Brandon (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jolinn) wrote,@ 2006-03-08 21:40:00 |
|
The Mother of All Demos
Biked for 40 minutes
I found this link today on Google Video, and it's pretty friggin' amazing:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=
This is the video from "The Mother of All Demos", where Douglas Engelbart showed off his operating system NLS, later to become known as 'Augment', inspired by Vannevar Bush's vision of a machine/software combo that would be an augment for human intelligence. To cement firmly just how cool this idea was for 1968, Engelbart managed to demo: the mouse, hypertext, audio/video conferencing, emailing, windows, hybrids of texts and graphics, and even real-time collaboration and sharing of documents.
Watch this video -- the passion this man shows for his operating system is inspiring, but more important is the fact that he manages to demonstrate features that some operating systems lack even today. That's crazy!
Well, crazy, or sad. The operating system used by most engineers where I work is one which is unimaginably powerful when it comes to being configured or programmed exactly as the user wishes -- but its interface is still more or less 10-15 years old. The current graphical "look and feel" is one made in imitation of Microsoft Windows.
This lack of focus on the interface -- the part of the operating system that makes it easier to do things with it, seems like a great loss, particularly if you're really, genuinely excited about your computer as being an "augment" to your own intelligence. Even when I look at my absolute favorite of modern operating systems (OS X), I always think: "We have to be able to do better than this."
--
The coolest part about the Augment video -- turns out Douglas Engelbart and some more modern web developers are teaming up to develop a working copy, emulated on the web:
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/0
Biked for 40 minutes
I found this link today on Google Video, and it's pretty friggin' amazing:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=
This is the video from "The Mother of All Demos", where Douglas Engelbart showed off his operating system NLS, later to become known as 'Augment', inspired by Vannevar Bush's vision of a machine/software combo that would be an augment for human intelligence. To cement firmly just how cool this idea was for 1968, Engelbart managed to demo: the mouse, hypertext, audio/video conferencing, emailing, windows, hybrids of texts and graphics, and even real-time collaboration and sharing of documents.
Watch this video -- the passion this man shows for his operating system is inspiring, but more important is the fact that he manages to demonstrate features that some operating systems lack even today. That's crazy!
Well, crazy, or sad. The operating system used by most engineers where I work is one which is unimaginably powerful when it comes to being configured or programmed exactly as the user wishes -- but its interface is still more or less 10-15 years old. The current graphical "look and feel" is one made in imitation of Microsoft Windows.
This lack of focus on the interface -- the part of the operating system that makes it easier to do things with it, seems like a great loss, particularly if you're really, genuinely excited about your computer as being an "augment" to your own intelligence. Even when I look at my absolute favorite of modern operating systems (OS X), I always think: "We have to be able to do better than this."
--
The coolest part about the Augment video -- turns out Douglas Engelbart and some more modern web developers are teaming up to develop a working copy, emulated on the web:
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/0
