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Xerox PARCers Doug Englebart and Alan Kay Webcast 35

Posted by emmett from the nifty-stuff dept.
Ryandav writes "Dr. Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse, and Dr. Alan Kay, creator of overlapping windows, were both part of the research group that created ARPAnet, and were heavily involved at Xerox PARC. Both were invited by the Progress Project and the University of Washington to speak about issues confronting humans as we rethink information technology in the future. The entertaining talk was archived for Webcast here." For those who enjoyed the article we posted earlier about the origins of the Lisa UI, check this out, too.
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Xerox PARCers Doug Englebart and Alan Kay Webcast More

Xerox PARCers Doug Englebart and Alan Kay Webcast

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  • I don't know about you guys, but I'd much rather skim through a text version of a presentation... Much faster. Who has time to listen to a long webcast these days? Oh well...

    B.T.W, I can see this site getting /.ed really really quickly.

  • Pls give Alan Kay more credit! (Score:3)

    by caliban ( 15401 ) on Thursday February 17, 2000 @01:27AM (#1266119)
    Man, the guy created Smalltalk, way back when (early 70's?)

    He has a valid claim for _inventing_ OO programming!

    I think thats just a little bit more substantial than inventing 'overlapping windows', duh.

  • Stanford Research Institute (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17, 2000 @01:33AM (#1266120)
    A common misconception is that the mouse was invented at Xerox PARC. It was actually first developed at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI (they broke their affiliation w/Stanford). It used a pair of wheels to drive multiturn potentiometer shafts that converted the horizontal and vertical motion into corresponding voltages. The mouse was improved significantly at Xerox, by changing the design to use a ball that drives digital shaft encoders. The encoders generated in-quadrature signals that reveal the direction of travel.

  • Basically we are talking about a computing legend here, but don't do down the idea of overlapping windows. It was a huge break-through (as was the term "window") that revolutionised interfaces. It seems so obvious now but way back when there were practical problems (the rendering of the overlaps for starters) and conceptual barries (but the user can't see the whole window, no thats no good.)

    Between that and the mouse they started the whole computer revolution, but for these two very simple ideas the computer would not be the omnipresent thing it is today.

  • Doug Englebart at Stanford (Score:3)

    by Raindeer ( 104129 ) on Thursday February 17, 2000 @01:43AM (#1266122) Homepage Journal
    For those of you interested in what Doug Englebart has to say, there is also a webcast available at Stanford. There was a Slashdot article on it a couple of weeks ago. You have to register and all of the info can be found here. http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/ [bootstrap.org]
  • To be fair, Simula already had objects in the late 1960's, although its objects were conceptually more like coroutines than like the modern concept of an object. But otherwise, I agree with you that Smalltalk pretty much started it all in terms of OO, and calling him "the guy who invented overlapping windows" is ridiculous.
  • Unfortunately, the site doesn't have the real audio file available for download. The only way they have it is via PNM or RTSP, i.e. streaming.

    When will these sites learn that for ARCHIVAL purposes, they should put these streams on an FTP or HTTP server, so that those of us with poor bandwidth can DOWNLOAD the stream and then listen to it at our convenience. I wish that Streambox would release a version of their program for Linux....

  • Alan Kay is widely credited with inventing the basic GUI concepts upon which all modern GUIs are based. However, I *believe* that he did NOT invent the concept of overlapping windows. Check out HACKERS by Steven Levy to support this, but according to that book it was actually Bill Atkinson @ Apple who invented overlapping windows.

    It came about after the second visit to PARC. Bill went back to start coding up Quickdraw and came up with the concept of regions when he tried to make windows overlap. He had to then add support for clipping. Up to this point, all Mac windows would butt up against each other but COULD NOT overlap.

    Of course, HACKERS may be full of crap in which case ignore everything I've written here.

    cr

  • > I don't know about you guys, but I'd much rather skim through a text
    >version of a presentation... Much faster. Who has time to listen to a
    >long webcast these days? Oh well...

    I agree with you. Especially if you going to try to preseve somthing for long-time storage. How many people really think many of these webcast "formats" are still going to be supported say 2 years from now?
  • Uh? What edition of Hackers are you referring to? I read the 1994 paperback edition, and it doesn't mention anything about this at all. (*blinks, shakes head*)
  • The first OOP was Simula invented by Dahl and Nygaard in Norway in the 1960s.
  • These guys had great foresight in the 70s (and
    even earlier) and should be honored for it.
    But haven't done a whole lot since 1980
    and are are being over-hyped.
  • Smalltalk in the early 70's (73-74?) had overlapping graphical windows running on the Alto.

    And yes, give Alan more credit. The man's a true genius. Look up some of his articles in Scientific American (Sept 77 for a real cool look at Smalltalk in the 70's, Sept 84 for an insightful article on the state of computers & humans). He has an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge that spans math, biology, computer science, music, history, the list goes on.

    So much of what we do today is directly attributable to him and those working with him at PARC in the 70's (graphical interfaces, mice, object-oriented languages, incredible development environments, ethernet, laser printing, etc.). It's amazing how long it has taken the world to catch up to what they were doing way back then.
  • No, as others have pointed out, Simula was the first object oriented programming language. What Alan Kay did however, was invent the term "object oriented". He explored the use of objects within Smalltalk beyond what Simula achieved.

    More importantly, Alan Kay introduced the concept of personal computing and media. Previously, computers were considered devices meant to be used only by businesses and corporations. His vision of individuals owning and using computers was quite radical in the late '60s. To this day, some of his visions have still not been achieved, mainly the Dynabook (read his bio).

    And yes, he did invent the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface.

    Currently, Alan Kay is working on the Squeak programming langauge, which is a variant of Smalltalk. You can check out his page on the Squeak Swiki at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/378 [gatech.edu]


    --Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!

  • Both of these guys are still at it. They did *not* just spout some interesting ideas and then go back to hacking. They are busy putting in the 99% persperation that can transform "gee, what a clever idea" into "holy maceral, they just changed the world".

    Specifically, Douglass Engelbert is working on making his idea of corporation/computer synergies come to life, and he's trying to explain to people just what the heck he's talking about (which to hear him, most people still don't get). Alan Kay is working on making his Dynabook goal finally happen, via the Squeak project (www.squeak.org). His original goals outstripped hardware of the 70's could do, but nowadays that is no longer an issue. In fact, when his group first announced the project a few years ago, they titled their paper "Back to the Future". Do they sound slightly condescending to the intervening decades of hacking? Well, they deserve to be!

    Overall, let's not go by what the trade rags say is "hot". Trade rags are designed to give people warm fuzzies, not to excite them about difficult goals for computers in society.
  • I realize this is a *BIT* offtopic, but I have to ask:

    At the very beginning, the Master of Ceremony said, '[He and I] rushed out to get the IBM Discounted Workpad for 269.00.'

    What Workpad is this? I would like one. Cheap. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

    ++Om
  • Actually, it does. I'm watching it at the moment. You can get RealPlayer G2 from here [real.com]. This actually has all the old versions of RealPlayer.
    Don't forget you need a 16-bit sound card, otherwise it won't work (personal experience having used one which Linux treated as 8-bit).
  • "A common misconception is that the mouse was invented at Xerox PARC. It was actually first developed at the Stanford Research Institute..."

    Yes, specifically by Engelbart and, IIRC, someone else in his Augmentation group (DE's name is on the original mouse patent). Here the confusion arises because the original poster incorrectly indicates that Engelbart worked at PARC.
  • Okay, I was wrong about Atkinson inventing overlapping windows. My memory is fallible.

    cr
  • ...and try to get your facts straight. Doug Engelbart was never at PARC, and neither he nor Alan Kay were in the research group that developed ARPAnet. Doug Engelbart's group was at SRI, later moved wholesale to Tymshare, Inc., not sure what happened after Tymshare was bought out by McDonnell-Douglas. Alan Kay's group did invent Smalltalk. They freely acknowledge a debt to Simula in the design of Smalltalk, so Alan Kay most certainly did not invent OOP, though Smalltalk did a great deal to popularize the concept. Dan Ingalls is generally regarded as the chief architect of Smalltalk. _Dealers_of_Lightning_ is the best account I've seen of early days at PARC, acknowledged as accurate by those who were there. Please read it before putting up another article mentioning PARC.
  • I was there, and it really wasn't all that interesting. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay did a lot for the computing world in their youths, but haven't done anything special in the past decade or so. (Although Kay supposedly had a hand in creating Squeak - it's a great project, check it out.) Engelbart hasn't made a peep in the past 30 years or something. Most of the people in the audience were technophobes, and concentrated on the political issues surrounding "the Internet thing."

    My favorite part of the discussion was when the moderator asked "So what will the effect of the Information Technology of the next fifty years be on the general population" - then he coughed and cleared his throat - "of Rwanda?"

  • Check out HACKERS by Steven Levy to support this, but according to that book it was actually Bill Atkinson @ Apple who invented overlapping windows.

    You're probably thinking of Insanely Great, also written by Levy. That book describes how Atkinson developed a new method for calculating overlapping regions after visiting PARC:

    During the PARC visit, Atkinson was impressed that Smalltalk somehow ``knew'' how to show only the visually relevant information at any given millisecond. The irony is that Atkinson was mistaken -- the Alto used a much less elegant, and slower, method than clipping. But buoyed by what he thought was Smalltalk's existence proof of clipping, Atkinson kept hammering at a solution.... Eventually wave after wave of Atkinson's brainpower eroded the problem. He had set out to reinvent the wheel; actually he wound up inventing it. His solution dealt with a sophisticated use of algebra to calculate which ``regions'' of the window had to be drawn and remembered. (
    Insanely Great, 1994, paperback p. 87)

    It's a flawed book but is still very entertaining. Levy has a knack for capturing the excitement and spirit of hacking.

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