I was very lucky to have worked with Doug on multiple projects and see his passion for computer science and humanity. He was one of the most humble people and was happy to share all his wisdom. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him. To be specific, I built out purple numbers for Doug. I remember demoing it to him, it was hacky, and the joy he showed made my soul smile. He was a very special man. I have many other stories, but that is for another day.
And yet we still haven't learned enough from it.<p>The fact computers have been so isolated from one another (even with internet apps) is a complete tragedy. Even sending large files is a pain in the butt to this day.<p>The demo had multiple people working on the same computer remotely, with their own cursors and ability to do things on the system at the same time.<p>Best we have now is web-browsers syncing data silos, or a one way "let this person control my mouse + keyboard".<p>It feels like building a bridge by everyone making parts in isolation then expensively shipping it to the work site that only has one crane to assemble them.<p>Usually it's way easier to have multiple people work on something. Like carrying something heavy, or having a line of people walk the bridge with the right tools/verification to install the rivets right, or even the opportunity for someone to speak up present unique ideas to the group.<p>Even just a few basic OS primitives early on could have jump started so much collaboration tools and techniques that mirror how we all work together everywhere else in real life.<p>As an aside, the whole "meta-verse" craze might pull these ideas through to the mainstream again.<p>I see lots of demos of avatars standing at a table working on stuff together, and I've been on VR chat before drawing 3d images with crayons at the same time with other people.<p>It's incredibly fun to try and draw an elephant together and work on different parts at the same time to hilarious results.
I had the change to meet him in SF. He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz.<p>But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been. Nobody would fund him. Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget. Who knows what he might have invented? He had that rare ability to see into the future. The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?
Funny timing — the Future of Coding podcast (disclosure: hosted by myself, sponsored by Replit) just did an episode about Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect, perhaps offering a bit of the "more in-depth examination" Amjad was interested in.<p><a href="https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056" rel="nofollow">https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/056</a><p>That paper (from '62) forms quite the contrast with MoAD (from '68). While the latter is quite specific, showing a lot of "features" that people tend to point to when citing Engelbart's influence, the former is arguably much more visionary. Doug had quite a lot more in mind than just pointing devices and video calling.
I met Doug Engelbart in the late 90's during his reboot sessions at Stanford. Lots of luminaries spoke, including Ted Nelson.<p>I was there because I read every one of his group's papers, in the mid 80's, and wrote a version of Augment in MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal. I think I showed him a demo.<p>He invited me to attend informal meetings at SRI. I left after a few weeks because I couldn't figure out how it would result in a product. Had already went into deep personal debt, once before (about $50K in 1990), trying to market something similar.
Always glad to see this getting attention, I really enjoy computing history. There's a link to a video in the article, but it's part three of ten. Recently I came across this[0]. It's pretty much the whole thing in one video. It's long but it's well worth the watch. I was born in '68, so I can't remember the 60s, but I can remember the 70s and it's easy for me to understand why people felt Engelbart was, "Dealing lightning with both hands" at the Mother of All Demos.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY</a>
The main thing he wanted, and never got... was a group of people working together on some task unrelated to programming, with an agreed upon measure of productivity.<p>He wanted to see how much he could optimize their productivity over time with careful measurement and plain old trial and error.<p>It's never stated why funding dried up, but here's my suspicion: Nobody was willing to risk upsetting the traditional hierarchy with something that might obsolete management, for example. Nobody other than an angel investor, or group of old retired technologists can pull something like that off. It has to be someone with time, or f*ck you money. I have time.
Amjad's tribute is touching, and also be sure to read the Wikipedia page he links to:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos</a><p>I met Doug in the late 1970s when we worked in the same Tymshare office at 20705 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino. He had a little cubicle like the rest of us, in the far corner of the building behind the pine tree in the middle of this Street View image:<p><a href="https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A</a><p>We only talked a few times, but I could always see the sadness in his eyes from the shabby treatment Tymshare gave him. No real team, and not much encouragement to continue his mission.<p>Tymshare was quite a land of lost opportunities. Earlier in the 1970s they had a "programmable terminal" in a side office. I think it may have been a Datapoint 2200?<p>I found the programming manual and saw that I could write code to respond to the cursor keys, put characters on the screen where I wanted them, and then run Conway's Game of Life!<p>In my years of working there coding on Teletype machines, I'd never experienced anything like this.<p>Eventually my manager saw me working on my GoL program, and kindly but firmly said, "Mike, this looks like fun and all, but no one is ever going to want to do something like this. We have important business problems to solve. Back to work now!"<p>At one point they did consider doing something to take advantage of these newfangled "microcomputers". But they didn't pursue it very far, because they figured it might be a threat to their established timesharing business.<p>And they were right!
A piece I wrote on this a couple years back: <a href="https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predicted-future-mother-demos/" rel="nofollow">https://thenewstack.io/49-years-ago-douglas-engelbart-predic...</a>
I’m always left amazed, confused and disappointed when I read about this.<p>How did something so monumental get built and demonstrated, but then not get followed up on for more than 30 years?<p>Were there humongous caveats involved in the demo that made it impossible to leave the lab even for major corporations?
I'd like to to leave a link to Doug's 1962 paper:<p><a href="https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html</a><p>It's worth noting that despite the historical magnanimity of the 68' demo that the real, "meat and potatoes" of Doug's work is still the operating philosophy he developed that allowed SRI to dream up all this groovy shit and make it work. It's also worth remembering Bill English who was the, "director" of the demo who sometimes doesn't get enough credit.
This is from Wikipedia article about the Mother of All Demos:<p>>The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor<p>If those things were possible in 1968, why did most of us started to use them just in the '90?<p>Is normal to have that big of a gap between a technological demonstration and the technology becoming available?
After reading Bardini's excellent biography I found that Dr. Engelbart's unfortunate involvement with Werner Erhard and est was the beginning of his journey down the wrong path. It's hard to say if his ideas around Collective IQ, CoDIAK and DKR were too obtuse for practical application or the world just caught up with his ideas. In any case, it seems centralizing human knowledge isn't going to save the world after all.
I never knew of it until somebody mentioned on a newsgroup - amazing for the time.
So thankful for these early pioneers to try out new ideas before it became a commercial success later on.