(2018-12-09) Finley50 Years Later We Still Dont Grasp The Mother Of All Demos

Klint Finley: 50 Years Later, We Still Don't Grasp the Mother of All Demos. He wasn't presenting a collection of hardware and software, but a system for developing hardware and software—a system that ideally could be useful in other endeavors. He was demonstrating a way of working.

Engelbart believed people should focus on creating feedback loops to improve their own effectiveness

Engelbart's ideas no longer seem so out there, thanks to management philosophies like lean manufacturing and agile software development that encourage companies to make continuous improvements to their products and processes.

Open source software is perhaps one of the purest embodiments of the Engelbart philosophy.

But the struggles of the open source community also expose some of the limitations to Engelbart’s thinking.

Making tools to solve complex problems can create new problems, and tools can be used in ways the creators might not have intended.

In other words, bad actors can continuously improve too.

Christina Engelbart, now the executive director of the Douglas Engelbart Institute, says her father was well aware of this issue, and believed it was important for good people to get better as quickly as possible. "He used to call it a race," she says.