May 21, 2006
Watching A Seminal Moment In Computing
Through the wonders of the Internet, it's now possible to watch one of the most important moments in the history of computing, one from when the Internet was just a twinkle in Defense Department's eye.
Doug Engelbart's demo was showing his work from 1968(!!!) where he outlined such as cut-and-paste, the first ever computer mouse, hyperlinks, networking, video-conferencing... and at the end he even mentions the "coming Arpanet in about a year, end up with some 20 experimental computers in a network... with bandwidth of something like 20kbps" (of course, Arpanet eventually became the Internet we know today).
The full set of videos is listed here but if you want to watch them all in sequence, I've stuck together a SMIL file with them all in.
Posted by Adrian at May 21, 2006 08:49 PM | TrackBackThis blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.
If you want to hire my company to help you with the Internet of Things then get in touch. If you want to learn more about the Internet of Things, then buy my book Designing the Internet of Things (amazon.co.uk amazon.com).
Awesome video I remember watching it at Reboot7 and then being part of the video conversation with Doug afterwards. I would love to get a copy of the 1968 film made by the computer lab here in Cambridge to compare with Dougs film. (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/UoCCL/misc/EDSAC99/history.html)
Posted by: Geoff at May 23, 2006 01:09 PMIt would be interesting to see the Cambridge film on its own. Thanks for the link - I didn't know too much about what the university here had been up to over the years in computing. I remember seeing the first stored-program computer (which is mentioned in passing) at Manchester when choosing which uni to attend.
Posted by: Adrian at May 23, 2006 04:44 PM