#engelbart

Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on. The 5-finger keyset lets you type without moving your hand, entering characters by pressing multiple keys simultaneously as a chord. Christina Englebart, his daughter, loaned one of Engelbart's keysets to me. I constructed an interface to connect the keyset to USB, so that it can be used with a modern computer. The video below shows me typing with the keyset, using the mouse buttons to select upper case and special characters.

Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. via Pocket

If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart's design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart's intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems.

If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart's design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart's intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems.

In the 1950s, Doug Engelbart set his sights on a lofty goal — to develop dramatically better ways to support intellectual workers around the globe in the daunting task of finding solutions to larger and larger problems with greater speed and effectiveness than ever before imagined. His goal was to revolutionize the way we work together on such tasks. He saw computers, at the time used only for number crunching, as a new medium for advancing the state of the art in collaborative knowledge work

In the 1950s, Doug Engelbart set his sights on a lofty goal — to develop dramatically better ways to support intellectual workers around the globe in the daunting task of finding solutions to larger and larger problems with greater speed and effectiveness than ever before imagined. His goal was to revolutionize the way we work together on such tasks. He saw computers, at the time used only for number crunching, as a new medium for advancing the state of the art in collaborative knowledge work

As designers, we all know that on-screen soft keyboards are cumbersome and rather slow to use due to their lack of physical texture and haptic feedback. And with the continual rise of touch screens on phones, tablets, and laptops, we got excited about giving the chorded keyboard another chance!

I want this as a poster!

"in the last few years I've been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they've ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have."

"The most impressive thing about Doug is that he's an incredibly decent human being."

I haven't talked much about it, but Hyperscope uses OPML 2.0 as its native file format.

"AUGMENT is a text processing system marketed by Tymshare for a multi-user, network environment."

"The OpenAugment Consortium is a not-for-profit open source corporation dedicated to the preservation of the Augment legacy."

"This file is a sort of " programmed text" for new users of Augment."

"I've created a screencast mockup of what the HyperScope UI might look like."

"We're back again at Doug Engelbart's house, trying to do another edition of Nerd TV. Doug, thanks for having us here."

"Do you want to be locked into tricycles because they're easy to learn?"