Engelbart’s achievements are often listed as “inventor of the mouse”, but in the last month I’ve been learning about his work and it was much broader: deep knowledge management, with all that UI and collaboration shown in that famous demo which were just tools he had to build on his path to his vision of improving humanity.
Essentially, documents in NLS were always structured, and then visualized in different ways. The document format itself was somewhat limited for today’s needs but could have been expanded instead of giving that up for WYSIWYG when his team left him for Xerox PARC.
That structured format was similar to LISP, with a tree structure like modern outliner[1] documents. The tree structure could be displayed as plain text with indentation, or as a graphical tree. Both views are shown in the demo, in addition to the map view (limited to lines between the different stations in his grocery shopping example).
To keep things brief, I just want to say that, if this sounds at least a bit interesting, spend some time learning about Engelbart from him: there are several videos with demos, presentations and interviews with him in YouTube.
Here is one, “The Augmented Knowledge Workshop”, 1986: https://youtu.be/sG3PWet8fDk?t=316
Apparently, there is a documentary coming up this year:
“The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wnS1Pls6Fc
And here some overview at an event in his honour after he died:
https://youtu.be/FNCCkhADpiw?t=3374 (there is a part before that point where his long time friend Ted Nelson’s speech is greeted with the usual scorn and laughs which displeased me, but that’s another complicated story: I’d recommend here too to learn about Nelson’s work by yourself, there is more in there than meets the eye).
Engelbart’s achievements are often listed as “inventor of the mouse”, but in the last month I’ve been learning about his work and it was much broader: deep knowledge management, with all that UI and collaboration shown in that famous demo which were just tools he had to build on his path to his vision of improving humanity.
Essentially, documents in NLS were always structured, and then visualized in different ways. The document format itself was somewhat limited for today’s needs but could have been expanded instead of giving that up for WYSIWYG when his team left him for Xerox PARC.
That structured format was similar to LISP, with a tree structure like modern outliner[1] documents. The tree structure could be displayed as plain text with indentation, or as a graphical tree. Both views are shown in the demo, in addition to the map view (limited to lines between the different stations in his grocery shopping example).
[1] http://outliners.scripting.com/
To keep things brief, I just want to say that, if this sounds at least a bit interesting, spend some time learning about Engelbart from him: there are several videos with demos, presentations and interviews with him in YouTube. Here is one, “The Augmented Knowledge Workshop”, 1986: https://youtu.be/sG3PWet8fDk?t=316
Apparently, there is a documentary coming up this year: “The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wnS1Pls6Fc And here some overview at an event in his honour after he died: https://youtu.be/FNCCkhADpiw?t=3374 (there is a part before that point where his long time friend Ted Nelson’s speech is greeted with the usual scorn and laughs which displeased me, but that’s another complicated story: I’d recommend here too to learn about Nelson’s work by yourself, there is more in there than meets the eye).