My kind of legacy

They achieve their goal by following the desire with a plan of action and execution, plus persistence, which recognizes no such thing as failure. Others acquire wealth by employing crooked, dubious means; or else they do so by diverting government’s money into their private coffers – stealing, basically, and building massive estates with the ill-gotten […]

They achieve their goal by following the desire with a plan of action and execution, plus persistence, which recognizes no such thing as failure. Others acquire wealth by employing crooked, dubious means; or else they do so by diverting government’s money into their private coffers – stealing, basically, and building massive estates with the ill-gotten wealth. Fortunately, the way spirit works, such legacies do not usually last for more than a generation or so.
Although there are a few wealthy folks who work extraordinarily hard for their money, most “wealthy” Nigerians belong in the latter category – the category of thievery. In Nigeria, it’s generally believed that a Special Assistant to a Minister, independent of his education, IQ, or “honest” skills, has more money than God!
I am always amazed by the emphasis that the average Nigerian places on wealth. Most times you cannot have a decent conversation with people before the conversation gets dragged into discussions about wealth. I find this to be intellectually very stunting. One obvious manifestation of this syndrome is the mad rush to politics by Nigerian youths, an environment they think promises instant wealth.
People who use their brains to make the world a better place for everyone are priceless in any generations. I mean the innovators and inventors in science and engineering, clergymen who shape the future of the younger ones in the right directions, truly wealthy people who build schools, mosques, and churches, and help others who don’t have the wherewithal to be rich; statesmen who prepare the way for subsequent generations (as opposed to politicians who focus on the next election). These are examples of my kind of legacy.
Douglas Engelbart, who passed away 2 July 2013, certainly foots the bill. His goal was to “augment human intellect,” by which he meant making computers more intuitive to use. He ended up inventing the mouse in the 1960s, filed the patent on 21 June 1967 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and had it registered on November 17, 1970. The title was “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System.” The physical innovation was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels.
Broadly speaking, you can interact with the computer in one of two ways. First, you give instructions to the operating system (OS) of the computer, for example, to print a document or run a program. You do not need to know how to program in order to issue these instructions. Before the mouse, these instructions were given via commands on the command-line, meaning you had to know the applicable system commands.
The other way to interact with the computer involves writing a program that you want the computer to execute for you. The program typically consists of a set of instructions to the computer for carrying out a computing task, such as calculating the average of a set of numbers. In the 60s and 70s such programs were “written” by punching holes into cards. A pack of the cards was then fed into a slot in the computer, from where the cards were conveyed into the “punched-hole-card-reader” for interpretation. This was still the case in 1981, the year I arrived at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in the United States.
However, by 1983 things had changed rather swiftly, at least in the United States, and OS commands could now be given on the command-line via a keyboard, while the pack of cards had been replaced by word processing programs. That is, the instructions in the cards could be typed into a file with the help of a keyboard and screen, using a word processing program, and the file saved on the “hard drive” of the computer. The file contained the program you wanted the OS to compile, link, and execute for you.
Today, your computer programs could still be typed into a file using some form of word processing programs. This part hasn’t changed much, although some computer language compilers now come with visual studios that provide a friendly colorized environment where you can develop (type, debug, compile, link, run) your programs.
The mouse has the most effect on the way we issue system commands, and less on the way we write programs. The command-line way of issuing system commands has been long gone, except for a few diehards like me. It has been replaced by the mouse. For non-computer-savvy folks, which is virtually everyone, this was good riddance, since the procedures required that you know the operating system commands. Apple’s release in 1984 of the then-revolutionary Macintosh computer was the first to replace command-line instructions to the OS with graphical user interface (GUI) icons that basically represented the OS commands. This also became the first time that Engelbart’s mouse was commercially used – to select icons (on the screen) that represented the actions (system commands) you wanted to perform; actions such as printing a file (by clicking on a printer icon), rather than typing the OS commands for printing. You can now appreciate how the mouse enhanced the wide adoption of computers by lay men.
“Anyone in the world who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to him,” said Curtis R. Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, where Engelbart had worked.
Although inventors tend to be rich, Engelbart didn’t make a penny from his invention because the patent, which had a life span of 17 years, had expired by the time the mouse became a popular device in computers.