What happens to Engelbart makes me and many others angry, but on what earth would people understand his vision in half a century?
Big advantage of Victor is all the experience he is inheriting from Engelbart. More than the vision, he is familiar with all the ways he is familiar with what happened to Engelbart, and so he is well prepared. I hope not to see his work being killed in its prime.
Life is such a strange thing. My view of a happy life has become happy surviving through the bad days. With people dying and you becoming sad, yet in the middle experiencing birth and that happy feeling. Life is strange and beautiful, but fairly very sad.
There is something about this archive that struck me each time I see it. I’m used to overly commercial websites and simple HTML homepages; this website, however, has all the craft and yet is not commercial. Therefore, it becomes so real. Postman’s “now … this” is not present here; this is the real deal, the real show. The archive is not a lens to see the content from a distance; it is the thing, and that strikes you.
In my childhood, I was presented with such a sure view of the advanced world we live in. I had a strong belief in the engineering grounds on which we stand. Nowadays I feel so unsure. I see how the world is a mess, how good ideas are nowhere near implementation, and it breaks me. I just realized I’m overcoming the overwhelming feeling of betrayal that has taken hold of me.
We talked about technology being like music and he thought what if we were able to hear it, and feel it, and use music notation, and have people actually use technology together in a whole new different kind of way. So the coded key set was unconscious and automatic for him, just like me playing this is unconscious and automatic for me. [...] The whole idea that you could actually have instead of a piano a piano that connects the technology where we can improvise together people can be on different instruments and we could imagine futures and uses for technology
The project was to evaluate or invent pointing devices that could be used in the space capsule, because we were just starting to send astronauts up and stuff, and NASA had a big enough vision that they could see that they were going to want to have have astronauts interacting with computers.
Doug from his previous scaling studies knew that our knee movement is actually the one of the most accurate that we have in our body. And they had trackballs [...] at the time and the trackball was basically two orthogonal orthogonal wheels with a ball on top and as you rotated the ball you'd rotate the wheels, and had little digital optical things inside and so you could cut wheel rotations in the software and you can figure out where the mouse was, so Doug and Bill English came up with the idea of turning a trackball upside down and and using your wrist in your hand to move the trackball on the table rather than having the trackball with the ball facing up, [...] and that's where the idea for the original Mouse came from