40 year old computer looks awesome by today's standards

"If you, in your office, as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?"

This is a demonstration of the original Graphical User Interface, given in San Francisco, by Dough Engelbart, a researcher at Stanford.  What strikes me the most is that we haven't come very far.  In fact, when I first looked at this very simple interface, and the ease with which Engelbart was able to do things, I found myself wishing I had an interface that simple and streamlined.  Look how many mouse clicks it takes him to create a new file.  Now ask yourself how many mouse clicks it takes you to create a new file.  Computer interfaces have gotten bigger, but I'm not sure they've gotten better.

The other thing that struck me is how we're still trying to catch up to some of those original concepts.  Engelbart easily shows how he can create a collection of shopping lists for different stores, and then link each shopping list to a map that shows the location of each store.  Click on each store on the map, and the list shows up.   I dare you to do that with modern computers.  In 1968 Englebert was able to do it with a few clicks.

Prepare yourself: the Engelbart demo is long.  Don't feel bad if you want to skip ahead.  I've made it easier by highlighting the cool thing from each section.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4kp9Ciy1nE[/youtube]Watch how easily he can create new documents.  He copies and pastes text with a single click.  Don't you wish you could do that?  (The first two minutes are intros and you can skip them.)  Also notice how attractive the black text on white background is.  Why did we get 20 subsequent years of white text on black background?  Did they think it looked cooler?  Well it didn't.  It only produced eye strain.  Thank you Apple for bringing us back to black on white.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epbmU7_fvg[/youtube]He makes a map of his route home from work, with each stop on the way to run errands.  When he clicks on each destination, it pops up a list of what he needs to do at each place.  Yeah it's like hyperlinking, but way cooler.  Why don't we have this?  Maybe we need to wait another 40 years?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYCMlMidvTM[/youtube]Now he uses a "real world" example, with a conceptual flowchart.  Each item on the flowchart hyperlinks to more documents with additional information.  You can start to approach such a display with modern flowchart software like Visio, but in a presentation it looks nowhere near as clean or cool.  Not in a true nonlinear format like this.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFRSBzn3vgw[/youtube]Check it out, it's a pointing device.  "I don't know why we call it a mouse.  It started that way, and we never did change it."

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_5hTH-1CNA[/youtube]This is a demonstration of the "On-Line System" itself (NLS for short).  Turns out this system is still alive today, as HyperScope.  All my complaining that such technology doesn't exist today?  Well I guess it does.  But that still begs the question: why isn't this mainstream?  Why does Microsoft continue to toss out BS "improvements" like the "ribbon" while ignoring true functionality improvements like this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY1U-aSiNSI[/youtube]Engelbart turns it over to his even nerdier associate who gets way too technical, talking about "compilers for compilers."  At the end of this section there's a neat shot showing an image embeded in the text.  It's a diagram of a mouse, showing where the buttons are, etc.  You can write technical papers with diagrams, and even send them straight to the printer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88fUDR17dpk[/youtube]What good are documents in an office environment if you can't collaborate?  Engelbart shows how multiple people can work on a single file.  At the same time.  With video chat. Desktop computers weren't able to do this until the late 90's, and most people still don't know how.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L93-LV3cWFc[/youtube]More of the same.  "I think for the software guy it's very powerful."  No kidding.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3JH0ckWju0[/youtube]"Another forthcoming involvement is this ARPA computer network in about a year . . ."  a.k.a. the internet.  Unfortunately NLS didn't take off during the ARPA days because most of the connected computers didn't have mice.  If they had, we could have had the World Wide Web 30 years early.

It was fun to watch this presentation, known as "the mother of all demos," because it shows a glimpse into the very earliest days of personal computing, when people were just beginning to grasp what was possible.  I saw a lot of the same things during my childhood, with dial-up internet access, electronic mail, the World Wide Web, real-time chatting, and digital multimedia (music, videos, etc.).  It's exciting to realize you have a new technology that will change the way you do things on an everyday basis.

At the same time, it strikes me how lazy programmers have been in the last 40 years.  Engelbart was able to hyperlink different types of documents and do realtime collaboration and video chat with someone in a different town, and this capability still eludes most people.  Engelbart was able to get his system running with just a few clicks, and you'd be lucky to get it running after hours of setup.  I should know, I've tried.  Looking back at what they had 40 years ago makes me wistful for what might have been.

J<