On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart, who died earlier this year, demonstrated, for the first time, a few computer technologies that we take for granted today. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber writes:
Engelbart and his team presented for about an hour and 40 minutes. The talk consisted of, among other things, the first public demonstration of a computer mouse. It introduced WYSIWYG editing. It showed off hypertext. It demonstrated the graphical user interface. Engelbart and his colleagues explained these new technologies; they also employed many of them as part of their presentation. (A young Steward Brand acted as one of their camera operators.) For people who had been used to thinking of computers as little more than fancy calculators, the whole thing was fairly mind-blowing.
Although most people probably use a touch screen to interact with computers, such as smartphones, we still rely heavily on a graphical interface. I would guess that fewer than 5% of current computer users have ever dealt with a command line. We have also adopted navigating from one page to another as an everyday part of our computing experience. The web as we know it wouldn’t be a reality for another twenty-two years.
In class last night, we didn’t get to screen a thirty-minute film produced for RCA on how RCA basically invented television all by itself. It also invented color and world peace. Here’s the video, produced in 1956 by the William Ganz Company.
In the film, you see RCA taking credit for inventing television, including interviews with Vladimir Zworkin and David Sarnoff.
As my presentation on radio technology was longer than I had expected, we didn’t have time to watch the Ken Burns documentary Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991). You can watch this on your own in one of the following ways:
Common synonyms for radio include “wireless,” “crystal set,” and “radio telephone.”
The song about radio at the end of the first part was one that was taking advantage of the radio craze in the 1920s. Honestly, will you be able to “love her” by radio?
On this day fifty years ago the people from Bell Telephone (another one that I guess you had to be there for) brought out the touchtone model, which was another thing we used to have before you’d swipe your germ-encrusted fingers on a glass screen to make contact with someone else who you are probably only texting with because who talks to each other anymore? Anyway, you could press buttons to dial a call! It was AMAZING.
Please remember to bring a hard copy of your paper to class today. Do not email me a file. If for some reason, you can’t print your paper, send a PDF via email so I can print it for you. However, if I do so, I’ll deduct a half-grade for my printing services.