-
Website
http://www.scobleizer.com/ -
Original page
http://scobleizer.com/2005/11/14/29-i-gave-douglas-englebart-a-mouse-and-a-book/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
Alex: you have no idea. My life is surreal. I'm getting to meet people who are simply national treasures. I don't know how to put it any other way.
And they say that scotsmen are cheap....!
So why doesnt MS hire him ? Sounds as if he's just the man to breathe new life into the Vista corpse!
---* Bill
Wild Bill: he wouldn't really joing MS, let alone any other org. now but MS would definitely benefit from his consulting...
Scoble: that post u deleted...i read the same thing on Motley Fool...i still don't get why the post was taken down: http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05111113.htm
Words can be much more immersive than pictures. Pictures are much easier to spank out than words, especially if you are an analphabet and you run Windows.
Look at MS. They have 61,000 employees, and their last few major announcements have all REEKED of "Follow someone else". Invention happens when someone gets annoyed enough by a problem to fix it. Just like nine women can't have a baby in a month, throwing more people at a problem can't solve it any faster. MS is simply too big, and if the rumors of 8000+ coders out of 61,000 employees is true, well, it would explain much.
you can't really innovate in all areas all the time...see how the innovation cycle is slowing down for Google...it'll happen as they expand into many areas and their employee base increases at the same time...
I believe he was not only looking at you to speed up the innovation to realization process, he was indicting you. The 800 lb gorilla likes the status quo - a lot.
Did you know Doug still is a volunteer at the Computer History Museum?
He's an awesome guy to just sit and have a conversation with -- I am so glad you had a chance to meet him!
Next time give him some cheese. Mice like cheese, ya know!
Well You are a lucky fellow!!!
I hope i got the chance to meet him some day to..
VJS
Nevertheless, cool post...thanks.
We are closing the gap from innovation to adoption but it definitely could be better. I agree that blogs and other forms of mass communication being available to the general public will only accelerate this trend.
You're a businessman? Is blogging about anything that crosses your mind now considered "business"?
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/
I did PR for SRI (agency side) from '97-'02 and had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Engelbart several times.
I have a number of stories of Dr. Engelbart, but what always struck me was his frustration that people were simply satisfied with his innovations from decades ago, forgetting that there is *so* much improvement to be made. "Sure, we've gone from here to here, but we have THIS FAR to go!" he once said in 2001, continuing with "That's why I'm grey -- I'm really only forty."
Honestly, people's tendency to tie Dr. Engelbart to the invention of the mouse (to the exclusion of almost everything else) is akin to reducing Edison's entire ouevre to the light bulb.
Or... As one wag put it (paraphrasing): "I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug Engelbart's ideas."
Eww, I hope you didn't say that to the world's expert on human interaction with computer devices.
I want to claim that Halo 2 is particularly special by acting as if we would have no way to fathom it if we were so crude as to perceive the world as ASCII.
Ignore the fact that we as humans and most creatures on earth usually have eyes and even the crudest visual perceptions are far superior the computer characters.
There's certainly no way I could say: it looks like a 1st person landscape with fewer colors, more jagged and less real representation of objects, with all the curves or non-linear objects a bit more hard-edged or boxier....
No, prior to last year or even the advent of video (when was that? The 70s for computers?...) that could not be described at all except by a bunch of ASCII characters.
A similarly interesting talk is Alan Kay's "Are we there yet?" He points out that the average computer today is still much too rigid and too difficult to use to create things, visualize things, and experiment.
If what you want to do doesn't fit into one of the little "boxes" like MS Word, MS Excel, or MS powerpoint, then you'll have to program, and programming today remains tremendously primative (C#, Java, and the current crop of languages are baby steps on the near end of a road that was paved long ago at PARC).
Of course, Windows is set in stone. The only way to do anything is to throw the whole mess out and begin again. (See http://opencroquet.org for some folks doing this). Microsoft will reach out and crush any effort to do this as they have much too much invested in buggy whips to allow internal combustion to gain a foothold.
http://www.futuresalon.org/2005/11/collective_i...
IT Conversations: Doug Engelbart - Large-Scale Collective IQ
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail378....
Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution (2004)
http://www.archive.org/details/FutureSalon_11_2004
If I have to pick one flabbergasting moment of this year, it was seeing the video at reboot and thinking (like most of the people in the room): what the hell have they done the last 27 years? They had everything already there.
It leaves me with the question: What did they also invent we have not seen yet, and why have we not seen it?
That being said, per Xerox PARC taken decades for things to impact. Even yet now, not much closer to Kay's "Dynabook", the Tablet being a poor substitute. Still legend's like Butler W. Lampson and Chuck Thacker are some of MFST's best employees. Just a darned shame MFST can't milk it.
Doug Englebart invented the English language?
As far as not being able to describe things without pictures. I imagine Shakespeare and Robert Frost would disagree with you.
But movies, comics, and video games are far more than text. The creator or creators are presenting not just a 'super soldier in green armor' but rather a very specific representation of what that guy looks like, how he sounds, how he moves, etc. A skillful writer may decribes these attributes well but it is not remotely the same experience.
Some things are better left to the reader's imagination. I recall a long running SF series about a far future military officer in which different artists were used for most of the covers. (Some of the artwork was possibly created for other material and repurposed for these books.) Some of these had an interpretation of the character that was jarringly in disagreement with my own imagined version of the character. Some seemed pretty spot on. But all were valid based on the text and the clash with my aesthetics was as much my fault as theirs. I'd be interested to know which covers the author most favors.
Halo 2 is not just ideas on a page but also how they're embodied by the running game. The quality of those visuals and other elements of the presentation are critical selling points of the product. Promoting that product on a text-only medium would be painful.
A great idea is only step one of innovation. It took decades for the set of ideas Engelbart presented in the 60's to catch on because these were things to make computers usable by a far wider range of people. That didn't avoid the issue of what the computers cost. It took many years before computers were even a common retail item and more before the machines possessed the level of power needed to bring Engelbart's concept to a wide audience.
It isn't just a matter of reaching consumers. It also means making the cost of entry low enough so developing around new ideas isn't restricted to a small elite. The number of people creating video games exploded when there were affordable personal computers that allowed nearly anyone to learn how to program and have access to a platform where they could publish software without being in the business of manufacturing the platform. There is a huge difference between producing an arcade machine and a game that runs on a home computer. In 1979 all of the people in the world who had created a video game could hold a meeting in any big hotel ballroom. Just a few years later that number had increased by orders of magnitude. The difference? Millions of relatively cheap home computers.