50 years later, we still do not take the mother of all the demos
50 years ago today, Doug Engelbart showed 2000 people a preview of the future.
Only gave a demonstration of the "oN-Line System" at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968. oN-Line System was the first hypertext system that was online for more than 20 years. But there was so much more than that. When Engelbart wrote a word, it appeared on the screen in San Francisco and on a terminal screen at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. Once moved with the mouse, the cursor moved in both places.
The demonstration was impressive not only because Engelska showed Google Docs-style collaboration ten years before Google was founded. It was impressive because he and his team at SRI's Augmentation Research Center had to think about and create almost all the techniques they showed, from the window-based graphical interface to the computer mouse.
"It made the interaction with the machine almost convincing, it was intimate," said Don Nielson, a retired SRI engineer and executive, who wrote a story about SRI named Heritage of Innovation . "Until then, unless you were programming, you did not spend much time in front of a terminal or a teletext or any medium. "
You can draw a line from the technologies introduced in" All Demos Mother, "as WIRED author Steven Levy called the event in his book Insanely Great to the Internet, the Web, Wikipedia, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Google Docs, and a host of other technologies that dominated everyday life when Angelina died in 201[ads1]3. His work was never the technology itself, but about Help people to work together to solve the world's biggest problems.
"I do not think what he looked around as he thought" Oh, I had a hand in it, "Nielson said." He would say "They still do not understand." "
It's not hard to see why people did not understand.It ended up with the 1968 presentation by explaining what he thought he had demonstrated. "It is an enlargement system that has been given to strengthen the development of computer systems," he says. "In addition, we hope that we develops quite a few design principles to develop our magnification systems. And these, I hope, are transferable things. "
In other words, he did not present a collection of hardware and software but a hardware and software development system – which could ideally be useful in other actions. demonstrated a way of working.
Bootstrapping Tools
Only founded the Augmentation Research Center in the early 1960s with an eye to help mankind to cope with its major issues, such as poverty, disease and war effects, his daughter Christina Engelstaligt.
To solve these problems, Angelic believed that humanity needed new ways of working. "Men's population and gross product increase at considerable speed, but the complexity of his problems is growing even faster and urgent solutions need to be the finding is getting bigger, "he wrote in the 1959 document," Augmenting Human Intellect. "
He believed that computers would be an important part of strengthening me strange skills, but he also believed technology that needed to be part of a systematic approach to problem solving and collaboration. Only believed people should focus on making feedback loopholes to improve their own efficiency, explains Jeff Rulifson, the computer scientist who developed a lot of the software that was shown to the mother of all demos. "The idea was to create tools and then use the tools to improve the tools," says Rulifson. Instead of doing the tool once, it would be continuously improved based on user experience. When the tools get better, they make it possible to create new, more useful tools. Excitedly called the approach "bootstrapping", named after the bootstrap circuit in radar systems.
The Augmentation Research Center team put the startup process into practice. They used the oN-Line System to build the oN-Line System, learn what did and did not work when they went. It was the real purpose of the group.
At the event in 1968, English not only showed the mouse and the hypertext documents so cool. He, Rulifson and his colleague Augmented Research Center, Bill Paxton, demonstrated how the team used the hypertext system to collaborate.
"What we say, we need a research team to provide them with these tools, put them in work with them, study them and improve them, said only during the demonstration." We do this by making ourselves the professional studying ourselves and making the tools so that they improve our ability to develop and study such systems, and ultimately produce this kind of system discipline. "
From GUI to Lean Manufacturing
Engelbar's ideas look no further out there, thanks to management philosophies like lean production and flexible software development that encourages companies to continuously improve their products and processes.
Open source software is perhaps one of the purest performances of English philosophy. Open source developers from around the world, often from competing companies , collaborates to build the tools they use to build more tools that they use to solve complex problems, such as building artificial intelligence equality systems. But the open source community struggles also exclude some of the limitations of English thinking.
Making tools to solve complex problems can create new problems, and tools can be used in ways creators have not thought about. Facebook used open source software to build a web application that could earn more than 2 billion people. Now it is accused of bad actors hating themselves, sharing societies and manipulating elections. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency uses some of the same open source tools as part of the monitoring work.
In other words, bad actors can continually improve as well. Just like environmentalists can be better at trying to raise awareness of global warming or create sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, fossil fuel industry can be better off to convince the public that global warming does not exist or to find better ways to extract oil and gas from . .
Christina Engelbart, now CEO of Douglas Engelbart Institute, says her dad was well aware of this issue and thought it was important for good people to get better as quickly as possible. "He used to call it a run," she says.
She says that the father was pleased with the development of the lean production method and the former "" total quality management
. "But he wanted to see these ideas used everywhere, not just production and product development. In this regard, the Institute will host a series of events starting Sunday that will help people understand English.
