The mother of all demos

This isn't exactly news, but it may interest some of you. First, a bit of computer history. In 1968, Doug Englebart gave a ninety-minute demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. NLS, the oNLine System, had been under development by the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford since 1962, and had a number of features which we now consider commonplace: the mouse, outline lists, hypertext links, and so on.

The demo was filmed at the time, and there have been copies and fragments of varying quality floating around ever since. Some enterprising soul has now uploaded the full film to Google Video; the text isn't particularly clear, and there are some audio artifacts, but it's still an intriguing glimpse of how the present day used to look when it was still the future.

The mother of all demos

This isn't exactly news, but it may interest some of you. First, a bit of computer history. In 1968, Doug Englebart gave a ninety-minute demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. NLS, the oNLine System, had been under development by the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford since 1962, and had a number of features which we now consider commonplace: the mouse, outline lists, hypertext links, and so on.

The demo was filmed at the time, and there have been copies and fragments of varying quality floating around ever since. Some enterprising soul has now uploaded the full film to Google Video; the text isn't particularly clear, and there are some audio artifacts, but it's still an intriguing glimpse of how the present day used to look when it was still the future.

Why I love the BBC / Web toys

You can now access the BBC's programme catalogue online. It doesn't contain listings for all of their radio and television programmes, but it's as comprehensive as you're likely to get, and goes back at least as far as the early 1950s. All I need to do now is think of something interesting to do with the data.

I've also seen the following web toy (I hesitate before saying "mashup", because that might provoke a desire to kill in some of you) which combines Google Maps and a NASA land elevation dataset to give a graphical display of what we're likely to expect if/when sea levels rise due to global warming and collapsing ice sheets. It's marginally comforting to see that Gark Villa will survive a 5m rise in sea level, even if it is likely to be inundated by a 6m rise.

Why I love the BBC / Web toys

You can now access the BBC's programme catalogue online. It doesn't contain listings for all of their radio and television programmes, but it's as comprehensive as you're likely to get, and goes back at least as far as the early 1950s. All I need to do now is think of something interesting to do with the data.

I've also seen the following web toy (I hesitate before saying "mashup", because that might provoke a desire to kill in some of you) which combines Google Maps and a NASA land elevation dataset to give a graphical display of what we're likely to expect if/when sea levels rise due to global warming and collapsing ice sheets. It's marginally comforting to see that Gark Villa will survive a 5m rise in sea level, even if it is likely to be inundated by a 6m rise.