WHITE PAPERS SPONSORED PROFILES JOB BOARD WEBINAR CENTER FREE SOFTWARE BZ RESEARCH ALMSHAREPOINT EVENTS CALENDAR PRINT/PDF EDITION PRINT/PDF BACK ISSUES

SUBSCRIBE TODAY CUSTOMER SERVICE EDITORIAL CALENDAR EDITORIAL BEATS GUEST VIEW GUIDE SD TIMES 100 GUIDE EVENTS CALENDAR ADVERTISING ARTICLE REPRINTS REPORT A BUG SITE MAP

ABOUT US BZ MEDIA NEWS BZ RESEARCH NEWS ON MONDAY SPTECHREPORT SPTECHWEB SPTECHCON IPHONE/IPAD DEVCON ANDROID DEVCON PRIVACY POLICY CONTACT US

HOME >> LATEST NEWS

Collective intelligence, 40 years after the Mother of All Demos

By Alex Handy

December 9, 2008 — (Page 1 of 3)
On Dec. 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart, Bill English and other researchers from Stanford University gave a demonstration of the many software and hardware projects they had designed to increase the productivity of the world's workers. This Mother of all Demos, as it is now known, marked the first public showing of the mouse, the hyperlink, the word processor and the remotely accessible system. In honor of its 40th anniversary, the Program for the Future, hosted yesterday and today in Silicon Valley, focused on the current state of collective intelligence and the tools used to support it.

The 1968 Mother of all Demos took place in San Francisco, but most of the work behind it went on at the Stanford Research Institutes' Augmentation Research Center. ARC's goal was to use computers to enhance human intelligence and productivity. The result was a system known as NLS (Online System).

NLS ran on computers hosted on Stanford's campus, but it was able to extend its reach up to San Francisco, thanks to the then-fledgling ARPAnet. In 1968, as Engelbart demonstrated (for the first time in public) the NLS' mouse, windowing system and hypertext capabilities, he was backed by a team running the systems at Stanford and communicating with him via videoconferencing. This revolutionary system was the first to hint at the potential of computers to enhance the collective intelligence of humanity.

Today, collective intelligence is something of a hot button for those attending the Program for the Future. Dr. Thomas W. Malone, director of the center for collective intelligence at MIT, defined the concept as “groups of individuals doing things collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By this broad definition, we've had collective intelligence at least as long as we've been humans.”

Engelbart's work in the 1960s was only the beginning of modern collective intelligence research, said Malone. What has changed since that time is the technology of collaboration, he added. All of the modern examples of online collaboration, such as Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, can be dissected to explain the nature of collective intelligence, he said.

Related Search Term(s): networking, software development

Pages 1 2 3

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33104

Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers

Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans

ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development

Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists

Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans

Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists

Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles

Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions

Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.

Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.

RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!

GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.

The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...

Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...

Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...

Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

News Briefs: July 15, 2008 Enea is named to the board of CP-TA, Teradata introduces a new version of its data warehousing tool and SOA Software upgraded its Repository Manager to accommodate its Policy Manager software.

New York City to open Academy for Software Engineering High school would give foundational education in technology

Antenna Software picks up device 'calling' apps and sites The Antenna Volantis Framework allows developers to create and distribute mobile codebases

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment

News Briefs: July 15, 2008
Enea is named to the board of CP-TA, Teradata introduces a new version of its data warehousing tool and SOA Software upgraded its Repository Manager to accommodate its Policy Manager software Read More...

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
FEBRUARY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?

Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
02/09/2012 02:16 PM EST

Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
02/07/2012 11:57 AM EST

RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
02/04/2012 01:57 PM EST

GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
02/03/2012 12:17 PM EST

Facebook claims hacker cred
Facebook's SEC S-1 filing form includes a short essay on the Hacker Way by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
02/02/2012 08:26 AM EST

Ryan Dahl steps down
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, steps back from his position as gatekeeper for the project.
02/01/2012 04:58 PM EST