Computer History Museum
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2025
7:26 · 17K views · Dec 14, 2013
Ted Nelson's short eulogy for Douglas Engelbart, delivered at the Computer History Museum in 2013, reflecting on his friend and Engelbart's ideas.
Recommended as a moving tribute that laments how little of Engelbart's vision caught on.
3 comments from Hacker News
>[...] but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on. I'm sad that he and others like Ted Nelson and Brett Victor would rightly say that his most important innovations have so far failed to catch on. But there's still time to raise awareness and make them real! Ted Nelson's Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart this video >Ted Nelson's emotional and moving eulogy for his friend Douglas Engelbart. Given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on December 9, 2013. An Homage to Douglas Engelbart and a Critique of the State of Tech: [LINK] >You don’t need me to tell you that Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time. We gather today, in pretense of unanimity and concord, to croon over Doug’s ashes and grab for scraps of his robe. >Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did. >Some are no doubt here to cheer and march behind the mouse, as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of yore. Let them be happy in that celebration. >But the real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration. >Don’t get me wrong, the people who gave us all those fonts were idealists too, in their way — they just didn’t necessarily hold a very high view of human potential. >I used to have a high view of human
Alan Kay made scathing comments on the World Wide Web browser (reinventing a broken wheel) at length in a lecture "Normal Considered Harmful" for computer science students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For context: Alan himself invented WYSIWYG at Xerox PARC. He was present at "the mother of all demo's" by Douglas Englebart. Ted Nelson who invented hyperlinks and Xanadu got Alan in touch with his future wife [2] and Alan was there at Apple when Bill Atkinson made Hypercard. He mentions that when he told Tim Berners Lee about the much better work of Douglas Englebart, Tim was chagrined (that he had not read any of the papers about earlier and much better designs of 28, 25 and 20 years before the WWW browser). Of course Alan also discusses how the web should have been done. In short, it should be that when you click a hyperlink you load a virtual machine in a secure sandbox of a Operating System Kernel. The virtual machine would then render the (bitmap or vector) pages. Operating System 101, well known in 1965. Of course, Alan's team did implement this (several times). I can demo this if you contact me. Email me at morphle [at] ziggo [dot] nl for a video where Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart and Tim Berners Lee meet and talk about this at a forum discussion. You can ask me about anything related to Alan, Ted or Douglas, I maintain an extensive archive with all scientific papers, emails, talks, interviews and lecture video's. Alan, Ted and Douglas worked closely togeth
Also worth saying... this video Are we now, this moment, coming to 5:15-5:34? I suspect, and hope, that the eulogist was pointing this toward ARPA and SRI and not me.