Friday, May 30, 2008

40 years ago - the "Mother of all Demos" the first mouse, etc

A little computer history for you:

A movie of Douglas Engelbart I found on Google Video, recorded in 1968. The demo of the first mouse, and text editing like cut/paste etc:
"Doug Engelbart: The Demo" also known as the "Mother of all Demos"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097&q=engelbart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
"The Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Convention Center in San Francisco. At the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC), Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, demonstrated the workings of the NLS (which stood for oNLine System) to the 1,000 computer professionals in attendance. The project was the result of work done at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
"He is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs..."

Physics simulator "phun"

I just ran across this application called "PHUN."
It is a 2D physics simulator created by a Swedish grad student named Emil Ernerfeldt. It is very interesting!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM
http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki
http://www.vrlab.umu.se/research/phun/