If you're under 40, the name Douglas Engelbart probably means nothing to you. It should, though, because a huge amount of the machine on which you're reading this sprang from his fertile mind.

Engelbart (yet another product of Oregon, having been born in Portland) worked at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) before the dawn of the personal computer revolution. Many of the things we now use without a second thought were developed by him, or made possible by his work: bitmapped screens, the graphical user interface (GUI), hypertext, and networking. The very birth of the internet occurred when his lab at SRI and it's counterpart at UCLA networked their computers to become the first two nodes of ARPANET.

His greatest moment would have to be his "Mother of All Demos" in 1968. In that presentation, he introduced to a stunned world the early working implementations of video conferencing, teleconferencing, interactive text, email and the aforementioned hypertext. It is, perhaps, the single most important event in the history of modern computing.

One of his inventions revealed for the first time at the Demo was a new invention: the computer mouse. It would take over a decade before his now-common pointing device finally reached the market (attached to the ill-fated Xerox 8010 Star Information System), and several years after that before it came to the notice of the general public (as an integral part of the original Macintosh.)



(John C. Dvorak, computer pundit, wrote in 1984 of the new Mac and Engelbart's invention : "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things." Dvorak is not known for his prescience, which surprisingly fails to deter his continued employment.)

YouTube has the entire Demo available.


-=[ Grant ]=-

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently turned 50. What's DARPA, you ask? Well, it is the agency that invented the network upon which you are reading this missive.

DARPA was founded to do fundamental, high-risk research into science and technology that could be used for military purposes. Today that sounds ominous and vaguely sinister, but in the 1950s it was exciting and patriotic.

One of their projects was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), intended as a way for DARPA staffers and researchers to disseminate information and share computing resources. It introduced email, file transfers, and even voice protocols into common use, all made possible through the magic of packet switching - another DARPA innovation. This groundbreaking computer network would, with their guidance, evolve into what we now call the internet.

(Funny, isn't it - the internet upon which you can read anti-military and anti-American rants until your eyes launch themselves from their sockets is the product of an American military project. Euro-weenies will no doubt point out that the World Wide Web was the invention of an Englishman working at a Swiss lab, but his contribution - important as it is - was simply a way of easing access to information on the already vast internet. His work would not even have been necessary had it not been for DARPA.)

The computer network wasn't DARPA's only development, of course - the magnificent Saturn V rocket and the computer mouse both came from the think tanks at the agency. How's that for a wide ranging legacy?

Happy Birthday, DARPA - keep up the good work!

-=[ Grant ]=-

Are you as tired of weather.com as I am? It started out as a great site with lots of content, but it's s-l-o-w and clogged with ads. If you need time lapse satellite or radar images, it's OK - but if what you want is just a forecast for the next few days it's a cumbersome mess.

Luckily, someone has come up with a better idea: WeatherMole. Combine the latest Weather Service forecasts with Google maps, and you've got a winning combination!

Just click on the area for which you want a forecast - WeatherMole shows you the upcoming week's forecasts for that pinpoint location. Zoom in on the map to refine your forecast point, and you'll see the forecasts change to reflect even small location differences.

If you travel, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread!

-=[ Grant ]=-

I make no secret of the fact that I love the Apple Macintosh computer line. I've been using Macs for about 8 years now, and those times when I'm forced to use a Windows PC are excruciatingly painful. I've gotten used to having a computer that "just works" without spending hours reloading operating systems, updating anti-virus software, worrying about spyware, searching for device drivers, and waiting for the machine to reboot after yet another crash.

Whew - sorry for the sales pitch, but I couldn't help myself! Anyway, this isn't about my Macs - it's about the new Apple Store on the ever-chic 5th Avenue in New York:



Get this: it's a glass cube that simply serves as a ground-level entrance to the subterranean store! The cube covers the curved glass staircase (and glass elevator) that leads you downward to the store below:



Very neat. I'd like to have a house built using this concept, but I shudder to think what it would cost...

-=[ Grant ]=-