The evolution of historyAt least computer history

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Lester D Earnest <learnest () stanford edu>
> Date: December 12, 2018 at 9:10:20 AM GMT+9
> To: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Cc: E-mail Pamphleteer Dave Farber's Interesting People list <ip () listbox com>, "Robert.McFadden () nytimes com" 
> <Robert.McFadden () nytimes com>, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>, Brian Harvey <bh () eecs berkeley edu>, DV 
> Henkel-Wallace <gumby () henkel-wallace org>
> Subject: Re: Obituary: Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor (in 1969)
>
> The stories cited, especially the one about my old friend Doug Engelbart, are total bullshit. The Engelbart myth and 
> his resulting receipt of the ACM Turing award came out of his 1968 talk in San Francisco, where a seriously ignorant 
> journalist in the audience named Steven Levy jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Doug had invented all the stuff 
> he was showing even though most of it went back as much as 20 years. Another journalist, John Markoff, then repeated 
> that baloney in the New York Times, which by the rules of journalism made it solid history.
>      I know all that because I helped create some of the earlier technology, working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory 
> beginning in 1956, then in its Mitre Corporation spinoff beginning in 1958. MIT's Whirlwind computer had been 
> developed before I got there but I got to play with it and also with the TX-0 and TX-2 computers, all of which which 
> had good text editors from their beginnings in the1950s. In summary, all of the published histories about text 
> editing are fantasies, like most computer history shown in public media, web sites, and the Computer History Museum. 
> The latter is evidently not interested in telling the truth even though I have been trying to bribe them with big 
> donations since I became a founding member, following my donations to its predecessor, the Digital Computer Museum in 
> Boston.
>      One thing that Doug Engelbart did invent was the mouse, with some help from his colleague, Bill English, but it 
> was not a big step forward. Many of us had been moving display cursors around for years using Light Guns, a 
> pistol-sized optical sensor with a trigger that could be aimed at optical elements on the screen. A smaller and 
> lighter version was then developed called the light pen, which I used a lot in my graduate research, developing the 
> first cursive handwriting recognizer including the first spelling checker, which won me a free trip to Europe in 1962 
> to present it at the IFIP Congress in Munich.
>      The mouse created no new capability but it did have two advantages over the light pen:
> It was cheaper, and
> It could be moved on a flat horizontal surface instead of having to reach to the screen.
> However, with widespread use of pocket computers coming into play, the mouse is now slowly dying, just like Doug did.
>
> Lester Earnest  Call 650-941-3984 (land line) any day from 9am till 11pm Pacific Time
> Senior Research Computer Scientist Emeritus, Stanford University
> https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/



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