The first day of reboot 7.0 had a surprise up its sleeve for those of us that stayed throughout the day: Not only did we get to see the planned showing of Doug Engelbart‘s 1968 demonstration of the NLS system featuring among other novelties a mouse, hypertext, and a keyword-ranking search engine — he joined us via a/v link, and stayed for a conversation after the show:
A very enlightening experience, even if those of us born after the demonstration took place might not fully appreciate its significance. Engelbart later emphasized paradigms, and how the process towards fullfilment of the goals of his research will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a view I’m sure Tim Berners-Lee agrees on with regard to the SemWeb aspect (even if some might say that linking to individual objects sounds more like XLink).
Earlier in the day we heard about blogging, Wikipedia, 37signals’ development process, and Ruby on Rails (must… make… time… for… check…) — Jesper Balslev has notes and pointers.
All in all a day above average that started out slow, but picked up at the end — I’m looking forward to day 2, featuring always enjoyable Ben Hammersley.