11 Dec
1998
11 Dec
'98
3 a.m.
> The actual demo had taken place 30 years ago in
1968, and the star of the
> demo was Doug Englebart.
<spelling flame>
Engelbart.
</spelling flame>
Come on - common English problems :)
> Think about your first reaction to what sounds
like whiteboarding software
> that is starting to become commonplace. Now consider that the demo was
> filmed 30 years ago in *black and white*! That's how far ahead Englebart
> and his team really were (or, how far we *haven't* come when we should have!)
Blame Microsoft; I do.
The moral of the story is that it's relatively
easy to give a good demo,
slightly harder to do a real implementation, and then very hard to get
market acceptance and penetration for new ideas.
Thats one thing, the other is how superior design (soft
and hardware) can be dumped in favour of crapy PCs.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s we had at SIEMENS a
network of EMS 5800 systems - OEM versions of the Xerox
Star - all over Germany and most European dependances.
Of course not every Employee had one, since including a
laser priter it was some 100,000 Mark value, but at least
most departments that needed to.
Just imagine, a System with 21" screens, mouse, OO desktop,
document centric workflow, WYSIWYG editing (in place etc.),
LAN/WAN networking, laser printers, xxx megabytes of storage
etc. in 1980 and this system was scraped in favour for DOS
(later Windows) PCs with 12" to 14" Displays and WORD (DOS).
And in my opinion no PC (no Win, no MacOS and no Next)
has catched up with the Star - and it's more than 20
years later !
BTW: Xerox' quality was just junk - from 10 systems
delivered to Witten (the SIEMENS plant where they
where configured and repacked) only 5 worked properly,
and 3 more could be reassembled from the five non
working. Like in the SU - 10 tractors delivered to
a farm coop and the farmers had to change parts
until at least 5 of them worked .... :)
(The real moral of the story is that I have a pair of
OmniShares, and I
just felt like gloating :-)
It might be easyer if you just tell what hand held
device you don't have .... Grrr :)
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK