This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Ohh, but they are still being used in the richest of schools. Universities. Professors. *ptoo*

I’d have talked about Engelbart a bit here when he passed away back in July, but the parts I wanted to talk about are too central to a story that I’ve been putting off writing for too long; in other words, I could not in fact convey the message I’d want to give without writing this entire story down, then having had a couple years to ruminate on it, then adding a foreword or something. But I can say this: his ideas concerning Intelligence Augmentation were very influential (albeit misinterpreted in ways) in creating anything good you use in interactive computing technology. If you want to spend a movie’s amount of time watching something that isn’t a movie, the so-called Mother of All Demos (1968) is the techporniest techporn that ever techporned, ever. Engelbart was frequently cited in our lifetimes as the “inventor of the mouse”. That should be a joke, but I’m afraid most of the people who said it meant it seriously. They had no freaking idea.