Crunch time
Finally got around to looking through the body of the presentation, and slowly came to the realization that this would be a really technical, boring video if I just tried to cover the key points of the demo. Much of it is very slow and tedious, and Engelbart frequently messes up and has to backtrack; seeing the presentation in its entirety helps me to understand perhaps part of why the ‘mother of all demos’ didn’t make huge waves and influence rapid progress at the time. It’s not a very concise presentation, and it’s clear he hasn’t rehearsed a lot of it before, often he stops mid sentence and goes for minutes at a time without speaking while he resolves a technical issue. Instead, I think I’ll need to focus it on the philosophy and goals behind the HIRC’s research, a little under halfway through the presentation Engelbart talks about this.
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