Inventing the Computer Mouse | Douglas Engelbart | Talks at Google

Douglas Engelbart | Talks at Google

One video on the /islandweller channel is this: link to this video a 56-minute visit / presentation with Doug and several others at Google. Inspirational ideas (unfortunately displayed with slides instead of Hyperdoc demos) and perplexed reactions in the ending Q&A session. These ideas are so different; ordinary presentations are clearly incapable of selling them. (As Nelson, too, found out repeatedly.) Looks like job#1 is bootstrapping Hyperdoc presentation methods. Guess the 'Mother of all Demos' needs a 'Mother-Squared'. Another reaction: the video I saw had very low resolution, and the audio was recorded in a terribly noisy environment. I'm completely unable to process how this could -ever- have ha…

This is along the lines of structured arguments link Doug Engelbart the creator of NLS and famous for Mother of All Demos talks about such systems link to this video and link etc. The general principle is we won't make much progress discussing complex issues by simply recreating the print world with increased convenience of a computer like we do now. The discussions have to take a fundamentally different form, possible only on computers, such as semantic argument maps, etc. Of course his perspective comes from 1950's when educated people had civil discussions that solved problems, or at least that's the modern nostalgia. He imagined a new class of "knowledge workers" moderating information. Instead…

…f simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell. For reference link link to this video…

Thanks for the reply! It's a really interesting piece of research. Yes, you're quite right, the browser alone can't interact between all the programs, I was purely thinking of low hanging fruit for the browser plugin. I watched a Google interview with Douglas Engelbart 0 where people asked him a couple of times if Wikipedia was what he'd envisioned for hypertext, he was very polite about it and said it "was a good start", but he'd clearly wished that we'd got much further by now. What you're suggesting is definitely a step forward. 0: link to this video