the Frogpad, or the Twiddler. But they're expensive and not available anymore.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciQVBNHrKKA

I totally agree, I think their time has come and it'd be great if someone could rescue the tech from all these dead or dying companies and provide a decent chording keyboard for people on the move.

mcb3k2• 13 years ago

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you could probably make a prototype pretty easily. A battery, some buttons, and a bluefruit[1] should be enough to make one. You would likely need to also write some kind of input translator (Custom android keyboard or so?) to wrap/ convert the value from straight key presses to your combinations (since you want a combination of key presses to give you just one character). 3D print a case, and you're probably all set to go.

I mean, it's likely easier said than done, and would take some time and effort, but it's probably also pretty do-able.

[1]http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/09/27/new-product-bluefrui...

mattstreet• 13 years ago

I've always heard that type of input device called a twiddler, I found one when googling "bluetooth twiddler": http://www.handykey.com/

* I'm an idiot, that was a top link because they're using the name twiddler, but they don't seem to offer bluetooth.

kybernetikos• 13 years ago

I've been looking at this recently too. I like the basic design of chordite http://chordite.com/

7 keys across four fingers, and then perhaps a trackpoint for the thumb.

In terms of a bluetooth gpio controller, there are a few options including a few that have been kickstarted recently (e.g. bleduino and rfduino).

EdiX2• 13 years ago

It wouldn't be very useful without NLS. It wasn't intended for text entry but to select commands to execute while the mouse selected the target for the commands, ie you would enter DW for "delete word" with the chorded keyboard and use the mouse to select the word to delete.

It disappeared because the people a Xerox Labs decided it was too hard for normal people to learn to interact with a computer in this way, so they replaced the chorded keyboard with on-screen buttons plus a set of keys on the left of the keyboard for the most used operations (Undo, Open, Copy, Paste, etc). Then Apple, to make things even friendlier, removed the extra buttons from the keyboard entirely and relegated the most frequently used operations to key combinations (Cmd-C, Cmd-X, Cmd-V, etc). You will notice that many shortcuts are relegated to the left side of the keyboard.

jgrahamc• 13 years ago

See also, "Turing's Curse", from OSCON 2013: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29917

samsquire• 13 years ago

One of the things I love about Engelbart's work is that it does not obfuscate the underlying data. You have the data structure at your finger tips and it's up to you how you display it or interact with it. If you've got a graph, you interact with that graph as a graph. If you create a list you can interact with that as a list.

I am trying to implement something in a similar vein[1].

[1] 98, 4, & 44: https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

sp332• 13 years ago

Wow, how trendy is that humanist sans-serif font and lack of capital letters?

Edit: I mean on the announcement at the bottom of the article.

ianbicking• 13 years ago

Did you notice there appears to be an overline for caps? At least that's what it appeared to signify to me.

eru3• 13 years ago

Small case only was pretty popular in the interwar period, too. You'd also be hard pressed to find a single capital in 1957's 12 Angry Men. Even the names of the actors in the credits are all lower case.

jostmey• 13 years ago

It is shocking to me that it took so long for this technology to be realized by the public at large. Decades passed before this technology reached people's homes.

columbo• 13 years ago

Here's a talk in the 80's from Douglas that covers some more details:

https://archive.org/details/XD302_86ACM_Prese_AugKnowledgeWo...

The Q&A session at the end is very interesting. People asking about gestures and using a pencil (stylus) instead of a keyboard (note this is back in 86).

ccozan• 13 years ago

Very interesting.

It looks like a interactive document/hypertext backed-up by a schema-less store ( much like JSON, with hierarchies ). Also I liked the idea to build "views" from the document(s).

shurcooL• 13 years ago

Views are a very powerful idea, one that is currently under represented.

Today, if you want a different view of a document/data, you typically have to convert the document/data into a new one (in a different format). Then, as you change the original, the other remains outdated. Views are awesome because they remain up to date.

noselasd• 13 years ago

Or a day over 30. The Blit demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emh22gT5e9k is a bit over 30 years now

saraid2162• 13 years ago

Incidentally, the way the kids were typing in the recent Ender's Game movie is interesting. Does anyone know how deeply they designed that system/interface? (i.e., was it just random keystrokes or did the chording actually matter?)

enupten• 13 years ago

What else would you expect when much of our Software architecture is from the 70s ? :)

tempestn• 13 years ago

Is everyone seeing a bunch of screwed up inline links, or is it just me? Stuff like this:

<a href="http://A young Stewart Brand — who would shortly launch The Whole Earth Catalog — operated one of the cameras in Menlo Park. Brand, along with others,">was fairly mind-blowing</a>

EdiX2• 13 years ago

For people interested in seeing the 1968 demo here's the links to the best (to my knowledge) version available on the internet:

https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn... (first reel, follow the links for the other two)

If you are interested in how NLS was actually used I also suggest watching the 1969 demo which is less flashy but contains a better explanation of the interface.

https://archive.org/details/XD301_69ASISconfPres_Reel1

andrelaszlo• 13 years ago

The shopping list demo really looks like org-mode to me. :)

'The Mother of All Demos' Is 45 Years Old, Doesn't Look a Day Over 25

Related Stories