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Paul Lindner
 

Replied to a post on nextbillionseconds.com :

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 .. (Ep 1)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/23/1968-when-the-world-began-part-one-the-pivot/

Google Glass? Augmented Reality? Ivan Sutherland's "Ultimate Display" conceived of it. (Ep 2)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/30/1968-when-the-world-began-part-two-sword-of-damocles/

Hangouts? Shared Docs? Remote Collaboration? Doug Engelbert's The Mother of all Demos was already there. (Ep 3)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/07/1968-when-the-world-began-the-mother-of-all-demos/

And the impact felt, with Vint Cerf and others:

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/16/1968-when-the-world-began-return-to-a-square/

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

0 stars 2 comments

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

Was listening to the excellent podcast series about computing in 1968, called "1968: When the World Began" by Nextbillionseconds which Paul shared not so long ago. I was pretty sure I had never heard about Mark Pesce until I got to episode 4 in the series, and Mark shares that he's a co-inventor of VRML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML).

Last time I came across VRML was in 2003 while working on my masters degree, where I used it to visualise scenes from an interactive film. I had never heard about VRML before back then, and I never heard about it since. Took me by surprise, I was not expecting to ever hear about it again either (:

Fantastic podcast series btw, 4 great episodes, highly recommend it (https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/23/1968-when-the-world-began-part-one-the-pivot/)

voss, Jan 05 2019 on blog.voss.co