A great Alan Kay quote

[Francis Girard]

Thank you.

Francis Girard

Le jeudi 10 Février 2005 02:48, Scott David Daniels a écrit :
> Francis Girard wrote:
> > ...
> > It's also interesting to see GUIs with windows, mouse (etc.), which
> > apparently find their origin in is mind, probably comes from the desire
> > to introduce computers to children.
>
> OK, presuming "origin in is mind" was meant to say "origin in his mind,"
> I'd like to stick up for Doug Engelbart (holds the patent on the mouse)
> here.  I interviewed with his group at SRI in the ancient past, when
> they were working on the "Augmentation Research" project -- machine
> augmentation of human intelligence.  They, at the time, were working on
> input pointing devices and hadn't yet settled.  The helmet that read
> brain waves was doing astoundingly well (90% correct on up, down, left,
> right, don't move), but nowhere near well enough to use for positioning
> on edits.  This work produced the mouse, despite rumors of Xerox Parc or
> Apple inventing the mouse.
>
> Xerox Parc, did, as far as I understand, do the early development on
> interactive graphic display using a mouse for positioning on a
> graphics screen.  Engelbart's mouse navigated on a standard 80x24
> character screen.
>
> Augment did real research on what might work, with efforts to measure
> ease of use and reliability.  They did not simply start with a good
> (or great) guess and charge forward.  They produced the mouse, and the
> earliest "linked" documents that I know of.
>
>      http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
>
> --Scott David Daniels
> Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org