10 Dec
1998
10 Dec
'98
7:20 p.m.
On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Uncle Roger wrote:
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>
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.
BTW, the semi-enlightened folks at HP did try to pull off a little
Engelbart trick in 1993 that few people remember: the HP OmniShare. It
was an "inexpensive" (~$2500) little computer with a LCD/pen-based
digitizer that had networking, fax/modem, and very interesting
collaborative software built-in.
In won a few awards, and then faded away about six months after
introduction.
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.
(The real moral of the story is that I have a pair of OmniShares, and I
just felt like gloating :-)
-- Doug