“52 years ago, people could edit content simultaneously, actually.”
Engelbart demo showed simultaneous collaborative editing in 1968.
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52 years ago, people could edit content simultaneously, actually. 1968 “Mother of All Demos” by SRI’s Doug Engelbart and Team this video link The failure to inherently support multiple cursors by default was one of Doug Engelbart's major disappointments about mainstream non-collaborative user interfaces, because collaboration was the whole point of NLS/Augment, so multiple cursors weren't a feature so much as a symptom. Bret Victor discussed it in a few words on Doug Engelbart that he wrote on the day of his death: link >Say you bring up his 1968 demo on YouTube and watch a bit. At one point, the face of a remote collaborator, Bill Paxton, appears on screen, and Engelbart and Paxton have a conversation. >"Ah!", you say. "That's like Skype!" >Then, Engelbart and Paxton start simultaneously working with the document on the screen. >"Ah!", you say. "That's like screen sharing!" >No. It is not like screen sharing at all. >If you look closer, you'll notice that there are two individual mouse pointers. Engelbart and Paxton are each controlling their own pointer. >"Okay," you say, "so they have separate mouse pointers, and when we screen share today, we have to fight over a single pointer. That's a trivial detail; it's still basically the same thing." >No. It is not the same thing. At all. It misses the intent of the design, and for a research system, the intent matters most. >Engelbart's vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a sha