Douglas C. Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies

The New York Times has reported that a true pioneer of computing has died, Doug Englebart, who is credited with inventing the computer mouse and the graphical user interface that we still all use to this day has died aged 88. In the 1960s he had a vision of computers that could be networked together and used intuitively by pointing and clicking at icons on a screen. On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his group of 17 researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation has become a legend and is now called "The Mother of All Demos" - the public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. These breakthrough ideas were subsequently taken up by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and then commercialised by Apple with the Mac.

What's in a name - #Apple's #Siri

Siri on an iPhone 4S

I saw several articles yesterday, like this one, claiming that Apple's intelligent agent Siri is named after a Norwegian goddess and that Steve Jobs didn't like the name. Frankly I don't believe Siri is named after a Norwegian goddess. This seems like post-justification. Siri was a company, which Apple purchased, that was spun out of Stanford Research International, commonly known as SRI, which sounds a lot like "Siri" to me. The new company Siri Inc. called its product "Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface" or Siri. The history is all explained here in an earlier post on this blog. Wikipedia makes no mention of Siri being named after a Norwegian goddess and there doesn't even seem to be a Norwegian goddess called Siri. Sigrid is a Scandinavian female name, for which Siri is a diminutive, and it does mean victory, wisdom and beautiful according to Wikipedia, but there's no mention of a goddess.
    Personally, I'll continue to believe that Siri derives from SRI, which at least is supported by historical fact. I have no opinion on whether or not Steve Jobs liked the name. Incidentally I asked Siri the origin of its name and it was evasive and refused to answer.

Sketchpad - almost 50 years old and still revolutionary

I came across this video on Google+ of Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka the Robot Draftsman). This was a revolutionary program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 for his PhD thesis that changed the way people interacted with computers. Sketchpad is  the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD). The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was derived from Sketchpad (it was the first program to use a "window") as well as object oriented programming. Ivan Sutherland demonstrated with Sketchpad that computer graphics could be used for artistic and technical purposes in addition to showing a new method of human-computer interaction. Sutherland received the Turing Award (computing's highest honour) in 1988. 

 This video is an excerpt of a longer one here.  Sutherland's Ph.D. thesis from MIT was reprinted in 1980 as Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.

Apple's personal assistant - Futureshock

The rumours have been flying ever since Apple bought the AI company Siri that they were going to put an intelligent assistant in iOS devices that used voice recognition. Well the rumours were true, but more on that later. First a quick comment on the hardware.
   Apple invited selected journalists to their Infinite Loop campus today for a event titled "Let's Talk iPhone."After lots of stats of how many billions of songs and Apps have been downloaded, how Apple dominates its markets etc...the new iPhone 4S was unveiled. So many forecasters and "Apple insiders" have egg on their face today - where's the iPhone 5 they were all predicting? Personally I always thought that just as with the iPhone 3 the next release would be an "S" model. The form factor of the iPhone 4 is relatively new (and IMHO gorgeous), why would Apple want to make it obsolete so fast? The new 4S has a faster processor, a better camera, some tweaks to the antennae and that's about it. We'll see the iPhone 5 next year. Once again though the important announcement was the software.
   Tim Cook, the new CEO, at the start of the event said: "Today we're going to be learning about innovations in software and hardware, and the integration of all of these into a "powerful yet simple integrated experience." This perfectly captures Apples ethos - an iintegrated experience, which only they can deliver since only they design and manufacture both the hardware and the software. All their competitors do one or the other and have to team up to do both.
   So back to Apple's new Intelligent Assistant. This has been a dream of Apple's for a very long time. Way back in 1987 they released a concept video of what they called the Knowledge Navigator. This was an intelligent personal assistant that used voice recognition. You can watch one of the series of videos below.

   Siri was a company spun out of the CALO “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” project funded by the US DARPA programme. This was a huge AI research project that  ran for five years involving more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions in the US. It's  goal was “building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” Sounds useful.
   When Apple bought Siri, many people said Apple have bought a search company, but Steve Jobs always said that they'd bought an AI company. Jobs said in a 2010 interview "[Siri is] not a search company. They're an AI company. We have no plans to go into the search business. We don't care about it -- other people do it well." Jobs believes passionately that for too long we've adapted our behaviour to  interface with our computers. Touch is our native way of manipulating our environment hence the iPhone and iPad. But,  speech is our natural form of communication, and consequently we should be talking to our devices. Apple may have stolen another lead on the competition through their acquisition of Siri and into integration into iOS 5. 
   Siri launched there own iPhone app which ran on the 3GS, but, by there own admission, there was barely enough processing power and they had to implement several shortcuts (you can read an interview with Siri's co founder Norman Winarsky here). Apple have waited until the hardware (i.e., the iPhone 4 and their new cloud infrastructure) is fully capable of running the Assistant. I don't expect this to be available on the 3GS. Winarsky says that apps like Google Voice are "partial AI" but that Siri is "real AI." He believes that "We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift. It reminds me of another SRI Project: Doug Engelbart, Inventor of Mouse augmented human ability back in the ’60s. Just as Steve Jobs took that technology and ran with it, we believe that Apple will use Siri to start another revolution."

How's the book coming along Ian?

Is a common question I get asked, and I often avoid a precise answer: "oh, slowly", might be a common reply.

Currently I'm working on content for what may be Chapter 6, which centres on the early developments in Silicon Valley, the Stanford Research Institute and Doug Englebart, Xerox PARC and leading on to the Homebrew Computer Club, Wozniac, Jobs and Apple.

Now there is a lot of stuff that could go into this chapter. I have one book on Xerox PARC that is 450 pages long! So obviously deciding what goes in and what doesn't is a major headache. What I realised the other day is that I don't need to make these decisions all at once. If I now lay down the main structure and flow of the chapter I can at a later date (probably next year) reread all my sources and at that time decide what details and anecdotes to add to my chapter. That should even by quite fun.

On a separate issue I was reading a book called the Physics of Star Trek last night and I wondered if perhaps my book should have lots of small bite sized chapters or sections rather than a small number of long traditional 30ish page chapters. It might make the book easier to digest. If you have opinions one way or the other let me know.

The Mother of All Demos

The complete video of Doug Englebart's famous live demo of SRI's Online System, the first computer mouse, a graphical interface, file sharing and dynamic file links and even video conferencing from December 1968 is available online here. This demo has become so famous in computer history it's often called "the mother of all demos". It really would have seemed like science fiction in 1968 when most computer users were submitted batch process jobs via punch cards to mainframe computers and waiting hours or days for a print out of their results.

The Hardest Chapter

Perhaps the hardest chapter is always the one that you're currently working on. However, the chapter on the innovations coming out of Northern California in the 60s and 70s is challenging me. There's just so much material and so many people involved. Compare this to the chapter on the Analytical Engine where there was really only Charles Babbage and little bit of Ada Lovelace.

However, I think a way through is emerging. I'm currently planing to concentrate on three people:

• Doug Engelbart - the inventor of the mouse and heavily involved in the development of networking and the GUI
• Alan Kay - the inventor of object-oriented programming and the Dynabook (the precursor of the iPad)
• Steve Wozniak - co-founder of Apple and designer of the Apple I & II

I'll also concentrate on three institutions: SRI, Xerox PARC, and the Homebrew Computer Club.

I know that this will cause some to howl "what about so and so" and "what about such and such" but it has to be done.