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Comment by musesum | Hacker News Reader

I met Doug Engelbart in the late 90's during his reboot sessions at Stanford. Lots of luminaries spoke, including Ted Nelson.

I was there because I read every one of his group's papers, in the mid 80's, and wrote a version of Augment in MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal. I think I showed him a demo.

He invited me to attend informal meetings at SRI. I left after a few weeks because I couldn't figure out how it would result in a product. Had already went into deep personal debt, once before (about $50K in 1990), trying to market something similar.

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Monetization is an extra constraint that makes software worse :(

Counter opinion was Nolan Bushnell, saying that the best way to test an idea was to put a coin slot on it. This was during the era of arcade machines.

But, then again, not sure how you put a coin slot on the Arpanet.

You don't happen to have that code lying around anywhere do you? I'd love to take a peek.

Ugh, am embarrassed by my coding style, from back then. The product still works on Windows XP, but is in storage in Iowa (am in California). Next time I visit family, will bring it out.

How actionable where the ideas in those papers? A few times I've read old essays and papers and it always seems like there's eventually one poorly defined or completely abstract portion that boils down to "magic happens here".

The most salient point was a hierarchy of discourse. I was working for a project management software company, at the time. So, it fit well within the mindset of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) or Bill of Materials (BOM). Usually activities were organized around WBS and BOM with resource leveling of resources (people) and materials. So, Augment filled in the documentation side for highly structured projects.

Am still working with core concepts: using a namespace hierarchy (akin to a WBS) and a directed graph (akin to activities). Except now, the activities are code.

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