Not to take away from GNU, but it was not the first freely exchanged open source software. In the batch processing days, every IBM branch office had a file cabinet full of shared software and organizations like SHARE did what the name suggests. Share was formed in 1955 and is still going.

Well, I am even older -- started on unit record equipment and really understood it. Later, I wire-wrapped a single board computer in order to learn about TTL. But I did that without understanding the physics. I could use relays and TTL chips, but did not understand them. Same with programming -- started with low-level assembly language then moved to higher levels of abstraction -- first IOCS routines then Fortran. Today we program at still higher levels of abstraction.

But, I never could have built a relay from scratch let alone a TTL chip. Even us old guys were far from self-sufficient and capable of restarting "the machine" if it failed. How long did it take people to get from mud to pottery, rocks to steel and concrete, raw meat to cooked,sheep hair to shirts? We are all extremely narrow specialists.

Also -- you've picked a tougher sounding life goal than Doug Engelbart did.

Well, you have given me some links to follow!

I visited Cuba a couple of times during the "special period," and saw poverty, closed factories, etc. The main adaptions I noted were -- regular power blackouts and tons of brand new Chinese bicycles.

If you are a fan of dystopian sci fi, check out EM Forster's "The machine stops."

Dramatization video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs
Text: http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf

I recall fooling with a Plato terminal back in the 60/70s when I was at the System Development Corporation. They had a program for time-shared interactive education in the research directorate, but I was not working on it -- had a nice orange plasma display while we were working with vector CRT displays and TTYs.

Well put! It seemed that every paper written in those days cited Licklider's man-machine symbiosis. He had a vision and the skill to get funds to support that vision (including my dissertation). I met him once and we also had a mutual friend and I can also add that, in spite of a regal sounding name, he was, like Doug Engelbart, friendly and modest.

These folks knew each other -- Engelbart claimed Bush's "As We May Think" as a major inspiration and Bush, Weiner and Licklider were colleagues at MIT. They were also familiar with other time sharing and interactive computing projects at the time and members of that community -- especially Engelbart and Licklider. As you said -- they are links in a chain, but strong links.

They had something else in common -- a sense that their careers were to be in service of humanity, not merely for self agrandisement.

For an overview of the connection between Bush-Licklider-Engelbart, including links to As We May Think and Man-Machine Symbiosis paper, see this teaching module: http://cis275topics.blogspot.com/2010/10/web-history-and-internet-culture.html.

This is no time to be a literal, pedantic dork. If you speak English, you know what I meant.

Synchronous collaboration: used computers to support collaboration at the same time -- computer-based meeting room -- see photo on my post. Asynchronous collaboration: Created shared database or documents created and edited by multiple people.

I think it may be that people like Doug are so smart they realize that they are not the smartest person on the planet. I am reminded of another visionary hero of that era, who funded a lot of Doug's work, J.C.R. Licklider. Lick was also super nice and humble. Another association -- Herbert Simon, AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate -- he once told me that he stored almost everything he knew in his friend's heads.

He was not quite that old, but he was not a kid. He worked on a lot of different pointing devices before settling on the mouse. He did a lot of testing. I recall one where he steered the cursor around using his knee. Up to that time, we just used light pens, which were imprecise and tiring.

I meant on a computer -- who did it before that?