Font used for hal 9000 computer badge12/2/2023 As the small device rolled, a dot on the screen rolled along with it. Engelbart had also invented a new tracking device with the help of Bill English, an engineer on his team. It wasn’t just the software that was revolutionary. Another list popped up, showing items like aspirin and Chapstick. Overdue books.” He went back to the map and clicked on the word Drugstore. A click on the word Library pulled up another list. What am I supposed to do there?” he asked. He pulled up a map of his route home, with stops along the way. “But there’s another thing I can do,” he declared. He moved the items up and down the list with simple clicks, organizing produce with produce, canned goods with canned goods, dairy with dairy. Next, Engelbart pulled up a shopping list onto the screen: apples, bananas, soup, beans. “Oh, I need a name,” he explained, and titled it “Sample File.” He showed that he could copy the text-and paste it again and again. He announced that he was going to save the document. “If I make some mistakes, I can back up a little bit,” he noted, proudly showing off his new delete function. Text appeared on the screen: Word word word word. Then he began to type, using a keyboard with numbers and letters instead of inputting information with a punch card. In order to project the demo onto a 22-foot by 18-foot screen, they’d borrowed a projector from NASA.Įngelbart started with a provocative question: “If in your office, you, as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsive to every action you have-how much value could you derive from that?” Engelbart’s team ran 30 miles of cables over the highways and to San Francisco. When Engelbart walked onstage, he was wearing a headset with a microphone so he could talk to other members of his team at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. Today, it’s known as “the mother of all demos,” a precursor to every technology presentation that’s happened since-and arguably more ambitious than any of them. He also gave the first-ever live demonstration of networked personal computing. HAL didn’t give its users a way to write, design or collaborate on documents.Įngelbart didn’t just come up with the notion of using computers to solve the urgent and multifaceted problems facing humanity. It could play chess and make small talk with crew members (and ultimately sabotage the whole mission), but its job was still to compute numbers and run systems. Even in the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in April 1968, the HAL 9000 was an enhanced version of the same thing. Most programmers of the day used punch cards to carry out quantitative tasks like tabulating census data, writing banking code or calculating a missile’s trajectory. His goal was to speak directly to other engineers, showing them that they could use computers in new ways to solve complex human problems. He was a shy engineer with no marketing background. On December 8, 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat in front of a crowd of 1,000 in San Francisco, ready to introduce networked computing to the world.
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