Festive 50
Instead of reflecting on the past year think about what's happened for the last 50 years. I finally got around to listening to a 4 part series about computing in 1968. Highly recommended, very very well done and will blow your mind.
Makes you realize that most of what we've been doing has been riffing on groundbreaking things from that era.
Art? Computer Animation? It all started then with some #cybernetics .. (Ep 1)
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Google Glass? Augmented Reality? Ivan Sutherland's "Ultimate Display" conceived of it. (Ep 2)
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Hangouts? Shared Docs? Remote Collaboration? Doug Engelbert's The Mother of all Demos was already there. (Ep 3)
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And the impact felt, with Vint Cerf and others:
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We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Excellent points. I watched The Mother of All Demo's at Reboot in Copenhagen in 2005, and it blew my mind. It also helped that Mr Engelbart himself was "present" live via videolink from the US.
Reading Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" a few years earlier while at university, equally blew my mind.
I remember sharing Bush's article with my dad, to show him that smartphones weren't a new invention, but rather reality finally catching up with a postwar vision of how technology could be of help to us.
voss, Dec 24 2018 on blog.voss.co