A nifty demo

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Fri Dec 11 03:20:05 1998

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
Received on Fri Dec 11 1998 - 03:20:05 GMT