It’s been exactly 40 years since a man, one of the greatest visionaries in the world of computing, showed a crowd things that they really, really didn’t understand. The visionary showed things you could do with a computer that we can still barely do today. He was the first to show windows, a mouse, video conferencing, document collaboration, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, and so much more. Yes, yesterday was the 40th anniversary of what would become known as The Mother Of All Demos. Please pay your respects.
Douglas Engelbart was a man way ahead of his time – a cliché, I know, but in this case it’s simple truth. The audience during the legendary demonstration consisted of the cream of the crop of the American compute science world, and even they had absolutely no idea what they had just seen – it went completely over their heads. “[Engelbart] was one of the very few people very early on who were able to understand not only that computers could do a lot of things that were very familiar,” as Alan Kay, legend in his own right, explains, “but that there was something new about computers that allow us to think in a very different way – in a stronger way.”
Those that witnessed the demonstration also believe that the functionality of the oN-Line System (NLS), as Engelbart’s environment was called, has yet to be realised in modern-day computing. “We’re looking back at this with a kind of nostalgia, asking what this magician did for us. But ask yourself this: What do we really have today?” Andries van Dam, a professor who attended the demo, wonders, “We have a collection of tools at out disposal that don’t inter-operate. We’ve got Microsoft Word. We’ve got PowerPoint. We’ve got Illustrator. We’ve got Photoshop. We can do a lot of individual things that were done with NLS and we can do them with more functionality… But they don’t work together. They don’t play nice together. And most of the time, what you’ve got is an import/export capability that serves as a lowest common denominator.”
According to Van Dam, NLS was about so much more than GUIs of today. “Everything inter-operated in this super rich environment. And if you look at the demo carefully, it’s about modifying, it’s about studying, it’s about being really analytical, and reflecting about what’s happening.”
Alan Kay agrees with Van Dam. “You may have noticed after watching the demo that [NLS’s] response time is a just a little bit better than we have today,” Kay argues.
Personally, I love the bigger point that both Van Dam and Kay put forth in the Register article. As El Reg summarises so painfully accurate: “NLS was designed to harness the power of ‘collective intelligence’ – to create a deeper level of thought. His research group was dedicated to ‘augmenting human intellect.’ But forty years on, Engelbart’s core vision has vanished. NLS has devolved into Twitter.”
Whenever I hear someone refer to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as computer visionaries, I cringe. Gates and Jobs are lucky if they may kiss the ground Engelbart walked on.
Why haven’t the things that haven’t been realised been done yet?
Well the article talks about responsiveness: BeOS on 10time less powerful HW was more responsive that what we have today, it still failed.
The Microsoft’s monopoly reduce competition..
Well… BeOS was very responsive doing nothing.
No apps, no market. Simple as that…
When going against a giant like Microsoft. You better bring a clear value proposition to the table. And as much as I liked BeOS, they did a piss poor job in identifying a clear initial market that would secure at leas some revenue stream.
Of course, MS’s anti competitive practice of forcing every OEM to have an MS OS installed by default did not help either. But Be was aware of that from the get go.
One reason is competition. When a dozen different companies compete to sell you a half dozen different solutions, interoperability will go out the window. For something like this to work one company has to supply the whole software stack from the OS (or even the hardware) on up.
As long as your presentation software comes from Microsoft, your illustrating software from Adobe and your video conferencing software is from Skype, you’ll never have that level interop. Of course there a plenty of good reasons why competition in software is a good things, but it is not without its costs.
The idea that we need monopolies for interoperability is nonsense. Healthy competition is best for consumers. It encourages portable open standards. Companies are more inclined to obey independent standards if consumers demand it and their rivals supply it.
Perhaps in theory it’s nonsense, but reality seems to point that way.
Here I fully agree with you.
Standards are very hard to write, and even harder to follow (see w3c as an example). Look at Microsoft Office as a counter example. Say what you want about the quality of the software (I know I have), but the interoperability between all the different components is pretty amazing and could never have happened if each component came from a different vendor.
I still hold that truly seamless integration can only come if one vendor supplies the whole stack. Now we can get pretty good and perfectly usable integration with multiple vendors, and there are plenty of other obvious advantages with having multiple vendors. In fact I’d say that the advantage multiple vendors (trying to) follow a set standard far outweighs the cost of less than perfect integration, but it is still a cost.
Basically, because around that time everyone thought that a HAL 9000 was just around the corner and people came up with all sorts of new, and as it turned out great, ideas about what could be done. Sadly, all of the background stuff that was required to achieve such a thing turned out to be far more complicated and needed far more processing power then was on offer. Doing a presentation is one thing, but making it a reality is something different.
Over the years we then saw the evolution of the software market and individual software companies doing their own thing where compatibility went out of the window as they kept their source code secret. The only way to get something like NLS is to let open source software become dominant, let people have a clean sheet of paper with no preconceived ideas, let the software evolve and converge into compatibility and come back in a few decades.
Many people, including Microsoft, will say that if you have one platform then that can be made a reality. Alas, running Windows on everything as a lowest denominator is never going to come to fruition. Ironically, all that ‘one operating system’ brain washing has taken us further away from what we want to have happen – everything working with everything else. We just haven’t got the foggiest how we would go about doing it now other than to say “Use this”, and that’s the saddest thing.
A large part of the problem is that document-centrism has almost completely fallen “out of vogue” in favour of application-centrism. The other part is the mindset that you need an all-encompassing, end-to-end solution for every imaginable task.
Mix in the prevailing economic/business “wisdom” (aka, “make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible – and to hell with any long-term consequences”) and you have the current situation. With those factors, over-engineered software & constant re-invention of the wheel is an inevitability.
The thing I find most amusing is that – as a result – it’s often more pleasant/less of a pain in the ass to use software that was created by developers with fewer resources. In words, software created by developers who didn’t have the resources and/or incentive to reinvent the wheel.
Edited 2008-12-11 18:12 UTC
The demo link has a missing =, so here is the actual link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
What we don’t have today is a:
1) standard universal digital data format. With such a format, it would be possible for individual programs to parse documents easily (semantic analysis is a different thing).
2) a standard communications protocol. We have dozens of communication protocols, all doing the same thing, sending information down the wire. There isn’t a common way to discover what is there, what data and services it has etc.
Without these, the universal collaboration dream will never be realized.
I’m about half-way through the video. I highly recommend it.
It is amazing how much they could do with so little – and I don’t mean just hardware.
He introduces three or four simple fundamental concepts (structured text, mouse, and links), and then blossoms them into what must be the worlds first multi-media PowerPoint presentation.
The software world needs a Great Simplification Movement.
Whenever I hear someone refer to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as computer visionaries, I cringe. Gates and Jobs are lucky if they may kiss the ground Engelbart walked on.
Yeah, because only one person, ever is allowed to be referred to as a “visionary”. Please. Gates and Jobs are visionaries in their own ways.
Yeah, but not really computer visionaries. They’re more along the lines of business visionaries.
Fair enough.