If you have not watched at least that first 30 minutes of Engelbart's talk, I would recommend you stop what your doing and watch it right now.

In an hour and 40 minutes Englebart demonstrates input via mouse, video conferencing and collaborative editing among other things. This was before the internet, before UIs, before the idea of personal computing. Incidentally the most profound thing about this demo is not the technology demonstrated but rather the introduction of the concept of personal computing. At a time where computers were reserved for number crunching Englebart envisioned a future where they would be a part of our daily lives not controlling us but enhancing our abilities.

A quick side note, it is worth noting that while Englebart was certainly the visionary, his partner Bill English brought Englebart's visions into the world.

"And observe that if I forget to tell the computer to save my work, it loses it!"

furious scribbling in the audience as everyone takes notes

I'm so glad we're finally getting away from this paradigm after four decades. For example, the iPhone notepad (and now Mac TextEdit) doesn't wait for a cue from the user to write the few dozen bytes of new input to persistent storage.

Autosave without saving many undo states is equally dangerous.

Not saying the iPhone does anything in a bad way (I have no clue) - but I've hardly been bitten by losing unsaved work because I'm deliberately using ctrl-c very often.

That's why many people (I first read about this in Alan Cooper's About Face 2.0) advocating for automatic save also advocate for unlimited undo (or at least something close to it) because closing a document and not saving it is just a form of undo while closing a document and saving it should be the default action.

This is also a place where the desktop metaphor (with paper documents) around which most WIMP systems are built exposes computer details and fails to stick to its metaphoric roots. When I scribble something on paper it's there and I don't have to consciously remember to somehow commit a transient state of my scribbling to paper explicitly.

After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it.

Good software doesn't lose anything ever, but even with "average" (i.e., unacceptably bad if you think about it critically) tools I've had sudden power cuts where I lost just a few words because of this habit.

> After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it.

That is exactly how I learned too. Years later, ctrl-s is still a reflex action.

I realised I have passed some kind of milestone - I read that and thought "search"

Thank you :-)

Totally necessary when the early PCs would just die on you because you pushed a key.