The ThinkPad TrackPoint tried to build a better mouse (2020)
I posted this about Ted Selker&#x27;s dual-Trackpad Thinkpad prototype to an earlier discussion about multiple cursors:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27222018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27222018</a><p>DonHopkins on May 20, 2021 | parent | next [–]<p>Kudos to you for supporting multiple cursors from the start, which a buffer with a gap can&#x27;t support efficiently. Douglas Englebart would have approved!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collaborative_real-time_editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collaborative_real-time_editor</a><p>&gt;History of key products: The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21757797" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21757797</a><p>Vis-à-vis mamelons, Ted Selker (who invented the Trackpoint) actually build a prototype Thinkpad keyboard with TWO Trackpoints, which he loved to show at his New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop at IBM Almaden Research Lab.<p>While I&#x27;m not sure if this video of the 1995 New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop actually shows a dual-nippled Thinkpad, it does include a great talk by Doug Engelbart (14:22), and quite a few other interesting people! (James Gosling of Sun Microsystems talks about capabilities of Sun&#x27;s new web browser HotJava, at 24:36! A classic!)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oD9NUWDCyHI">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oD9NUWDCyHI</a><p>The multi-Trackpoint keyboard was extremely approachable and attractive, and everybody who saw them instantly wanted to get their hands on them and try them out! (But you had to keep them away from babies.) He made a lot of different prototypes over time, but unfortunately IBM never shipped a Thinkpad with two nipples.<p>That was because OS&#x2F;2 (and every other contemporary operating system and window system and application) had no idea how to handle two cursors at the same time, so it would have required rewriting all the applications and gui toolkits and window systems from the ground up to support dual trackpoints.<p>The failure to inherently support multiple cursors by default was one of Doug Engelbart&#x27;s major disappointments about mainstream non-collaborative user interfaces, because collaboration was the whole point of NLS&#x2F;Augment, so multiple cursors weren&#x27;t a feature so much as a symptom.<p>Bret Victor discussed it in a few words on Doug Engelbart that he wrote on the day of his death:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;Engelbart&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;Engelbart&#x2F;</a><p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;&quot;Ah!&quot;, you say. &quot;That&#x27;s like Skype!&quot;<p>&gt;Then, Engelbart and Paxton start simultaneously working with the document on the screen.<p>&gt;&quot;Ah!&quot;, you say. &quot;That&#x27;s like screen sharing!&quot;<p>&gt;No. It is not like screen sharing at all.<p>&gt;If you look closer, you&#x27;ll notice that there are two individual mouse pointers. Engelbart and Paxton are each controlling their own pointer.<p>&gt;&quot;Okay,&quot; you say, &quot;so they have separate mouse pointers, and when we screen share today, we have to fight over a single pointer. That&#x27;s a trivial detail; it&#x27;s still basically the same thing.&quot;<p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;Engelbart&#x27;s vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a shared intellectual space. His entire system was designed around that intent.<p>&gt;From that perspective, separate pointers weren&#x27;t a feature so much as a symptom. It was the only design that could have made any sense. It just fell out. The collaborators both have to point at information on the screen, in the same way that they would both point at information on a chalkboard. Obviously they need their own pointers.<p>&gt;Likewise, for every aspect of Engelbart&#x27;s system. The entire system was designed around a clear intent.<p>&gt;Our screen sharing, on the other hand, is a bolted-on hack that doesn&#x27;t alter the single-user design of our present computers. Our computers are fundamentally designed with a single-user assumption through-and-through, and simply mirroring a display remotely doesn&#x27;t magically transform them into collaborative environments.<p>&gt;If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart&#x27;s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart&#x27;s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems.<p>bombcar on May 20, 2021 | root | parent | next [–]<p>The multiple-cursors problem goes to show how much of computing is STILL strongly single-user, even for all our multiuser underpinnings.<p>Arguably the only &quot;single user&quot; devices should be things like the mouse itself, as multiple people can see the same screen (and maybe even use the same keyboard).<p>Some games implemented this to allow two-player on the same machine - each would get a joystick or &quot;their half&quot; of the keyboard.<p>DonHopkins on May 20, 2021 | root | parent | next [–]<p>The Thinkpad with two Trackpoints was ostensibly single user, but multi-hand, which applications still are not designed to cope with, let alone multi user multi hand&#x2F;finger&#x2F;trackpoint!<p>Given a program that supported multiple trackpoints, two people could use the two Trackpoints on each side of the keyboard, just like you describe with keys.<p>Now we have multitouch APIs on mobile devices, at least. But they&#x27;re not a good match for supporting multi-mouse&#x2F;trackpoint, since they only support tracking fingers while they&#x27;re touching the screen, not pointing around without pressing like a mouse&#x2F;trackpoint does.