I, Cringely: "Even the Best Technology Can Be Ignored If It Is Difficult to Classify"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040826.html' target='_blank'>http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/...it20040826.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"I spent an afternoon recently with Doug Engelbart, talking about making computing history and troubleshooting Doug's DSL line. Doug, for those who haven't heard of him, conceived of and then went on to invent much of what we value today in computing from the standpoint of the user. Networks, graphical computing, hypertext, the mouse -- Doug's the guy behind all of those in one way or another. He is best known as the inventor of the mouse, but his work goes far beyond that. Doug did most of this at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA. And nearly all of those innovations first came to him during a momentary fugue state Doug entered while driving to work one day in 1950."</i><br /><br />This is a completely off topic, but very cool article about the creator of many of the modern computing concepts we take for granted today - and how he was ridiculed for them. Worth a read!

[gorkon280]

Don't really see how it's totally off topic as soon our PDA will be if not the only computer we have, it will replace the laptop. If it were not for him, there would have been no mice and no interface for Microsoft to try to make fit on a small screen! :D

The video is at the following website in real video format.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

[omikron.sk]

Very interesting article.

I definitely would like to see more of such articles.

[Jason Dunn]

Very interesting article. I definitely would like to see more of such articles.

If you like them, the best thing to do is sign up for notification when Bob writes another one - they're awesome!

[omikron.sk]

Very interesting article. I definitely would like to see more of such articles.

If you like them, the best thing to do is sign up for notification when Bob writes another one - they're awesome!
Thank you for your advice. I just did it.

[T-Will]

Wow, the demo that Engelbart did in 1968 is pretty amazing considering that personal computers didn't even exist at the time!

[Christian]

That demo blows me away... it really sets a standard for thinking outside the box.