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

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]

For me, even though it's PHP, ProcessWire consistently models data in a human way. I've put the out-the-box backend CMS in front of people that interact with computers very little and they instantly "get it". All data is simply a node in a hierarchy, and is easily movable and editable. I don't understand why more frameworks don't copy this basic structure. If you watch "The mother of all demos"[1] the structure is almost visually 95% the same. I look at Angular and it's looks complicated - the article is about how complicated it is. Surely we should be striving for tools the everyday man can pick up and play with? [1] - [this video]

Windows 3.1 to Windows 8 is incremental. This, however, was not: [this video] It's hard to pin down, but I'd define a fundamental advance as one that either (a) multiplies the number of addressable problems, or (b) constitutes a sudden and sizable nonlinear jump in capability over a very short period of time. It does often result from the combination of existing things, but it's always a discontinuity. A fundamental innovation is when 1 + 1 + 1 = 1000, not 3. It's a big monumental win that unlocks whole sections of the "technology tree" that were not reachable at all before. An example of (a) would be the final integration of all the components necessary for a CPU onto a single die. An example of (b) would be what the development of the alternating current transformer did for energy transmission over long distances. The most dramatic examples are both. Examples of these would be the first radio transmission or the first rotary electrical generator. These were utterly unprecedented innovations that changed human life radically. They weren't linear at all. You're right. I haven't seen many of these in my lifetime. I can think of some low-magnitude borderline cases but nothing Earth-shattering that has touched me directly. But if I'd lived from, say, 1900 to 1970, I'd have seen many in rapid succession. You seem to be arguing that such things do not exist-- that the fitness-weighted combinatorial state space for technology is completely smooth and incrementally traversable. I think y

Some of TempleOS actually reminded me of the MOAD[1], and even the Acme[2] editor a bit. The beauty of plain text is that it's trivial to interpret though (not unicode so much). Anything else and you need to start to worry about backward/forward compatibility, byte orders, etc... I imagine it's probably easier when you only have only one platform to think about though. I liked the index concept. There have been more than one (successful) efforts to build a filesystem that fully supports indexing content, but they're generally implicit indexes. Explicit indexing via file content might be interesting. I'm not sure what the real justification for running everything in Ring-0 is. I can't think of many reasons for anything more than minimal privileges to be a benefit. [1] [this video] [2] [link]

Kind of want reply both to you and @pjc50: I think moving images with sound as part of hypertext/hypermedia is a given -- and has been since (at least) the 60s. That's not just "TV". And "TV" isn't just video. We've only recently entered the era where users can reasonably make live and recorded video, and use that as a form of expression (from video chat, to youtube/vimeo to snapchat etc). And just like you could take a tv camera and use that for video conferencing in the 60s[1] -- video-the-medium is much more than "TV". "TV" is indeed very pacifying. For myself, I can on days off, do two very different things that are very immersive : watch tv series, or play Star Wars: Online Galaxies. Now, I mostly play SWTOR solo, so for the purpose of this discussion, lets just use "play a single-player computer game". I enjoy both, but if I read a book or play a computer game -- I'm mentally invigorated . If I watch a TV series, even something interesting like "Humans"[h], "Mr. Robot"[r] -- or more interesting drama like "True Detective"[t] -- I always end up more passive. Even watching documentaries, or news -- TV ends up a very passive medium. And that's (IMNHO) just the good "TV". I find that a good movie is usually between "book" and "TV" -- something with the format/runtime that drives a different expression both in writing and directing. > We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now. I don't think the

Xerox was an immensely profitable business once. Being first to market with photocopiers, and keeping a large market share for a long time. In the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), they had the right team, the right ideas and research was absolutely going in the right direction. For instance, they had former SRI International researchers that participated in the Douglas Engelbart's "oN-Line-System", presented in 1968 in what is now known as "the mother of all demos" ( [this video] , [link] ). Their achievements include the creation of the excellent Xerox Alto computer system featuring a GUI and a mouse as input device, which inspired the Apple Macintosh and MS Windows (a story dramatized in multiple occasions, notably in the classic "Pirates of Silicon Valley"). Xerox leadership failed to visualize how innovations like the Alto could be converted into profitable products... even if it looks self-evident today. That's a once in a lifetime opportunity that they let go and as a result other companies heavily profited from PARC's findings and continue to do so today. In addition, photocopiers are no longer at the center of business activities, and usage paper is decreasing. This makes Xerox a company of the past, like Kodak or Blockbuster (not trying to be offensive, but it is fair to say so).

> human-machine cooperation is probably where the big money will be. As it has been for as long as machines have existed, really. This reminds me of Douglas Engelbart and his vision for computers. I'll cite the section of his wikipedia page that paraphrases an interview with him from 2002[0][1]. > [Douglas Engelbart] reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and that any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such problems. He was right of course, and his work lead to "The Mother of All Demos"[1]. Machine learning is the next step in using computers as thought enhancement tools. What we still need to figure out is an appropriate interface that is not as "black-boxy" as "we trained a neural net, and now we can put X in and get Y out". EDIT: Now that I read that quoted section of wikipedia again, it's funny to note that computers were "only seen as tools of automation", and how modern fears of AI are also about automation. Automation of thinking. [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] [this video]

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]

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