The mother of all demos

This is where there are basically no rules about topics, or off-topics. Discuss things here of fleeting interest.
Forum rules
Here, you can discuss anything (well, anything legal and not offensive) you want to. Use this for gassing about any half-baked theories, general getting to know one another, and other things that as someone once said, should be forgotten after awhile. This sub forum is set to auto-remove threads that haven't been posted on for a couple weeks, emptied like the office trash can. Almost anything goes here, the idea being to keep the other forums and threads more on topic but in a maximally friendly way. If anything actually worthwhile should wind up here, let me know and I will make it immune from being removed.

The mother of all demos

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:40 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY


You might want to watch this when you have some spare time. In this one, Douglas Englebart, in 1968, demos a number of computer firsts to a stunned audience to whom this might as well be sci-fi or magic.
First mouse. First GUI. First word processing. First chording keyboard (drat, didn't catch on). And so on. No one knew, or could guess what all this would become by now, all these years later, so it's kind of fun to look at this, primitive as it is (yet in some ways, more advanced than most things till quite recently) - and see if you could have figured out where it would go from there.

Remember, before this, the more advanced guys had KSR-33 110 baud teletypes on a timeshare mainframe, but those were the advanced guys. The rest of us used decks of cards, with instructions on which deck to run after mounting which tapes and so on, and where to stack any printout - we'd get our jobs run sometime within the week. To say the least, that made debugging a lot more interesting than today's fast edit/compile/test loop (or in my case, just edit/test since I'm doing scripting most of the time these days outside of arduino stuff).

Just a good little bit of history. Hard to tell where you are if you don't have a clue where you came from.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Return to The water cooler -- disscusions about anything

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests

cron