Discussion on:

Geek Trivia: Name

You dramatically shortchange Doug Engelbart when you state that his
primary contribution was the invention of the mouse. That's the
smallest tip of the iceberg. Engelbart's lab can be credited with
pioneering work in video conferencing, shared screen computing,
screen-based text editing, document sharing, multiple windows,
email, online publishing, trackback links, hypertext, spreadsheets,
version control and graphics. But these were just means to the end he
envisioned of augmenting the cognitive capacity of teams of humans
by using technology.

For a terrific graphical overview of Engelbart's accomplishments, see:
http://www.visualinsight.net/_engelbart/Engelbart_Mural.jpg

I thought Englebart was a singer in the 60s

ha, sounds so sci-fi

Maybe that's where the idea came from...

http://tinyurl.com/73ome

was the first thing I thought of.

With a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

So, where does Al Gore fit into all this...?

He came before all of these people. Don't you remember? He invented the internet.

It's a manbearpig!

http://tinyurl.com/5lpn4t

He didn't contribute technologically, but he did help provide funding, so Ha Ha, have your joke and eat it too!

I had thought that "internet" as a name was a shortening of the generic term "internetwork", which is a network of networks.

Anyone..?

You'll break the illusion....

This article reminds me of a job I took on in 1980 - the design of the firmware (i.e. operating system) for a multi-function terminal that could be switched to communicate with a variety of mainframe computers. Its basic functionality was similar to that of a DEC VT100 - the standard terminal at the time - but there were many systems that didn't use the DEC protocols, and we planned to sell these terminals to companies which possessed more than one type of system, thus enabling them to buy one type of terminal that could be used on any of their systems. The company I worked for was Pericom Data Systems in Milton Keynes, England, and it was the most enjoyable period of employment in my life (my current job being a close second). Development was done on a Motorola Exorciser system (we used the Motorola 6800 series processors) which used 8 inch floppy discs with (I believe) a 160 kilobyte capacity. The firmware had to fit into 16 kilobytes of EPROM, and saving a few bytes here and there enabled more functionality to be squeezed in. The programmers of today don't know they're born!