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you don't need me to tell you Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time we gather today in pretense of
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unanimity in Concord to croon over Doug's ashes and grab for scraps of his robe everyone here will of course say they're carrying on his work by whatever
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twisted interpretation I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file as he did some are no doubt
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here to cheer and march behind the mouse as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of York let them be happy in that celebration but the real ashes to be mourned but the
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ashes of Doug's great dream and vision that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration
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don't get me wrong the people who gave us all those fonts were idealist too in their way they just didn't necessarily hold a very high view of human potential I used to have a high view of human
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potential but no one ever had such a soaring view of human potential as Douglas Carl Engelbart and he gave us wings to soar with him though his mind
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flew on a head where if you could see like Icarus he tried to fly too far too fast and the wings melted off the melt off began after the great demo of 1968
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his team dispersed to seek fortunes elsewhere and he was subordinated to an artificial intelligence department where his real intelligence was stifled all too soon the augmentation lab the augmentation Research Center was gone
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fobbed off on an aircraft company he was cast out for the next 30 years into the endless spiral of what they call in Hollywood development hell trying to
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find backing let us never forget the Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA tugging apart was dumped by SR I Doug Ingle Bart was snubbed by Xerox PARC and
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for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us farther but for Doug that great demo was only the beginning that great demo which defined the corners of our world was only square
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one of his endless new checkerboard the great playing field the great workplace of sharing cooperation and understanding he sought to create and alas that only he could imagine just as we can only
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guess what John Kennedy would have done we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime perhaps the dynamic knowledge repository he imagined the DKR would not be
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feasible in a real-world corporation perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics jockeying and
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backstabbing and euphemized evil of course he was naive Gandhi and Martin Luther King pretended to be naive but duck was the real thing a luminous innocent able to do in all
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innocence what sophisticates could not would not dare but that naive tay accomplished a dazzling amount in those few years of his augmentation Research Center even as the knives were being
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sharpened for him did he actually have any more great inventions under that halo we'll never know will we Doug hoped eventually to take on all the
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urgent and complex problems of humanity dealing with them in parallel because he saw you're dealing with him in parallel he saw is the true and final challenge could he have done it somehow given us
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exalted radical tools for optimization and agreement in this urgent complex world of hurt and hatred we'll never know Willy but who better should have had the
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chance to try to quote Joan of Arc from Shawn's play about her when will the world be ready to receive its Saints I think we know the answer when they are
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dead pasteurized and homogenized and simplified into stereotypes and the true depth and integrity of their ideas and initiatives are forgotten but the urgent and complex problems of mankind have
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only grown more urgent and more complex it sure looks like Humanity is circling the drain to quote the great poet Walt
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Kelly the gentle journey jolts to stop the drifting dream is done the long-gone goblins loom ahead but deadly that we
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thought were dead are waiting everyone and here we twiddle in a world of computer glitz as the winds rise and the
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seas rise and the debts rise and the terrorists rise and the nukes tick so I don't just feel like I've lost my best friend I feel like I've lost my best
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planet I'll give the last word to Shakespeare's Mark Antony he speaks to
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the body of Julius Caesar while he's confronting the gang that murdered him hope Arden me thou bleeding piece of Earth that I am meek and gentle with
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these butchers thou art the ruins of the noblest men that ever lived in the tide of times
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