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Playlist: 5 Pioneering Computer Demos, featuring MIT, Stanford and Xerox

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Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket

Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his many accomplishments Engelbart struggled in later years to get attention or funding for his work.

Now seems like an appropriate time to look back at some of the early computer demos, and for further reading, check out “Creation Myth,” Malcolm Gladwell’s 2011 New Yorker story on the work of Engelbart, Xerox PARC and Apple.

1. The Early Days of ‘Cloud Computing’ at MIT, 1963 (28 min.)

This is a 1963 interview with professor Fernando J. Corbato at the MIT Computation Center, where he explains the concept of “timesharing,” which they developed to allow teams to work on individual consoles that attach to one centralized computer.

For more from MIT, check out this 1963 demonstration of “sketchpad” software developed by Ivan Sutherland.

2. Hewlett-Packard’s First Personal Computer, 1968 (21 minutes)

Marketing brochures proclaimed that HP’s 9100A was “more than a calculator—it’s really a desk-top computer!” The cost: $4,900. Read more on how the Model 9100A was developed.

3. Doug Engelbart, Stanford Research Institute, 1968 (1 hr., 15 min.)

This two-hour demo from Engelbart, who founded SRI’s Augmentation Research Center, not only introduces the mouse, but also everything from the graphical user interface to hyperlinking, cutting-and-pasting and collaborative editing.

4. Early Digital Teleconferencing, University of Southern California, 1978 (6 min.)

USC’s Informational Sciences Institute produced this filmed demonstration of early digital teleconferencing technology over ARPAnet, complete with guy-who-nearly-misses-the-call-because-he-was-yachting.

5. Xerox Star User Interface, 1982

It was Xerox PARC where Steve Jobs saw the future for Apple, when he visited and got a demo of the Alto personal computer. Xerox released its Star Professional Workstation in 1981, and this clip features Star designers Charles Irby and David Canfield-Smith explaining how the system worked.

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Image via dougengelbart.org

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The Letter

Longreads Pick

S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era:

“Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her second reader). ‘She came into my office and, in the space of a twenty-minute conversation, she had about a hundred ideas for stories, and about eighty of them were good.’

“Orlean laughed about this. ‘By the standards of The New Yorker I was being brought in off the street. I had a book contract; I was writing for Rolling Stone and The Boston Globe, so that’s hilarious. That’s so classic of The New Yorker to feel that if you weren’t at The New Yorker you were essentially homeless and living hand-to-mouth on crap.’

“‘When I got there the mood was not very nice,’ she said. Orlean was unusual among New Yorker writers, most of whom, she said, had spent their careers at the magazine and hadn’t written for other publications. ‘It’s a little bit like, I wasn’t a virgin, and more typically people came to The New Yorker as virgins. They came into their adulthood there.’ The place was cliquey, she said, but that has since dissipated, in no small part because Gottlieb brought in so many writers who ‘weren’t born in the manger.’ At this point, ‘that aristocratic, inbred feel—that if you weren’t there from birth you didn’t deserve to be there—has really dissolved.'”

Author: Elon Green
Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 3, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,379 words)

Reading List: Summer Camp

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For anyone who wants to run away to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, to make new, fun, friends, to live as though summer is forever: This one’s for you.

1. “Into the Woods and Away from Technology.” (Chris Colin, The New Yorker, June 2013)

Welcome to Camp Grounded, where you’ll bring your sleeping bag but not your iPhone. Navarro, Calif. hosts this three-day adult summer camp where campers seek to understand themselves and their relationship to the screens they treasure.

2. “A-Camp May 2013 Recamp #1: Over the Mountain and Into the Woods We Go.” (The Team, Autostraddle, June 2013)

Autostraddle hosted the third installation of A-Camp, a summer-y camp for queer folks, chockfull of workshops, dance parties, feelings, discussion panels, swimming, and arts and crafts. Here, counselors, interns, and campers provide heartfelt, hilarious recapitulations of their experiences and epiphanies. (This is the first of four installments.)

3. “Summer Camp.” (Tyler, Rookie Magazine, June 2013.)

The author’s favorite place in the world. “Noncampers just don’t understand,” he writes.

4. “Transmissions From Camp Trans.” (Michelle Tea, The Believer, November 2003)

Author Michelle Tea explores “Camp Trans,” the campout-music festival that protests the trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

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Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Image: Universal Studios

Reading List: Summer Camp

Longreads Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from The New Yorker, Autostraddle, Rookie, and The Believer.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 30, 2013

Longreads Guest Pick: Todd Olmstead on 'Random Access Denied'

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Todd Olmstead is Mashable’s Associate Community Manager and an occasional music writer. He lives in Brooklyn.

My favorite longread this week is ‘Random Access Denied,’ by Sasha-Frere Jones in the New Yorker. It takes you through the mind of the reviewer, writing about a big-deal album, and peels back the curtain a bit. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that initial listening party? And yet, it’s about more than just an album. It’s about the way we listen to music. Frere-Jones, despite being a critical listener, isn’t lamenting leak culture or the rush for journalists to judge albums, though no one would blame him if he did. Rather, he presents an honest case for how we listen: Oftentimes in phases, via iterations of songs and bits of marketing, piecing together our opinions as we go. Rarely do we as listeners arrive at the finished product on album release day anymore, and that’s okay. As we come up on the summer’s next massively anticipated music release — Kanye West’s “Yeezus” — it’s worth this reflection before we rush in.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Your Latest Fiction Picks: Lorrie Moore, Tor.com and Taddle Creek

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In case you’ve missed them, here’s a quick list of some of the most recent #longreads #fiction picks from the community:

1. “The Side Sleeper” (Emily Schultz, Taddle Creek)

2. “We Have Always Lived On Mars”(Cecil Castellucci, Tor.com)

3. “Paper Losses”(Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker, 2006)

4. “Burning Bright” (Ron Rash, Ecotone Journal, 2008)

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Longreads Guest Pick: Pravesh Bhardwaj on Alice Munro's 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain'

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Today’s guest pick comes from frequent Longreads contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj:

“I am a filmmaker based in Mumbai. These days I am writing a screenplay, which might become my next film. I spend more time ‘trying to write’ than doing the real writing. So I have made a deal with myself: Read a piece of fiction I have not read before, and read it online so that I don’t run away from the computer—and then go back and take another stab at writing. The idea is to relax in front of the screen that scares me as I have not written enough on the day.

“Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ (The New Yorker, 1999) is one of the finest stories I have ever read. It is about Grant and Fiona, who have been married for many decades, and how their relationship changes once Fiona gets institutionalized as she is in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I am yet to see Sarah Polley’s film adaptation (Away From Her). Maybe I will, after I have read the story a few times—maybe never. Yes, I love the story that much.”

Read the story here.

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Longreads Guest Pick: Pravesh Bhardwaj on Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’

Longreads Pick

Today’s guest pick comes from frequent Longreads contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj, who recommends Alice Munro’s short story, published in The New Yorker in 1999.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 6, 2013

Lives of the Moral Saints

Longreads Pick

Why do some people react so negatively to the idea of “extreme morality”? An interview with The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar, whose latest book project examines the selfless acts of others:

“If the suspicion is hypocrisy, I think we underestimate the sort of people I’m writing about—it’s entirely possible to live an extremely ethical life without being hypocritical. But besides that, I think people overvalue certain kinds of sins. For instance, many people have said to me, when they hear who I’m writing about, ‘Well, don’t they just act morally to make themselves feel better? Don’t they get all self-righteous and overly proud of themselves?’ I think that pride and self-righteousness are far less important than most people seem to think they are. I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!”

Source: Boston Review
Published: Apr 18, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,357 words)

“Death of a Revolutionary.” Susan Faludi, The New Yorker.