On Jul 3, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Bob Braden <braden(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu> wrote:
Wikipedia defines "genius" as "a person who displays exceptional intellectual
ability, creativity, or originality"
All three applied to Doug Engelbart. He belongs up there with other creative
geniuses I have had the privilege of meeting during 50 years in computing --
Al Perlis, Dick Hamming, John McCarthy,and Don Knuth come immediately to
mind.
Dear Bob,
Here is a video of Doug Engelbar's 1968 demo of SRI's work.
http://vimeo.com/32381658
In the early seventies, most work used mini computers where faults were
diagnosed using the front key panel and bit light displays. I even had the
misfortune of debugging early production of MITS Altar systems that were flakey
by connecting front panel LEDs directly to the data bus. As a consultant in
1985, I worked at Xerox Parc on the Xerox Star 6085 adding a cartridge tape
drive. They relied on the tape drive to distribute OS updates in a timely
fashion because their 10 Mbit Ethernet offered less than 3 Mbit throughput
across dozens of test systems. By then, they were using Bill English's mouse
design. Being relatively sheltered in the lab, this was my first encounter
with a GUI interface. I needed to access my test programs but was dumbfounded
by a display that did nothing when you typed on the keyboard. The secret was
to drag the arrow icon over the terminal icon and click. This finally provided
access to a terminal display that responded to the keyboard.
Until then, my editing made use of multiple screens navigated with the use of
key combinations. To this day, I don't think GUI really offered improved
productivity. It was sexy and you did not need to remember all those damn key
sequences. The systems at Xerox Parc made use of the SRI developments which
then spawned Windows and Macs introducing personal computers to the masses.
Keeping the masses safe has been an ongoing struggle requiring creative genius
often evidenced in algorithms rather than hardware. The evolution of computers
has been awe inspiring, and Steve Jobs proved genius makes a difference in
hardware as well. As Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by
standing on the shoulders of giants."
Regards,
Douglas Otis