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Funny to think that it’s been 40 years since someone (Doug Engelbart) came up with the idea for the first computer mouse.

Made of wood, and with one button, it shook up the traditional ideas of computing and redefined how people should interact and use computers – they should help us.

Many of the things we take for granted today, and perhaps thought had only been around since the 80s and the first usable PC-based word processors, were demonstrated at that show in California in 1968. Copying, pasting and clipping text files and hyperlinking  - all things previously unheard of, were unveiled by Engelbart and the team behind NLS, the name of the system to put the ideas into practice.

What is perhaps most significant about the event was that NLS was adopted by the Stanford Research Institute who, together with UCLA, formed one of the two ends of the first link in the Arpanet network – what we now call the Internet. 

I think we should all raise a glass to Mr Engelbart today.

Read more at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7768481.stm

The search giant Yahoo, amongst others, is experimenting with a new version of the internet called the “Semantic Web”. In other words, the aim is to try and get the internet to behave more like person, rather than just a collection of dumb terminals.

At the moment, when you do a web search for, say, “office equipment”, the search engines use the specific words in that search request, and try and match pages that they have previously indexed. This can sometimes throw up all sorts of anomalies and weird pages. Basically this is because people are still much better than computers at associating between words and phrases, and as people’s associations differ wildly between age groups, countries, races and so on, it is very difficult for a search engine to get it right every time, for everyone.

The solution, say the techies, is to have the web think for itself, and instead of just dumbly returning a list of pages, it should actively search for relevant content by understanding its meaning. Of course “understanding” is a relative term – we think it is doubtful whether a computer will ever pass the Turing test in our lifetime, as the meaning we as humans attach to information is vastly complex and, ultimately, any computer will have to be programmed by us, and we do not fully understand this relationship ourselves.

We all saw what happened in Terminator 2 when SkyNet started to think for itself (it fought back, apparently, when someone tried to unplug it), so maybe going as far as a fully self-aware internet wouldn’t be such a good idea. However, anything that makes our daily trawl through the internet a little easier and quicker is a good idea in our book.

Check out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7296056.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test