Note- I wrote a bit of this while I was waiting for a highway to re-open…

It looks like I have offline time for some slow blogging. I am writing this from the front seat of my car, stuck in a highway closure on Arizona Highway 87, whose nickname is the “Beeline Highway”. The bees are not moving fast today, there is an accident up ahead, and the highway is a parking lot of strangers thrown together. There is the usual flitting around, craning necks, and people who don’t know each other talking like they don’t.

There is no spot to do a turn around on this mountain highway, and what else can one do? As much as I might complain, I am guessing someone up ahead is having a much much worse day, likely the worse of their life.

While here I have time to reflect on the experience a few days ago of attending the Program for the Future event in San Jose, designed to honor the 40th anniversary of a computer historic event known as the “Mother of all Demos” (I prefer to to acronymize it like someone else did in a presentation as “MOAD”).

If you have never seen the video of what Doug Engelbart and his SRI team did in San Francisco, stop now and go watch the video. Watch it twice, or more…

As I said in our presentation, back in 1968 I missed the Mother Demo; I was only 5 and was likely watching the Flintstones instead. But I wonder (and have been asking others) what is happening today in our tech world that might have such an impact. Or what someone who is 5 now might be seeing 40 years from now.

What this live demo did was demonstrate almost countless features of the modern computer interface in a time when computing meant mainframes, punch cards, and teletypes. Engelbart’s peers saw no reason for a computer screen– but I think he showed them wrong.

Engelbart seems most credited for invention of the mouse (which was actually co-created with Bill English), but when you look at the demo, that is not even a significant aspect of the NLS system. He had two way video conferencing (al a Skype). Live co-editing of documents (Google Docs), cut and paste of text, a flexible menu structure, and more.

I am always curious about the meaning of the chalkboard in this photo of what is written “5->3”

The Program for the Future was meant however to convene people around Engelbarts concepts of collective intelligence, which again he outlined long before it reached buzzword status about a year or two ago.

The hopes for the event were to stimulate research, development, advancement of these ideas, and there were certainly plenty of heavy hitters in the crowd.

I’ve already waxed on the demise of the television I grew up with.

So long.

I just finished watching a funny episode of the Simpsons, but my TV is still off (actually it gets no reception); I watched Mypods and Boomsticks on Hulu which in true form, poked some fun at “Mapple”, it’s “MyPods” and CEO (using an underwater Jeff Han-like interface) Steve Mobs:

This is hardly new, as hulu has been around a while, and there are plenty of sites to watch full shows, etc. But can you imagine the inner panic at the network television empires? Their era is gone. Over. Kaput. Adios.

Yes, I know hulu cannot be seen out of the USA (I experienced that black screen in Iceland).

And the AT&T ads are super cheesy annoying, but they are only 15 seconds. Maybe there is a Greasemonkey Tivo.

But as far as I am concerned, the control of television networks is gone. I do not even need their devices. This is not to say I will start watching a lot of content, but I am intrigued as the disruptive nature of the net ripples seismically through the establishment.

This is just the beginning.

If you want to watch, below the fold is the embed (you cannot do that with your television set, eh?)

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