A radar operator named Doug Engelbart read this on the trip home from WWII. He realized that the computer was the tool that would make this possible. He went on and created everything from the mouse to lots of modern interactive computing. Many of you may have seen his "mother of all demos". If not, watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097...
That demo, in turn, influenced a generation of young computer scientists to invent interactive computing. Notably Ted Nelson & Andries van Dam who created hypertext and Alan Kay who, while at PARC, invented the desktop GUI and the concepts for tablet computer.
I recommend reading "What the Dormouse Said" by Markoff for a history of that era.
(I consider this the "NLS thread" of computer history. The other major interactive thread is from PLATO to Ray Ozzie/NOTES to Mitch Kapor, et al.)
I worked with Ted Nelson in Nottingham in 2003 (and again in Jan 2006 in Oxford) and it was a blast. He has so many ideas and brilliant endless anecdotes. I hope he works on his autobiography.
I have signed copies of all Nelson's works but Future of Information. Not boasting, but I love collecting books. The Home Computer Revolution (inscribed "We haven't got to the future yet") is a stunning book, it predicts so many things in 1977.
I find it very hard to believe, that he independently invented the mouse (ten years later?), given both spent their youths in the military as radar operators doing tracking.
Is Markoff the one, who trashes his MB Air along with the old Times, just because it is so slim (in accordance to the PR message)? Believe him if you want to...
I first read this 15 years ago in high school, when a teacher of mine saw the web first take hold and felt it important enough to photocopy this piece and spend several days in class discussing it.
However, we had really only discussed the concept of hypertext and how it fit with Bush's designs -- so much of the other concepts in the piece seem dependent upon technology which was still "far off" when I first read it in 1995. Digital photography was still a curiosity too expensive to be universally practical; I still spent lots of money getting film developed to have pictures that now sit unindexed in shoeboxes. E-ink wouldn't exist for several more years. Networked tablets were what Geordi LaForge carried around on Star Trek, not what you could buy for a few hundred bucks and use to read one of thousands of books while sitting at a bus stop. I would never expect that speech recognition would get "good enough" that I could have voice messages automatically transcribed and emailed to me.
It still blows my mind when Google Voice takes a voicemail and the transcript appears on an app on my smartphone. I still have that kid in a candy store feeling when reading a book on my iPad, or browsing all sorts of movies on Netflix's streaming service. This stuff is all amazing and I hope I never take it for granted.
It still blows my mind when Google Voice takes a voicemail and the transcript appears on an app on my smartphone.
Are you sure Google Voice transcribes all voicemail manually? There are call centers in third-world countries where people transcribe USA voicemails, you know.
The Ipad is a consumption device, unless you've found a professional niche to employ it you probably could do without it. But for me the magic is when I'm in some foreign country sitting in a hole in the wall cafetaria and my mom calls me and doesn't even realize I'm not even on the same continent.
There is plenty of magic in all this new stuff, you just have to think for a second what life was like in the 80's (2 MHz computers and bigger stereos) to appreciate the benefits of all this stuff.
This is just PR, literally. In a magazine. Just as TimBL, and the other claimants of hypertext/network/technology pieces in the comments below.
The story is not unlike the one about going to the Moon. Verne wrote about it. Physicists judged it too, to be easy (just fill in F=ma so that you escape Earth with enough thrust -- only need to build a rocket large enough). Engineering/Engineers are the last thing being given credit to. Who actually fulfilled the dream.
When people write papers about New Media and The Web, they often cite Vannevar Bush's 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”. We had a 65th anniversary panel about the paper at Hypertext 2010, at which I was the designated heretic. My position is that Bush’s paper is essentially a popular science article. It gets some things right, some wrong. It’s cavalier about its sources – especially the very important work of Emanuel Goldberg, which Bush knew and which was entirely forgotten by everyone in the field for fifty years before Michael Buckland rediscovered it.
We can point to other precursors, too. H. G. Wells, for example, wrote The World Brain before the War and tried hard to fund a foundation that would manage an open-source microfilm encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. But the really astonishing prediction is not Bush’s but Murray Leinster’s 1946 short story, “A Logic Name Joe”…
A radar operator named Doug Engelbart read this on the trip home from WWII. He realized that the computer was the tool that would make this possible. He went on and created everything from the mouse to lots of modern interactive computing. Many of you may have seen his "mother of all demos". If not, watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097...
That demo, in turn, influenced a generation of young computer scientists to invent interactive computing. Notably Ted Nelson & Andries van Dam who created hypertext and Alan Kay who, while at PARC, invented the desktop GUI and the concepts for tablet computer.
I recommend reading "What the Dormouse Said" by Markoff for a history of that era.
(I consider this the "NLS thread" of computer history. The other major interactive thread is from PLATO to Ray Ozzie/NOTES to Mitch Kapor, et al.)