In December of 1968, Engelbart gave a 90 minute demonstration of the NLS that would come to be known as “The Mother of All Demos”. So they dropped the “Text”… and NLTS became NLS. Eventually the system added graphical capabilities (read: not just text). Those just seemed like the best acronyms to them. So, for a time, the system was actually two related systems… the “Off-Line Text System” (which they abbreviated to “FLTS”) and the “On-Line Text System” (NLTS). More fun trivia time: Why was the “oN-Line Sytem” called “NLS” instead of “OLS”? You see, one of the early machines in use (prior to the SDS 940) simply wasn’t beefy enough to handle more than one user. Using this machine, Engelbart’s team developed what they called the “oN-Line System” or simply “NLS”. ![]() In the ‘60s! The SDS 940 was an absolute beast of a machine! Powered by a 24-bit CPU (yeah, you read that right), 64 kilowords of 24bit memory and (get this) 4.5 MB of Swap. In order to accomplish his goals, in 1968, Engelbart’s development efforts settled on the SDS 940. He built on both of them heavily to create many of the User Interface concepts we know today. His work was heavily influenced by both Bush’s “As We May Think” essay, and by Sutherland’s Sketchpad. 1968ĭuring the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart was working on a computing system of his own, funded by the US Air Force, NASA, and ARPA. Modifying a vector object, then zooming out again. Around the 11 minute mark, he demonstrates zooming in on a vector graphics document. So many moments in this demo absolutely blow me away. And nothing like this had ever been done before. As you’re watching, remember that this was from 1963. If you have never seen this demo before, it is an absolute must watch. What Sutherland created was something truly remarkable.Ī system where the user could work, with a lightpen, on a graphical display with immediate feedback. Like using the Internet? Thank Leonard and the Lincoln TX-2. This massive amount of memory was going to be necessary for the ambitious graphical plan that Sutherland had in mind.įun side note: The Lincoln TX-2 was also the computer where the first simulation of packet switching networks was run by Leonard Kleinrock. The museum of simulation technology looks pretty cool software#He built the software on Lincoln TX-2 - which had a whopping 64K 36-bit words of memory, absolutely mammoth for the time. A man named Ivan Sutherland, who was working on his PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, was inspired by Bush’s Memex to build a highly graphical computer system. I can’t recommend reading this essay strongly enough. What he describes is the precursor to things like Hypertext, structured file systems, wide area networks (and the Internet) and… Graphical User Interfaces. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.”īush also describes ways of storing, retrieving, and interacting with information within the “Memex”. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. ![]() “It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. Essentially… what we now call the Personal Computer. ![]() This article turns out to be one of the most critical works in the history of computing and it describes a new machine… which Bush calls the “Memex”. In 1945, Vannevar Bush (the first Director of the USA’s Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II) wrote an article, published in The Atlantic, entitled “As We May Think”. When songs like Sentimental Journey ruled the radio. ![]() The 1980s and 1990s were an amazing time in computer history… with so many well known stories of computer GUI’s that have become instantly recognizable.īut how did we get here? What were things like before the 1980s? How did the graphical user interfaces of computers get their start?įor that… we need to go back to the end of World War II.
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