The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

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. [0] ▶ this video

I was so surprised when I watched "The Mother of All Demos" from 50+ years ago (1968) and saw what they predicted and actually implemented. They demonstrated what's happening in 2020, video conferencing, real time collaborative word processing, and etc. Truly amazing. [1] ▶ this video [2] link

The Mother Of All Demos is an absolute classic: ▶ this video link I also very much enjoy Feynman’s talks. Here’s one on imagining physics: link For computer science in particular, I highly recommend the first lecture in the SICP series, especially on the naming of so called “computer science”: link

those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. watching the mother of all demos once a year is a sobering reminder of that. ▶ this video some better-than-most discussion here: link

I was just listening to one of Douglas Crockford's talks which discussed the contributions Engelbart made to computer science. What really stuck with me was the sheer number of new concepts he showed in his demo, which, though made in 1968, would showcase features not seen for decades, and some of which are still not effectively in use. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth the hour and forty minutes. I think this is also a good moment to reflect on how incredible it is to be involved in a science which is still so much in its infancy that seminal figures in its development are still alive and well. Let us not forget their contributions, and most importantly, not overlook the concepts that, if employed today, can advance us far beyond where we are now. Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos: ▶ this video

Sometimes I really feel we're chasing UX that were solved in the Mother of all Demos (in 1968). For those who haven't watched it: ▶ this video

I'm not able to see this link, but I'm assuming it is this: ▶ this video Google "The Mother of All Demos" One fascinating thing to me is that he is explaining things with clarity that we take for granted - for example, the mouse - for the first time. He explains the mouse here: ▶ this video "The tracking spot [cursor] moves in conjunction with the mouse. As it moves up and down and sideways so does the tracking spot."

I know it’s not spreadsheets and even more distant, but I think it’s worth it for you to check [1] to see the origin of much of HID to this date. Best in mind that all of what you see there was done by 12 people from scratch (no OS, not even assembled hardware) in roughly 2 years until 1968. [1] ▶ this video

Slightly off-topic, but I really hate this trend that now every developer / researcher / engineer also needs to be an actor (typically cringy one) pretending to be quirky for the camera while trying to act unnaturally excited about the technology. I really miss the days of the professional casualness and naturalness of something like the "mother of all demos" [0]. Like, can you imagine the guy wearing a turtleneck and going, "but wait!" and acting surprised after every sentence? It would NOT have been the same demo. [0] ▶ this video

I remember reading an article on Source Code In Database back in the early 2000s, and it's been knocking around my brain ever since as something I ponder every couple of years. I just can't shake the feeling that there's the gem of a future paradigm where everyone wonders "why we didn't always do it that way?", but then every time I try to follow those thoughts through to a conclusion, it always feels like it'd just be re-implementing Smalltalk, and then the question is "why isn't Smalltalk more popular?" That said, there's a lot to be said for revisiting old ideas. There was so much interesting research done in the 60s and 70s in all sorts of random directions, maybe because at that time there were no precedents or expectations for how things should be done. There are so many untapped resources here, it's crazy. Every now and then I re-watch "The Mother of All Demos" [1] from 1968 where Douglas Englebert demonstrates some of the research at Stanford or the Sketchpad Demo [2] from 1963 where Ivan Sutherland is presenting a GUI-based CAD system. Fortunately, these ideas have now been picked up again, but to me it's interesting to note just how long a time lapsed between these ideas and becoming mainstream. Some of it is obviously the cost as the state-of-the-art research machines were massively more powerful than the home computers even 2 decades later, but I'm sure there were a lot of great ideas that have just been forgotten. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have fou

As did Engelbart's NLS, as seen in ‘the mother of all demos’. ▶ this video What little actual research exists suggests dark on light is more readable for people with normal vision. People with cataracts benefit from light on dark, and people with astigmatism benefit from dark on light.

Well, unix is another really bad OS compared to it's historical predecessors: at first they decide for a bad programming language to need less hw horsepower and separate that cheap language from the user language (C for the system, for "complex" things, shell scripts for the end user), for equal reasons they decide that's no need for GUIs, while far before unix we have had GUIs, touch monitor, even the world first video-conference with screen sharing in LAN (the so called Mother of all the Demos, in 1968 [1] then they realize that's was not that good and graphic systems start to appear on Unix, far limited, complex, that completely violate unix principles since for GUIs there were no IPCs, classic PostScript GUIs do support some user-programming but not really something like classic systems, CDE support a certain integration but again nothing like classic systems. Since them all "modern" systems keep rediscovering in limited, limited and bug ridden ways what historical systems have done far better decades before... I think many should just see classic advertisement like link than see it's date and where we are today... It's not only security it's the overall design. In the past hw resources was limited an so hacks and slowness were common, hw itself being "in a pioneering phase" was full of hacks and ugliness but evolving those systems would have led us too the moon while we are still in the middle age... [1] ▶ this video