“extra buildings added to the futuristic San Franscisco skyline”

I understand the sentiment, but 99.9% of the species of animals that have existed on Earth have gone extinct, the great majority of them before homo sapiens sapiens existed. Of the approximately 8 million species estimated to be alive currently, we have yet to discover or document some 80%.

Did Toshiba get permission from Alan Kay to use the name he used for the tablet he invented in 1968? I used his concept for the semester project in a course on operating system design I taught in 1970.

There were also some gigundo listening devices — sound cameras/telescopes —built for detecting aircraft before radar. Here’s one of my favorites:

“A weight in geosynchronous orbit would drop down to Earth’s surface a hundred-thousand-kilometer-long, ultra-strong cable”

I re-purpose old Kindles. Here’s an ancient e-ink that displays data from my weather station:

TOTO-washlet: luxurious, elegant, feature-laden, and a complete waste of money.

“The Alto had a graphic screen that you could draw and write on, it prompted the invention of the first laser printer and Ethernet and even had a mouse.”

The update helps, but the title of the article is still hopelessly wrong. The urban system doesn’t have anything to do with Hyperloop, any more than the DC Metro has anything to do with Acela. There hasn’t been any new news about Hyperloop; all of Musk’s new stuff is about tweaks to the urban underground tunnels. You…

I’m confused by this article. You seem to be calling the urban transport system “Hyperloop,” but they’re two entirely different ideas. Among the many differences between the two is that Hyperloop vehicles travel in a low pressure tube; the urban system is at normal pressure.

In fact we already have fusion power; it’s the largest source of energy used by the human race.

Science is written in Basic?

I didn’t say they invented the mouse!

If I were talking about just Ethernet, I’d probably mention Bob Metcalfe; laser printer I’d name Gary Starkweather (not at Parc yet then); for the graphical interface you have to mention Sutherland at MIT/Utah and Engelbart at SRI, but also Alan Kay at Parc. Finally for the Alto, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker, both…

If you mean me I’m too old to be a baby boomer; I was born during WWII, not after.

At that time our graphics system at Brown, one of the most advanced in the world, was an IBM 2250 display. It had a resolution of 1024 x 1024, 1-bit monochrome, cost $250K in 1965 ($2M in today’s dollars). I programmed the light-pen tracking; if you look up “light pen” in Wikipedia you’ll see a picture of one of our…

No, Xerox didn’t invent the mouse. Doug Engelbart at SRI did that, six years before Xerox Parc was created. I got to try it in 1968, when that little wooden box was the only computer mouse on Earth. You can give them credit for the graphical interface, though Ivan Sutherland at Utah deserves some of that credit, and…

I’ve gone a step beyond this: I use AutoHotKey to create arbitrary sequences of actions mapped to obscure keyboard entries (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Z), then I use Flirc to map a button on a little 3" x 2" IR remote that I hold in my left hand while mousing with my right. Other than typing text, pretty much everything I need to…

We had a 747 go over our house at about a thousand feet a few years ago. It looked very large, but so did the Space Shuttle Discovery that it was carrying on its back to Dulles. It was a bittersweet closure for me; I was at the rollout of the Enterprise in Palmdale in 1976.

However, Sedge gets $0.004 every time someone uses it. IP law is strange.