December 10, 2024

— Douglas Englebart

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Keep slogging away ...

It's the 1930s, and a boy named Douglas is growing up on a small farm in Oregon.

He spends his childhood surrounded by fields and forests. Life is quiet, simple. But inside his mind? There’s nothing quiet about it. He asks big questions, and most of the adults around him can't answer them.

It's the 1940s. The world changes as Douglas reaches his teenage years. The Great Depression gives way to war, and Douglas finds himself swept up. He graduates from high school and goes directly into the U.S. Navy, becoming a radar technician. He spends countless hours with the cutting-edge machinery of the time.

The work is tedious, but he's enthralled. He's not just punching buttons. He’s thinking. Machines, he realizes, aren’t just tools. They can amplify human capabilities. They can extend what’s possible.

It's the 1950s. Douglas, now a veteran, returns to civilian life. He goes to college, gets his degree in electrical engineering, gets married, and starts a family. He’s got a steady job at a government research lab. On paper, everything looks good. Stable. Comfortable.

But he's restless.

Sitting in a library one day, he has a realization that changes his life. He imagines a world in which humanity can tackle its biggest challenges collectively. What if machines could help people think better, communicate better, work better together? And what if sharing information on screens, like the radar he used in the war, were among the keys?

What if, instead of just processing numbers, computers could augment human intelligence?

It's the 1960s. Douglas's vision consumes him. He leaves his steady job and begins the uphill battle to make his dream a reality. He joins the Stanford Research Institute, where he assembles a team of brilliant, unconventional thinkers. They call themselves the Augmentation Research Center, or ARC, and together they work on something truly radical: a system they call the oN-Line System, or NLS.

It’s not just software. It’s a philosophy, a way of thinking about technology as an amplifier for human potential.

It's the cup of the 1970s. After years of work, Douglas and his team have created tools nobody has seen before and few have imagined. Finally, on December 9, 1968 -- so, 56 years ago yesterday -- Douglas has the opportunity to debut some of the technology he and his team have developed — things like:

• The idea of hypertexting information on a screen, so that readers can click on "links" and learn more context.
• The idea of multiple people have access to a single draft of a document, and being able to edit it collaboratively in real time.
• And, the one that symbolized it all, the idea of a computer with a graphical user interface, that could be manipulated via a keyboard, or else via a groundbreaking tool: a small, physical box that tracked its position in real time, and was connected to a computer by a long cord.

The cord reminded Douglas of a tail, so he called the device a "mouse."

It's now the 2020s, of course and our main character today was in fact named Douglas -- Douglas Engelbart, who gave a 90-minute demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco all those years ago, that people now call "the Mother of All Demos."

Even the way he shared is demo was groundbreaking -- a custom-built computer terminal, connected via a network to his team back at their lab, with a massive screen projecting every move he makes so that the audience can see it all in real time.

​The entire demonstration is preserved online, and it's intriguing to see a group of enthralled people from the past getting their first all-in-one glimpse the future.

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The contributions of Douglas Englebart were overshadowed later by more entreprenurial names and simpler visions of personal computing. But his dream was always bigger than just making machines more useful. He wanted to make people more capable.

We need a quote of the day. Douglas had a lot of good ones, but I like this quote for what it says not just about the time when he unveiled his works, but the earlier decision he made to to pursue it.

Slog away, my friends.

Did you see ...

• The NYPD named a 2020 University of Pennsylvania graduate, Luigi Mangione, as a “strong person of interest” in the ongoing murder investigation of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Police in Altoona, Pa. detained Mangione in a McDonald’s after someone reportedly thought he looked like the much-circulated photos of the shooter. Police said he was carrying a gun that looked like the one used in the shooting that may have been built using a 3D printer, along with fake IDs and a "handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset." (Daily Pennsylvanian)
• Mangione, 26, is the heir to a holiday resort fortune created by his grandparents - and the brother of a top doctor. He grew up in relative comfort in Maryland, according to reports, was first in his class at a $40,000-a-year private high school, and comes from a powerful family centered around its late patriarch, Nicholas Mangiano, a first-generation American who built a real estate empire that included country clubs and media. (Daily Mail)
• Daniel Penny and his legal team went barhopping in Manhattan on Monday to celebrate his acquittal in his closely watched manslaughter trial. Penny, 26, was spotted having a beer with his defense lawyers Thomas Kenniff and Steven Raiser at Stone Street Tavern in the Financial District hours after a jury acquitted him of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely. The group eventually moved on to American Whiskey bar in Midtown. Jurors took about five days to find that Penny was not criminally responsible for killing Neely when he allegedly placed him in a chokehold on a crowded subway in May 2023. (NY Post)
• Dollar General is testing same-day delivery to customers’ homes as the deep discounter tries to fend off fiercer competition with Walmart. (I hate to say "good luck with that," but good luck with that.) (NBC News)
• Ministers in Sweden's government are considering imposing age limits on social media platforms if tech companies find themselves unable to prevent gangs from recruiting young people online to carry out murders and bombings in the Nordics. (Reuters)
• Fear of Trump tariffs is causing some Americans to stockpile toilet paper, medicine, and food before prices rise, according to a new survey. About one-third say they will spend more money this holiday season, and the top motivation is fear of higher tariffs under Trump. About 30% said they are likely to go into or worsen debt in order to buy things now. (Fortune)
• Arrivederci! Why young Italians are leaving in droves. Those leaving blame low salaries and little recognition for their skills. The proportion of graduates leaving in particular is on the rise. (AFP)