513 posts
Australia
Posted 03 July 2013 - 10:24 PM
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share the news that Douglas Engelbart has passed away today.
He was probably most famous for his role in the invention of the Computer Mouse, but his work also included the chorded keyboard, modern text editors, collaborative computing, hypertext and in general the use of computers as a workstation rather than a scientific instrument. Today he is often regarded as the father of HCI.
When I was in my third year of undergrad, one of my lecturers showed a segment of a video in which he demonstrated the first working mouse being used with a keyboard. Many of the things I mentioned above were shown in the video, shot and released in 1968. Watching what was the first example of things like a transparent file operating system, basic text editing with things like cutting, copying, pasting to a world that has known for centuries nothing more than writing words on a surface with a pencil or pen, was amazing.
You can watch the full 100 minute video, separated into segments, here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
I hope you find it as inspiring as I did when I was just starting out in computer science.
I wanted to share the news that Douglas Engelbart has passed away today.
He was probably most famous for his role in the invention of the Computer Mouse, but his work also included the chorded keyboard, modern text editors, collaborative computing, hypertext and in general the use of computers as a workstation rather than a scientific instrument. Today he is often regarded as the father of HCI.
When I was in my third year of undergrad, one of my lecturers showed a segment of a video in which he demonstrated the first working mouse being used with a keyboard. Many of the things I mentioned above were shown in the video, shot and released in 1968. Watching what was the first example of things like a transparent file operating system, basic text editing with things like cutting, copying, pasting to a world that has known for centuries nothing more than writing words on a surface with a pencil or pen, was amazing.
You can watch the full 100 minute video, separated into segments, here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
I hope you find it as inspiring as I did when I was just starting out in computer science.
