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55 years ago, the ‘Mother of All Demos’ foresaw modern computing

opb.org

Engelbart grew up on a small farm in Southeast Portland where his father operated a radio store.

He graduated from Franklin High School in 1942 and enrolled at Oregon State College, now called Oregon State University, to study electrical engineering.

When World War II interrupted his studies, he spent two years working as a Navy radio and radar technician in the Philippines.

In a 1986 oral history, Engelbart said the radar training was critical to his later work: “I knew about screens, and how you could use the electronics to shape symbols from any kind of information you had. If there was information that could otherwise go to a card punch or a computer printer, you could convert that to any kind of symbology you wanted on the screen. That just all came from the radar training.”

Sneakers Computer Press Kit

archive.org

Released in conjuction with the computer hacking movie “Sneakers” (1992), this floppy-based “computer press kit” contained many of the aspects of regular movie press kits, including cast bios, plots, and information on all aspects of production. It was intended for press, and as such is both “locked up” (via passwords) but also endeavored to help the same press get through the barriers as quickly as possible. 

The balancing act between technical complexity and simplicity to ensure promotion is quite notable.

Pyret

pyret.org

Pyret is a programming language designed to serve as an outstanding choice for programming education while exploring the confluence of scripting and functional programming. It’s under active design and development, and free to use or modify.

Sqids (formerly Hashids)

sqids.org

Sqids (pronounced “squids”) is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free.