Douglas Engelbart

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

by Thierry Bardini  · 1 Dec 2000

Press Stanford, CalIfornIa @ 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford JunIor UnIversity LIbrary of Congress CatalogIng-In-Publication Data BardIni, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, coevolutIon, and the ongins of personal computIng / ThIerry Bardinl. p. cm - (Writing science) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8°47-3723-1 (

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the answers to these questions, and with them, the origins of personal computing, it is necessary to begin by understanding the contribu- tions of Douglas Engelbart and the concerns that motivated them. Famous and revered among his peers, Engelbart is one of the most misunderstood and per- haps least-known computer

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pioneers. This book proposes to remedy this, and not only for the sake of a case study or to claim a spot for Douglas Engelbart in the pantheon of the computer revolution, but also because such an enter- prise teaches us many lessons in the development, diffusion, and effect

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and users, as tends to be the norm in the historical accounts of the development of the computer. In its inception, as the career of Douglas Engelbart shows, the development of the personal computer interface was a technology by and about people. In more traditional accounts, the computer is first a

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research in the best conditions pos- sible and, therefore, to tackle such a crazy project as writing this book; and, last but not least, Douglas Engelbart, of the Bootstrap Institute, who agreed to answer my questions and cheerfully helped me in writing this book. This book would not have existed without

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BASE 1981 HITACHI LCD MS DOS QUICKDRA W Developments In Computer Technology, 1969-1984 (Computers are shown above the line; software and components, below) INTRODUCTION Douglas Engelbart's Crusade for the Augmentation of Human Intellect Journal entry 37. Thoughts of the Brain are expenenced by us as arrangements and rearrangements-change-in

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addressIng Itself and not someone or some- thIng outsIde Itself). - PHI LIP K. ole K , Val,s Very few people outside the computer industry know Douglas Engelbart, the leading figure of the Augmentation of Human Intellect project, and among those people, many still credit him only with technological innovations like the mouse

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the windowed user interface. These indeed are major innovations, and today they have become pervasive in the environments in which people work and play. But Douglas Engelbart never really gets credit for the larger contribution that he worked to create: an integrative and comprehensive framework that ties to- gether the technological and

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more than that: how they believed humans could do better at living and working, thinking and acting. Both aspects of the story meet in what Douglas Engelbart always called his "crusade. " In the I 9 50'S, computing technology was still in its early stages, character- ized by massive machines devoted

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plethora of ends. How-and why-that revolution came about can best be seen by examining the career of one of its most important agents, Douglas Engelbart. Both because of Engelbart's efforts and, in some ways, de- spite them, the personal computer is what it is today. FROM TECHNICIAN TO

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another, and finally started realizing I would like them to be the father I didn't have, instead of being a professor. (Engelbart 1996) Douglas Engelbart was a bright child who sailed through most of his school years with no apparent difficulties. He graduated from high school and spent two years

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crusade," with its connotations of zeal and enthusiasm in the undertaking of a task of epic proportions. For a generation of engineers and scientists like Douglas Engelbart, who had known the military as the means of achieving moral goals, as well as the context in which they came of age and, later

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be- come the outsider as free intellectual, fitting uneasily into the regimen of incentives and rewards proffered by the America of the mid-1950'S. Douglas Engelbart eventually got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1956 (John Woodyard was his adviser). For his Ph.D. work, he had developed a

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together in shaping them. IntroductIon 23 Engelbart and Licklider In 1960, when J. C. R. Licklider was proposing his ideas on "man-computer symbiosis," Douglas Engelbart was beginning to implement his "crusade" to make humans better able to cope with the twin challenges of complexity and urgency at SRI. The full

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"evaluate, motivate and stimulate SDC's progress." 29 Since his Ph.D. at Berkeley under Paul Morton's supervision in the early 1950'S, Douglas Engelbart had kept some contacts with his alma mater. For instance, some Berkeley computer science students came to ARC for summer jobs. Engelbart, in connection with

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, a company based in EI Segundo, near Los Angeles. This second project, entitled Project Genie, had a tremendous influence on the further progress of both Douglas Engelbart's "crusade" and the development of per- sonal computing. Charles Thacker, Butler Lampson, and Jim Mitchell (and later Peter Deutsch) were the main architects

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a common language. How that pro- cess worked out had significant consequences for the way the personal com- puter developed. The most significant consequence was Douglas Engelbart's 33 34 Language and the Body inclusion of the body of the user in the interaction between computers and their users. LANGUAGE The history

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together by typed links" (Halasz 1988, 836). Because of how he conceived of the way that natural language could function in the human-computer interface, Douglas Engelbart, along with Ted Nelson, often is credited for pioneering work in the field of hypertext or hypermedia. Many, however, trace the genealogy of hy-

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systems. The first is represented by Ted Nelson and his Xanadu Project, which was aiming at facilitating individual literary creativity. The second is represented by Douglas Engelbart and his NLS, as his oN-Line System was called, which was conceived as a way to support group collabo- 40 Language and the

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of natural language as a way to connect computers and their users was a central concern of the Artificial Intelligence research program, not just of Douglas Engelbart's project for the Augmentation of Human Intellect. Its at- tempt to use natural language as a human-machine interface was perhaps AI's

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artificial or supernatural when they were first introduced. Progress depends on artrficial aIds becoming so famtllar that they are regarded as natural" (Good 1958, 283, Douglas Engelbart's emphasis).21 And what is more natural, for humans, and 54 Language and the Body indeed, more universal, than perception? As Whorf has said

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on a specific product or an artifact, but on a process that involved the coevolution of the user along with the computer. Here is how Douglas Engelbart was formulating the bootstrap strategy in 1968: I have been talkIng about what you would say is an evolutionary approach. You bUIld a system;

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them in new con- texts. In 1992, thirty years after Engelbart's first experiments with the chord keyset, I first saw the device on Douglas Engelbart's desktop and took my first lesson in operating it from its inventor. I immediately realized that I was using one of the most efficient

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later recollections "on early history" : There's a long-standing debate about the qualities of keyboards. I think that one of the great inventions was Doug Engelbart's invention of the one-handed key- board. But there's an awful lot of human factors and ergonomics wrapped up in that. In fact

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play and position-indicator technology: the integrator is in fact the operating principle of most position-indicating transducers. Bill English, an electrical engineer who joined Douglas Engelbart in 1964 after earning his master's at Stanford, took charge of the project of developing a planimeter-based input device for manipulating symbols on

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resulted from the dialectical relationship between technological innovations and the conceptions of their uses-and their users-entertained by their designers. Technological innovators such as Douglas Engelbart also invent the kind of people they expect to use their innovations. THE PROBLEM OF THE INTERFACE In her remarkable Computers as Theater, Brenda Laurel

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in- novation process. INVENTING THE VIRTUAL USER The question of the user at first seemed to pose no serious challenge to the im- plementation of Douglas Engelbart's Framework for the Augmentation of Hu- man Intellect. The experiment was considered to be a learning experience, an experience of "bootstrapping" for the

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is, in users (Buxton 1986). In 1986, too, in a retrospective I 16 Inventing the Virtual User exhibition of the advances of the ARC project, Douglas Engelbart also con- cluded that "the technology side has grown way out of proportion, in my view, just stupendously so . . . but all we have to

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puting Machinery and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Every book devoted to personal computing at some point reports this fa- mous presentation, which Douglas Engelbart and his staff offered at the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference on December 9, 1968, later dubbed "the SRI and the oN-LIne System 139

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might want to make a break and do something different. Start agaIn, that was certainly the PARC phIlosophy. Butler Lampson belIeved that. (English 1992) To Douglas Engelbart, the justification of the decision to stick to the time- sharing technology was consistent with the augmentation framework. One goal of the project was iterative

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The first Alto was operational on April I, 1973. It was principally the product of the vision of one man, Alan Kay. The Alto took Douglas Engelbart's innovations in a direction completely different from that envisioned by the Framework for the Augmentation of Hu- man Intellect, a direction that ultimately led

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system or a text ed- itor, there is a powerful bootstrapping effect. (IbId., 269, emphasIs in the orIginal) Thus, the "bootstrapping philosophy" proposed by Douglas Engelbart at ARC during the 1960's ended up being put to use for very different ends than those envisioned by his crusade. 6 To Engelbart

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be made to be, and combining it with the basic boot- strapping methodology spelled the end of the bootstrapping philosophy as en- visioned by Douglas Engelbart. It meant tailoring the user interface to what the designers could find out about or imagine about how people actually do their work, not using

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and Augment (the new name of NLS) slowly faded into oblivion. 214 ARPANET, E-mail, and est Describing his career at a conference in 1986, Douglas Engelbart provided his own eulogy for ARC: I'm going to terminate at this point, since after 1976 we really had no chance to continue pursuing

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ephemeral from what is more enduring, it is becoming clear that many of the basic issues about the nature of personal computing first raised by Douglas Engelbart continue to define its future, as well as its past. CODA Where Hand and Memory Can Meet Again Notions of bootstrapping occur in many

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user: the social construction of the personal interface happened as the social construction of user-friendliness, translated into the technical terms of "mode- lessness." From Douglas Engelbart's intellectual worker to "Sally" and even- tually to Apple's consumer, the conceptualization and gradual realization of the user was a social process in

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in cyberspace. Although cyberspace, simstim, and their attributes were first given popular currency by Gibson, they were anticipated-and in a limited way, achieved- by Douglas Engelbart, whose hypermedia vision was of a multidimensional and mutliformat dataspace in which users can "fly" (Engelbart 1992). For En- gel bart, the "workstation is

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of human experience. Like any other human interaction with the world, human-computer interaction is both a bio- logical and a sociological process, as Douglas Engelbart knew. As a result, the interface between the user and the personal computer cannot be considered solely as a symbolic space where materiality becomes a

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take this into account and strive for a harmonious human experience in its fullest expression, an experience that employs both hand and memory once more. Douglas Engelbart's decision to "start with the basics" led him to put the emphasis first on sensorimotor processes, the lowest order of explicitly human processes

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- garded with hostility and derision more ambitIous plans to make programming ac- cessible to a larger population" (1980, 127- 28). 5. This section on Douglas Engelbart's contribution to personal computIng tech- nologies relies on my interview with him (Engelbart 1992), as well as on four oral history intervIews carrIed out

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us to understand also the develop- ment of even so sophisticated a product of modern high technology as the electronic computer" (199 2 , 334). 20. Douglas Engelbart certainly understood this point long before PetroskI, as his own example of an "unnatural" tool, the "disaugmented pencil," shows: "One way of explaining to somebody

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manufacture of many thousands of the in- struments In the nIneteenth century- over twelve thousand by Amsler alone by 1884" (199 0 ,168). I7. Douglas Engelbart was, of course, aware of this connection, SInce he wrote in a later paper that "exactly the same phenomenon applied in the mechanical inte- grators

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he or she has been black boxed too: the prescriptIons in the machine are also prescribed possibilities for the user. 4. From an interview wIth Douglas Engelbart available on-line at http://www .su perkIds.com /awe b /pages /features /mouse /mouse.html. 5. The interaction sequence was actually a lIttle

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. The vIrtual user to be augmented thus becomes a reflexIve user who has already ac- qUIred the correct Incorporating practices. 9. In the interview with Douglas Engelbart available on-line at http://www .su perkIds.com /awe b /pages /features /mouse /mouse.html. 10. Some of these designs might not be

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very powerful way to interact with the computer, though learning how to key the various combinations took some practice. " 6. For this section on Douglas Engelbart's contribution, I again rely on my own interview as well on four interviews carried out by Henry Lowood, bibliographer for History of Science and

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contributIon to the Second Annual Computer Communications Conference (San Jose, January 24, 1972) entitled "Coordinated Information Services for a Discipline or Mission-Onented CommunIty," where Douglas Engelbart quotes Drucker (1966 and 1969). 16. Engelbart launched these three activities separately between the end of Janu- ary and May 1972 in three Internal memos

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Calif. Engelbart, D. C. 1968. "Augmenting Your Intellect." Research/Development, Au- gust: 22-27. . I992. Personal interview with the author, December 15, Fremont, Calif. . 1996. Douglas Engelbart: An Oral HIstory. Four interviews conducted by H. Lowood and J. Adams, edited by T. Bardini. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Libraries. Available on-line at

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

President Kennedy proposes sending man to the moon. 1962 MIT hackers create Spacewar game. Licklider becomes founding director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. Doug Engelbart publishes “Augmenting Human Intellect.” 1963 Licklider proposes an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. 1972 1964 Ken Kesey and the Merry

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Processors.94 Roberts selected four research centers to be the first ARPANET nodes: UCLA, where Len Kleinrock worked; Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with the visionary Douglas Engelbart; the University of Utah, with Ivan Sutherland; and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were given the task of figuring out how their

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of technology. “Brand did the marketing work for the concept of the personal computer through the Whole Earth Catalog,” said his friend Lee Felsenstein.21 DOUGLAS ENGELBART Shortly after the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out, Brand helped to produce a happening that was an odd echo of his

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the hippie culture. It happened because, like a magnet, Brand naturally attracted and attached himself to interesting people. This time it was an engineer named Douglas Engelbart, who had taken on as his life’s passion inventing ways that computers could augment human intelligence. Engelbart’s father, an electrical engineer, had a

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Nixon was elected president, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. Also that year, Intel was founded and Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog. Doug Engelbart (1925–2013). Englebart’s first mouse. Stewart Brand (center) assisting at the Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart’s ninety-minute demonstration occurred on

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was run by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults. “While living in San Francisco at the top of the crookedest street, Lombard, I frequently ran computer programming, wine tasting, and Greek

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hacker. He had no grand theories about augmenting intelligence or the symbiosis wrought by graphical user interfaces. He had never heard of Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart. He was instead a hobbyist. Indeed, he had a curiosity and passion that made him, in the words of one coworker, “the world’s ultimate

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value in one cell, the professor had to use his eraser and change the values in many of the other cells.84 Bricklin had seen Doug Engelbart demonstrate his oNLine System, made famous at the Mother of All Demos, which featured a graphical display and a mouse for pointing and clicking. Bricklin

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already seen the future and was embarked on inventing it. On visits to Xerox PARC, he was shown many of the ideas that Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, and their colleagues had developed, most notably the graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced GOO-ee), which featured a desktop metaphor with windows, icons, and a

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. He had produced the techno-psychedelic show at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival, reported on Spacewar and Xerox PARC for Rolling Stone, aided and abetted Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and founded the Whole Earth Catalog. So in the fall of 1984, just as modems were becoming easily available and

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as fully as you could, given that you didn’t have digital computers. He and Charles Babbage are in the same league.” Another hero was Doug Engelbart. “His lab was node four on the Internet, which was like having the fourth telephone in the world. He had the amazing foresight to understand

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Ada Lovelace would like, which is based on the half century of computer development in the tradition of Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, and Doug Engelbart. HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS: “WATSON, COME HERE” “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” Ada Lovelace declared. “It can do whatever we know

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,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of

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trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. When Howard Aiken was devising his digital computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a

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/. 21. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein. 22. The best account of Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Co-evolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000). This section also draws on Douglas Engelbart oral history (four sessions), conducted by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood, Stanford, http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts

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/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/start1.html; Douglas Engelbart oral history, conducted by Jon Eklund, the Smithsonian Institution, May 4, 1994; Christina Engelbart, “A Lifetime Pursuit,” a biographical sketch written in 1986 by his

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://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html#10a; “Tribute to Doug Engelbart,” a series of reminiscences by colleagues and friends, http://tribute2doug.wordpress.com/; Douglas Engelbart interviews, in Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (Next Press, 2009) and http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/; The Doug Engelbart Archives (includes many videos and interviews), http://dougengelbart

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.org/library/engelbart-archives.html; Susan Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July 1997; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 417; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 110; Bardini, Bootstrapping, 138. 23. Douglas Engelbart

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issue also had aerial photographs of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb.) 25. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Smithsonian, 1994. 26. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986. 27. Landau and Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis. 28. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986. 29. The quote is from Nilo

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, Sept. 1971, quoted in Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT, 2000), 178. See also Steven Levy, Insanely Great (Viking, 1994), 36. 30. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 31. Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” prepared for the director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oct. 1962. 32

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. Douglas Engelbart to Vannevar Bush, May 24, 1962, MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium, archives, http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium.html. 33. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 2, Jan. 14, 1987. 34. Author’s interview with Bob

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Taylor. 35. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 36. Landau and Clegg, “Engelbart on the Mouse and

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Keyset,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; William English, Douglas Engelbart, and Melvyn Berman, “Display Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation,” IEEE Transactions on Human

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-Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1967. 37. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 38. Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All

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, “The Prophet of Menlo Park,” http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-center/publications/forefront/archive/copy_of_forefront-fall-2008/features/the-prophet-of-menlo-park-douglas-engelbart-carries-on-his-vision. After reading an early draft of this section, Kay clarified some of what he had said in earlier talks and interviews

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. 27. Author’s interview with Ginni Rometty. 28. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 3. 29. “Accelerating the Co-Evolution,” Doug Engelbart Institute, http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/co-evolution.html; Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000). 30. Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter (Portfolio, 2013), 203. 31. Usually

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext

by Belinda Barnet  · 14 Jul 2013  · 193pp  · 19,478 words

half of the twentieth century. It’s worth remembering, as this book reminds us, that this particular fear of ending was the spectre that haunted Douglas Engelbart, sitting in his radio shack somewhere in the South Pacific in 1945. Reading news of the bomb, he came (after any GI’s understandable euphoria

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Hypertext Editing System (HES) team; time to rummage through the Vannevar Bush archives at the Library of Congress looking for interesting correspondence; time to interview Doug Engelbart and feel embarrassingly starstruck; and time to travel to Keio University in Japan to meet Ted Nelson. I also had time to ponder how it

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‘evolves’. What, exactly, am I tracing the path of here? In one of those delightful recursive feedback loops that punctuates any history, I discovered that Doug Engelbart is also concerned with how technology evolves over time – so concerned, in fact, that he constructed his own ‘framework’ to explain it. Inspired, I went

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to use his personal photos from the late ’80s and for a copy of his unpublished manuscript Re:mindings, which I cite in this chapter. Doug Engelbart sat for an interview in 1999. Bill Duvall, a member of Engelbart’s original team at SRI, also donated his time for an interview in

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EDS, his ‘HES Questions’ document (courtesy Traction Software) and for his conference notes. SRI International gave me permission to use the photographs of NLS and Doug Engelbart. Adrian Miles, Noah WardripFruin and Chris Chesher also provided interviews or comments on a chapter. Paul Arthur approached me with the idea for a book

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. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend

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and pieces from whatever is around at the time (microfilm, for example, was the newfangled thing in Vannevar Bush’s era, and digital computing in Doug Engelbart’s era) and then rapidly evolve in a single generation. [Virtually] all permutations and combinations were possible – including ‘retrofitting’ older designs with new ideas. Bottom

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incorporated the innovations that were current at the time – for example, microfilm. TECHNICAL EVOLUTION 9 The most influential demonstration in computing history is, of course, Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo of NLS. But as one of the original members of Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Centre (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute, Bill

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is much more tangled than that, and presents its own material and technical limits. We investigate this in more detail in Chapter 3, when discussing Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system. NLS was the computing world’s most influential prototype, yet it was inspired by Vannevar Bush’s vision of Memex. Engelbart updated

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. Yet all of these visions and prototypes, as I demonstrate, have had an influence over the evolution of hypertext qua material artefact. We begin where Doug Engelbart began, with Vannevar Bush’s memory extender or Memex. As the reader will discover, this has become the oldest image of potentiality for hypertext. Chapter

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at MIT. The associative model of human memory was deeply influential on cybernetics and the nascent field of artificial intelligence, which in turn directly influenced Doug Engelbart and Andries van Dam, as we explore in Chapters 3 and 5. Many of the pioneers we will meet later in this book cut their

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, or any other published work I refer to here (for example, his autobiography, Pieces of the Action, published in 1970) had historical influence. Inventors like Doug Engelbart, Andy van Dam and Ted Nelson did not read the other pieces I cite here until James Nyce and Paul Kahn published their landmark 1991

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). Before this time, the word ‘computer’ had meant a large group of mostly female humans performing equations by hand or on limited mechanical calculators. As Doug Engelbart told Henry Lowood in a 1986 interview: I’ll tell you what a computer was in [the 1940s]. It was an underpaid woman sitting there

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Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958 – an agency that funded many of the early computing science projects conducted at universities around the United States (including Doug Engelbart’s lab at SRI). Bush started this relationship. This chapter has been arguing that the Analyzer prototype accomplished something dreams or white papers can’t

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and machine’ in a 1996 ACM paper. But aside from that, the full development of this concept from Bush’s work has been left to Doug Engelbart.7 Engelbart would be quite explicit about the symbiosis between humans and technology: he didn’t just set out to create a computer program – he

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. This never happened. Memex has entered into the intellectual capital of new media as an image of potentiality. Chapter 3 AUGMENTING THE INTELLECT: NLS Dr Douglas Engelbart is a softly spoken man. His voice is low yet persuasive, as though ‘his words have been attenuated by layers of meditation’, his friend Nilo

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facilitated collaboration. Everyone knew the order of things and worked within that structure. This was a crucial difference between NLS and Xanadu: ‘The difference between Doug Engelbart and me is that he sees the world in terms of harmony, and I see it in terms of disagreement. My systems were built with

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us in the context in which we wanted to work – text and structured items and interactive commands. (Engelbart 1988, 195) AUGMENTING THE INTELLECT: NLS 53 Doug Engelbart circa 1967 © SRI International. In the context of screen-based interactivity, Engelbart and English’s ‘mouse’ consistently beat other devices for fast, accurate selection in

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makes us human, and that this is just a matter of pursuing the right tool system (Engelbart 1999). With his daughters he now runs the Doug Engelbart Institute in Fremont, California, an organization he founded to continue evolving the relationship between humans and computers. Ever the visionary, ‘Doug […] slog[s] on, ideals

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real world and its burgeoning mass of information; we need an alternative paradigm. The computer world could be so much better. Like Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart (a close friend), Nelson also has a theory about the inheritance and transmission of human knowledge. The knowledge that we pass on to each other

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) as the man who dreamed up hypertext, he is not a known quantity outside of the digerati. The people he appears beside in such histories – Doug Engelbart, Bob Metcalfe, Tim Berners-Lee – have attained worldwide recognition (and in the case of Metcalfe, wealth) and have directly influenced the course of computing with

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). As the chapter on Xanadu stated, hypertext was certainly not obvious to anyone else whom Nelson encountered at that time, with the notable exception of Doug Engelbart. Van Dam’s Early Work Andries van Dam has more than a passing interest in graphics. The Pixar animators put the Foley and van Dam

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‘context’ editor (van Dam 1999). This system was designed for writing or editing computer programs, but it was often used covertly to create documentation. Like Doug Engelbart, who unbeknownst to van Dam was working on the NLS/Augment system at the same time, van Dam saw the need to tailor computing technology

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. ‘Not only were we selling hypertext, but at the same time document processing, interaction. Many people were still computing with cards’, recalls van Dam (1999). Doug Engelbart was also having trouble convincing the world that humans and machines might work together interactively. No funding body in the country would support the idea

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no concrete distinctions between ‘readers’ and ‘writers’ – these activities were both accessible to users. One of the canons of Nelson and my shared beliefs (also Doug Engelbart’s) was that there should be no artificial distinctions between readers and writers in the user community for our systems – the two activities are totally

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HES team used Ted Nelson’s concept of a hypertext link (though from Nelson’s perspective they ‘flattened’ this by making the jumps one-way). Doug Engelbart was incorporating the same idea into NLS independently. ‘I hadn’t heard of Engelbart. I hadn’t heard of Bush and Memex. That came quite

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we now know, however, in less than a decade journalists (and executives) would be typing on computer keyboards. In late 1968 van Dam finally met Doug Engelbart and attended a demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. As we explored in Chapter 4, this was a landmark presentation in the

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the first time. The NLS demo was celebrated in December of 2008 at its 40th anniversary with almost all of the original team led by Doug Engelbart on stage and Andries van Dam as the outsider commentator. 106 Memory Machines The Hypertext Editing System (HES) IBM 2250 Display console at Brown University

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systems focused not on the creation of personal devices, but on distributed systems. The technology of networked communication became the early stages of the Internet. Doug Engelbart’s NLS was one of the first nodes in the fabled ARPANET, which eventually spread its wires around the globe to become the Internet. However

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certainly never foresaw the World Wide Web. It surprised me. (van Dam 1999) Van Dam says he didn’t foresee the Web; neither he nor Doug Engelbart could have imagined where their technologies would lead. But it is undeniable HES became the first working example of hypertext on commercial equipment, and in

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work to be done in this arena, work that van Dam continued to do at Brown, and Engelbart at the Bootstrap Institute (now called The Doug Engelbart Institute) – the organization he founded to continue evolving the relationship between humans and computers. Because ‘the things we decide now will continue to haunt us

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is what remained the same: it was a direct analogy to the workings of human associative memory, an alignment between human and machine. CONCLUSION 139 Douglas Engelbart picked up Bush’s vision of a symbiosis between man and machine and brought it to computing science. Engelbart also borrowed the idea of associative

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Books, 1 March. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1984/mar/01/let-us-calculate/ ?pagination=false (accessed September 2012). Bardini, Thierry. 2000. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 150 Memory Machines Barnet, Belinda. 1998. ‘Reconfiguring Hypertext as a Machine’. FrAme: the

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(accessed April 2013). . 1988. ‘The Augmented Knowledge Workshop’. In A History of Personal Workstations, edited by Adele Goldberg, 185–249. New York: ACM Press. . 1997. ‘Doug Engelbart: The Interview’ with David Bennehum. Meme 3, no. 1. Online: http://memex.org/meme3-01.html (accessed April 2013). . 1998. ‘The Strategic Pursuit of Collective

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’. Paper presented at The Brown/ MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, 12 October. Online: http://www.cs.brown.edu/ memex/Bush_Symposium.html (accessed March 2012). . 2002. Doug Engelbart Institute. Online: http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/pix. html (accessed April 2013). Engelbart, Douglas and William English. 1968. ‘A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect

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digital electronics emergence 18 Digital media, ‘operations and processes’ behind 6 ‘Digital Media Archeology’ 6 disagreement, as Nelson’s world view 43 Document Examiner 129 Doug Engelbart Institute 63, 114; see also Engelbart, Douglas C. 159 Douglas, Jane Yellowlees 126, 130 Dream Machines 83 drum memory replacement 32 Duvall, Bill 9, 42

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop  · 14 Apr 2001

day at the Pentagon, and whose ideas on "augmenting the human intellect" had proved to be identical to his own notion of human-computer symbiosis. Douglas Engelbart had been a voice in the wilderness until then; his own bosses at SRI International, in what would soon become Silicon Valley, thought he was

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meaning. And then when he did talk, his soft, diffident baritone somehow managed to be hypnotic in its intensity. His name was Douglas Engelbart. It was in December 1950, says Doug Engelbart, thinking back to the morning when it all changed for him. He was twenty-five years old, and by every objec- tive

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Washington, if not in the entire country. It THE INTERGALACTIC NETWORK 261 was Taylor who pulled out all the stops to get NASA funding for Doug Engelbart. It was Taylor who put NASA money into a number of specific efforts within Proj- ect MAC-and even funded a study of interactive, computer

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would that set them back? Furthermore- Good questions all. Still, the audience wasn't actively hostile, which was some- thing. And in a few cases-Doug Engelbart, for example, marching as always to drumbeats that only he could hear-the reaction was even quite the opposite. "I was thrilled," Engelbart remembers. "We

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doorways. This, everyone could tell, was not going to be your standard presentation. Down on the right-hand side of the stage, all alone, sat Douglas Engelbart. He was wearing a fresh white shirt and tie for the occasion, plus a set of head- phones that made him look for all the

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. So perhaps that was one reason so many people at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco sat transfixed until the very end, watching Doug Engelbart shoot a last, over-the- shoulder smile at the projector that had not failed him. And perhaps that was why they started clapping when Engelbart

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generation. By December 1968, the fu- ture as envisioned by the ARPA community was beginning to take shape, how- ever sketchily. And now here was Doug Engelbart, expanding by an order of magnitude their sense of what that future might really mean. The name Wood- stock wouldn't acquire its modern connotation

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if ever there was an event that qualified as ARPA's Woodstock, this was it. THE IMP GUYS In January 1969, barely a month after Doug Engelbart's extravaganza in San Francisco, Larry Roberts formally announced that Engelbart's group at SRI would serve as the nascent ARPA network's Network Information

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't predict with any accuracy what you could do with it." That was what people like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Wes Clark, and Doug Engelbart had always perceived so well, he thought. The real significance of computing was to be found not in this gadget or that gadget, but in

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slowly that you don't even know they're there-he can look back on it now and see that one inspiration must have been Doug Engelbart's augmenting-the-intellect ideas. Another must have been the on-line communi- ties that he had watched springing up around the various time-sharing

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1971, in a coup that ranked right up there with his acquisition of the BCC team itsel£ Taylor arranged to have PARC hire some of Doug Engelbart's best people away from SRI-including chief engineer Bill English, the man who had always had such a genius for turning Engelbart's dreamy

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Cheadle were pondering how to achieve their goals, given the "little machine's" severe lack of horse- power, the Utah group received a visit from Doug Engelbart, "a prophet of Bib- lical dimensions." Engelbart gave them a progress report on NLS, and once again, Kay said, it was a revelation. Hypertext, graphics

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of self-exciting system. As Stu Card remembers it, "There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay-a thread in the Ascent of Man. It was like the Holy Grail. We would rationalize our mission according to

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you wanted just by arranging tiny dots on a piece of paper-or on a com- puter screen. And they had the living example of Doug Engelbart's NLS. "You got this feeling sitting in front of one of Doug's screens, and looking at his dis- plays, that the computer image

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we may have something in there somewhere.") Of course, Lick was also obliged to kill some projects, which hurt-especially since one of them was Doug Engelbart's. This didn't really have much to do with Heilmeier, except perhaps through the Heilmeier-era budget constraints. It was more that the whole

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the idea of hypertext for a full decade by that point, having independently reinvented the idea long be- fore he ever heard of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, or, for that matter, the Internet itself; his first implementation, in 1980, had been a kind of free-forn1 database that simply linked

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DEC from the PDP-10 time-sharing machines it sold to the ARPA community. There would have been no windows-icons-mouse interface a la Doug Engelbart. And there would have been no creative explosion at Xerox PARCo So in the end, about all anyone can really say is that it's

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. · to Tim Anderson, Gordon Bell, Leo Beranek, Marjory Blumenthal, David Burmaster, Vint Cerf, Paul Ceruzzi, Wes Clark, Fernando Corbato, Steve Crocker, Mike Dertouzos, Jerry Elkind, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Bob Fano, Ed Feigenbaum, Jack Goldman, Charlie Herzfeld, Bob Kahn, Alan Kay, Len Kleinrock, Karl Kryter, Butler Lampson, Louise Licklider, Steve Lukasik, Stuart

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Hzstory ofComputzng 14, no. 2 (1992): 19. 4. Ibid., 18. 5. oted in Howard Rhelngold, Toolsfor Thought (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), chapter 9. 6. Douglas Engelbart, "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop," in A H15tory if Personal WorkstatIOns, ed. Adele Goldberg (New York: ACM Press, 1988), 189. 7. oted in Rheingold, Tools for

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

government-funded research laboratories located on opposite sides of Stanford University. The two labs had been founded during the sixties, based on fundamentally different philosophies: Douglas Engelbart’s Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford Research Institute was dedicated to the concept that powerful computing machines would be able to substantially increase

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they performed in their homes on the Midpeninsula. Yet Engelbart presented special managerial headaches for Crane. A dreamy engineer with a mind of his own, Doug Engelbart was not an easy person to control. He had joined the group in 1957, and though he recognized that he had to earn his keep

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to be transformed at a hastening rate, driven by the silicon chip. Gordon Moore has been widely credited with the insight underlying the revolution, but Doug Engelbart had arrived at the same conclusion six years earlier. His understanding of “scaling” and the resulting relentless increase in computing capacity shaped his own life

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more serviceable title: ‘Microelectronics, and the Art of Dimensional Analysis.’…I hope that this serves to clear up the problem,” he wrote. It was pure Doug Engelbart: understated, polite, but persistent. Three days later, Finch wrote back and briefly said there was no reason for Engelbart to worry. The first title was

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in a simple linear fashion. The changes that were coming would be dramatic and disruptive, and they would keep happening faster and faster. And for Doug Engelbart, it didn’t stop with the machines. He had also begun thinking about human systems and all of the organization and skills and knowledge and

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the one he had left. As the sixties began, the three separate threads that each of the men profiled in this chapter represented came together. Doug Engelbart had a clear vision of using computing to help mankind by augmenting human intelligence; Myron Stolaroff was wandering around Johnny Appleseed–style with a new

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industries, has made technology innovation appear routine. Three decades ago, the direction of computing innovation was by no means certain. 2| AUGMENTATION Not long after Doug Engelbart arrived at the magnetics group, another young engineer, William English, joined Stanford Research Institute. The army had funded English’s first job at SRI, but

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magnetics group, he met an eclectic group of young researchers who worked and socialized together. There was the folk-dancing scene, which frequently assembled at Doug Engelbart’s home, and there was also a tight bunch of four friends, Hew Crane, Dave Bennion, Howie Zeidler, and from the neighboring physics laboratory,

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SRI pitched in some support from general funds to contribute $120,000 between 1960 and 1965.1 During the first two years of his contract, Doug Engelbart largely ruminated about his dream machine. He wrote several draft versions of papers exploring what he had come to call the concept of the “man

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machine interface problem doesn’t get stuck on the big-installation, formal-scheduling picture. The interface problem…required adapting controls to suit human capabilities.”2 Doug Engelbart was on the hunt for the personal computer. However, like the researchers at PARC who were to follow him a decade later, he was looking

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than anyone else had envisioned. Computers until then were hulking behemoths deemed useful for large organizational tasks, ranging from check processing to calculating missile trajectories. Doug Engelbart realized that computing could be more than data processing. Previously, teams of humans had served a single computer; now, the computer would become a personal

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interactive computing, which he viewed as being more flexible than the batch mainframe computers of the 1950s that were programmed with decks of cards. Perhaps Doug Engelbart’s greatest piece of luck was that Taylor and Licklider had become close friends in 1962. Licklider had shown up in Washington that year with

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vibrant industries. Within a decade, Engelbart came to feel that he was rejected, misunderstood, and ultimately betrayed by those he had trusted most closely. Ultimately, Doug Engelbart lost control of both his vision and his technology. When that happened, it was not just as the result of developments within the insular world

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the SRI group, the first to try LSD was Hew Crane, who was followed by a number of other scientists from the research laboratory, including Doug Engelbart and Bill English. It is easy to understand why Engelbart would find the idea of enhancing creativity with psychedelic drugs so intriguing. After all, the

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setting, everyone was making progress. Electrical engineers were designing circuits; Hewlett-Packard mechanical designers were improving their lighting designs; architects were designing buildings. But not Doug Engelbart. His reaction to his first trip was to become virtually catatonic. He simply stared at the wall for the duration of the experiment. Even so

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he had to rotate the tray so that he would receive the cup with a half dose. In the end, the second drug experience aided Doug Engelbart’s creativity, but its ability to augment human intelligence was less clear. Engelbart’s contribution to the creativity session was a toy he conceived under

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even permeate SRI, the largely military funded research center that sat just blocks away from offices of the foundation and the Whole Earth Truck Store. Doug Engelbart began to develop a magnetic effect in the halls of Stanford Research Institute as it became increasingly apparent that his group was doing something unusual

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military projects using typewriters and paste pots, walked past Engelbart’s laboratory. He peeked in and was transported into the future. His first memory of Doug Engelbart was seeing the researcher seated before an imposing workstation with a screen that was embedded in a custom-built desk. In front of the screen

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crucial period during the 1960s, it was Taylor who made sure that the envelope was pushed. The arrival of the SDS-940 at SRI enabled Doug Engelbart to finally embark on his original vision: a community of researchers working with a shared computing system to experiment with the idea of extending the

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cumbersome process. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the role that the revised NLS played in the development of personal computing. In 1968, Doug Engelbart started “living” in the future. A display was installed in his office that was connected to a jury-rigged video system that ultimately made it

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allocated to the terminal whose light was switched on at the moment! In the late 1950s, however, McCarthy’s notion was prescient and similar to Doug Engelbart’s vision for the Augmentation machine. However, they remained fundamentally different concepts. At the deepest level, the question was whether humans would remain in the

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, during the late sixties, he affected a headband, long hair, and a beard. In the computer-science world, there were different styles of research leadership: Doug Engelbart at Augment and David Evans, the founder of the University of Utah Computer Science department, inspired fanatical devotion; several years later, at Xerox PARC, Robert

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key. In addition to a traditional control key there was also a “meta” key to give even more command combinations. It was a keyboard that Doug Engelbart on the other side of the campus would have loved. Ultimately, by using inexpensive television monitors, the SAIL group was able to push the cost

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an important seed had been planted, for years later Tesler became the carrier of a gospel, which—while it was in certain ways antithetical to Doug Engelbart’s vision of powerful, complex machines—would ultimately be the crucial factor in translating Engelbart’s augmentation ideas to a much wider audience. That gospel

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1968 for the design of the Flex programming language. It was while Alan Kay was thinking about the software design of the Flex machine that Doug Engelbart came calling at the University of Utah. Engelbart had filmed a demonstration of his early Augment NLS system, and he was traveling the country showing

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The researchers sat in a circle, while the graduate students sat surrounding them in their own ring, listening. Bob Taylor, the psychologist who had funded Doug Engelbart, was running the session and toward the end asked the graduate students if they had any suggestions on how the meetings should proceed. John Warnock

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state of Utah. Ultimately, he took a postdoctoral fellowship at SAIL. However, as he finished his work at Utah, Kay heard about the presentation that Doug Engelbart was planning to make at an annual computer-science meeting in San Francisco. On his earlier visit to the Augment lab, he had seen Engelbart

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warm on the plane and with a group of other graduate students flew to San Francisco a few days before the event. 5| DEALING LIGHTNING Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, “dealing lightning with both hands.” At least that’s the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker

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s demonstration should involve both media and even entertainment. Brand, for his part, was barely able to grasp what he was seeing. The notion that Doug Engelbart was bombing around—piloting with mouse and chord-key set—in this new kind of information space that didn’t even have a name yet

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human intelligence, would never be the same. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For many people who saw Doug Engelbart bombing through cyberspace and dealing lightning with both hands in December 1968, that was certainly true. But one young programmer who watched from the audience

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numbers. Even before he had gone to England, he had realized that computers were best used for presenting and communicating information. It was 1969, and Doug Engelbart had been developing his vision for six years. He had built a loyal group of programmers and hardware designers, what Duvall found to be part

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buried in the paper that was to launch a computer network that would stretch around the globe and tie together people in fundamentally new ways. Doug Engelbart’s NLS tool was intended to be the first “killer app.” The term would become popular a decade later. It referred to a software application

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the end of the 1960s, all of these were concentrating with wicked force on the San Francisco Peninsula. And in the midst of the chaos, Doug Engelbart felt that he was beginning to lose control of his vision, the Augmentation Framework. Everything seemed to be in dispute, even the name of the

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as an interactive medium, as embodied by Steve Russell’s Spacewar game, or computing as a tool for augmenting the human intellect, as dramatized by Doug Engelbart’s FJCC demonstration, more and more outsiders wanted in. They were mostly young men who had had enough contact to lust after their own machines

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computers, the kids had no such fears. They took to computers enthusiastically. He was teaching with a CDC 160 minicomputer, the same machine on which Doug Engelbart had begun his augmentation research. The class became extremely popular, and soon the University of Colorado was offering an extension program that involved more than

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was much more accessible to ordinary people. He even had cards and buttons made up that read “SHAFT—Society to Help Abolish Fortran Teaching.” Like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, Albrecht had been introduced early on to the concept of microelectronic scaling. In 1963, Control Data had sent him on a mission

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the Free University. The events were soon thriving, and as luck would have it, a number of them were held in the Atherton backyard of Doug Engelbart, another folk-dancing devotee. Raymond and Albrecht soon transformed Raymond’s nonprofit into the Portola Institute, housed in downtown Menlo Park just off El Camino

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way to avoid the draft was to obtain a “critical industries deferment.” And as luck would have it, in the mid-sixties, working in either Doug Engelbart’s Pentagon-funded laboratory at SRI or at John McCarthy’s AI laboratory at Stanford University would qualify a bright, technically oriented, draft-age young

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to theater to one of the first community time-sharing computer efforts, which was called Resource One and had become the final resting place for Doug Engelbart’s SDS-940. Pam Hart, a charismatic Berkeley computer-science graduate student and activist who had been one of its cofounders, had talked the

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technology to create a computing renaissance in the world that was to become Silicon Valley. Inside Stanford Research Institute, just the opposite was taking place. Doug Engelbart was still holding tightly to his Augment vision, but it was proving increasingly to be like herding cats. ARPA funding was flowing to it in

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learned to dislike est intensely, and he decided his relationship with the woman had been doomed from the start. Est had a different effect on Doug Engelbart. Although he couldn’t put his finger on it and he was slightly put off by its glibness, Engelbart became convinced that est training genuinely

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the group of remaining ARC researchers moved offices from Menlo Park to Cupertino. An era had ended, a new one was about to begin, and Doug Engelbart had been tossed out into the wilderness. 7 | MOMENTUM While the Augment lab was having trouble licensing its technology, on the other side of the

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worked with information, the Alto gave rise to an almost palpable hunger for that kind of computing power. It was the Alto that finally brought Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration to life, making it accessible beyond the boundaries of a computer laboratory. And yet the first true personal computer remained more or

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offer and promised that he could work half-time in Kay’s group. This time, he accepted. Once he arrived, however, he immediately clashed with Doug Engelbart’s Augment philosophy of complexity, which had arrived with the SRI émigrés. From Tesler’s experience at SAIL he had become dead set against the

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visits to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, although he came away skeptical about the possibility of machines mimicking humans. He also found his way to Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center and talked briefly with one of Engelbart’s business managers. Despite his wariness about technology, Moore found himself increasingly drawn to

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will become even more of a factor as digital computers increasingly define every aspect of modern life. Its origin lies in the separate passions of Doug Engelbart, Fred Moore, and Myron Stolaroff. Engelbart and Moore were two sides of the same coin, both committed to an ideal to the exclusion of

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, 1961, Douglas C. Engelbart Collection, Stanford Special Libraries, Stanford University. 3.Memo, March 14, 1961, Douglas C. Engelbart Collection, Stanford Special Library, Stanford University. 4.Doug Engelbart, “The Augmented Knowledge Workshop,” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations, ed. Adele Goldberg (New York: ACM, 1988), p. 190

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)

by Douglas R. Dechow  · 2 Jul 2015  · 223pp  · 52,808 words

links were numeric codes that had to be typed in and by Ted Nelson’s work with Andries Van Dam. Only later did we see Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo video, which had selectable list items. So while there were several precedents, I take credit for the highlighted textual link embedded in

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is the POLOS Group (PARC OnLine Office Systems), which was made from some of people who came over to PARC in the early 1970s from Doug Engelbart’s group. A myth about PARC was its extreme originality. One of the triumphs of a few hundred years ago was to be able to

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wealth of ways to think about personal computing and networks, including Sketchpad, the very image of personal computing. Some of the personal computing explorers included Douglas Engelbart, of course, and Ted Nelson and Andy van Dam. The Grail Gesture Recognition System on a tablet that was invented the same year as the

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even have a glimpse happen. One of the keys is for the two-eyed people to turn into evangelists. Both Ted and our mutual hero, Douglas Engelbart, worked tirelessly over their lifetimes to point out that, in this dial-tone world, the emperor not only has no clothes but his cell phone

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step toward loosening up people’s thinking in the direction Ted was and is advocating. I am especially grateful to Ted for introducing me to Douglas Engelbart, another amazing visionary, the man who gave “the mother of all demos.” Engelbart showed creative ways of organizing work and ideas, and of collaborating online

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of text on a screen was seen as a waste of processing power, let alone bizarre “nonsequential” text. In 1965, unless you were working on Doug Engelbart’s team or could afford a system with video-type display (Nelson reasons it “would cost less than a secretary” in his paper, at $37

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didn’t have screens. I should also stress that, in 1965, text was not data—it was something academics and journalists manipulated with typewriters. As Doug Engelbart told me in 1999, the whole concept of a human being sitting in an interactive feedback loop with a computer, manipulating symbols on a screen

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. n.p., available at Lulu: http://​www.​lulu.​com/​shop/​ted-nelson/​possiplex/​paperback/​product-14925222.​html 11. Nelson TH (2013) Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Speech at Technology legend: honoring Douglas Engelbart, computer history museum, mountain view California, December 9th 2013. http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​FNCCkhADpiw 12. Smith LC (1991) Memex as

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when I read Vannevar Bush’s paper I also began to hear about this ‘new’ idea called hypertext. I began to hear about Ted and Doug Engelbart, both of whom equally inspired me: Ted talking about everything being deeply intertwingled, and Doug, talking about augmenting the human intellect. Again, I don’t

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up to why I believe Ted is limitless. I was born in Norway. Land of vikings, socially connected politics. Ancestral home of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. A land of fjords. For me the picture has changed to a view of the Thames. I now live in London, greatest city in the

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world, but I won’t go on and on about that. What I do: I’m a software developer in the school of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. To me, interactivity is paramount – that’s what all my work is about. My main project and product is Liquid, which allows

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interactive text on computer screens happened, many of you here know that better than me, but I like to think of 1968, the year of Doug Engelbart’s demo, as a good year. It, of course, has something to do with the fact that that this was the year I was born

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(1992) The silicon valley show. http://​archive.​org/​details/​Timothy_​Leary_​Archives_​189.​dv. A video short called “The Silicon Valley Show” featuring Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Rick Mascitti, Stewart Brand, and Timothy Leary. Directed by Ted Nelson Nelson TH (1992) Xanadu space, 1993. Autodesk, Sausalito. http://​archive.​org/​details/​01Kahle000838. Wide

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.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​rbqPqp9y_​lQ. Lecture at HomeBrew Computer Club reunion, 11 November, Computer History Museum Nelson TH (2013) Ted Nelson’s eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Streamed video. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​yMjPqr1s-cg. Given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on 9 December Nelson TH

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

help, I’d like to thank Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, John Brockman, Michael Callahan, John Coate, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Lee Felsenstein, Cliff Figallo, David Frohman, Asha Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee), Katie Hafner, Paul Hawken, Alan Kay, Kevin Kelly, Art Kleiner, Butler Lampson

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’s procedure was Jim Fadiman, who later served for several months at Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center—the division that in 1963 sponsored Douglas Engelbart’s research on networked computing. According to Brand’s journals, he received two doses of LSD, one in a “goblet” and the other, an hour

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from the Lama Foundation, and an exchange between Steve Baer, who had designed the dome housing at Drop City, and Dave Evans, a staffer at Doug Engelbart’s Augmented Human Intellect project at the Stanford Research Institute. It also featured a detailed description of how to build a solar water heater, four

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of each other and of the offices of the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park. One of the groups consisted of the researchers associated with Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and later Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and the other was made

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empowerment, and collective growth that were alive within the counterculture and the hobbyist community did not so much compete with as complement each other. In Douglas Engelbart’s ARC group, computers had long seemed to be natural tools with which to expand the intellectual capacity of individuals and their ability to share

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the burgeoning commune movement, Brand helped bring the two communities together. Steve Durkee, of USCO and the Lama Foundation, began to visit the ARC offices. Doug Engelbart and Bill English later traveled to New Mexico and the Libre commune, where they met with Steve Baer, the Whole Earth Catalog’s foremost authority

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brought together over a number of years through the entrepreneurial bridging of structural holes by the principals, particularly by Stewart Brand. Early members, such as Douglas Engelbart, Mary Catherine Bateson, biologist Lynn Margulis, and ecologist Peter Warshall, represented Brand’s time at the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly and his journeys

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2005 volume What the Dormouse Said. Even the most cautious historians have tended to accept this account. Thierry Bardini, in his thoroughly researched history of Douglas Engelbart’s work, for example, argues that the personal computer was in part a product of the “generation of ’68.” Bootstrapping, 194. 2. Ceruzzi, History of

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18, 1998. Available at http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/hrc/theory/ californianideo/main/t.4.2.html (accessed September 27, 2005). Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Barley, Stephen R., and Gideon Kunda. Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Possiplex

by Ted Nelson  · 2 Jan 2010

to be in each of its different projects, but it would only exist in one place, and the lists would point to it. * Or in Doug Engelbart’s terminology, a statement. Of course, you would also want to see (from each entry) its different contexts—its different transclusions-- and compare them side

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. I don’t know if he could have done it or not. He was a swell kid. I didn’t know at the time that Doug Engelbart was doing the same thing, typing ASCII with a five-finger keyboard. How I wish we had built that, half a million notes ago. There

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; he said he was with ARPA. (I knew that ARPA was funding a lot of basic stuff.) Taylor asked me if I’d heard of Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart, he said, was also working on interactive text systems with screens. (I had thought I was the first; only now did I know there

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SRI, 1966 Jovanovich and I flew out separately to California. He wanted to meet someone at Stanford about computer-assisted instruction. I wanted to meet Douglas Engelbart and see a real screen-based text system, which I had so far only imagined. I think I went out a day early, giving me

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just did a tenminute comedy in video-- essentially a trailer-- as a whiff of what I might do later. As a sentimental touch, I cast Doug Engelbart as my father. We shot Doug’s scene at Roger’s house. Doug’s wife, Ballard, was there, as well as Marlene. We had a

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down, and everyone wondered in fear what new world we were entering. What would Wendy Hall have said? (2001) ‘BUT MY DEAR, YOU ARE ONE!’ Doug Engelbart came to speak at Southampton, travelling with his sweetheart Karen. Dining at Wendy’s house, we discussed their forthcoming plans for marriage. They had the

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there could be other possibilities.' But he didn't get, or get behind, the compelling uniqueness and power of transcopyright. Stay with Us, Doug (2004) Doug Engelbart came to Oxford to speak, this time without Karen. He spoke at the OII but he wasn’t in great shape. We all went to

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engagement to Karen O’Leary, and I think this undermined his health. Now they are very happily married and he is much healthier. What would Doug Engelbart have said? (1) 2004 Every day, for the two weeks Doug stayed with us, he and I talked at length. I explained to him issues

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a commercial level, but Rob drifted on to other things and we returned to the USA with yet another prototype. On we go. What would Doug Engelbart have said? (2) (2004-current) Doug has been having difficulty with his memory, but his mind is still great. I have shown him XanaduSpace and

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never be written. Surely the population collapse will come before that time. But can the outcome be better? Can better document systems help us, as Doug Engelbart hoped long ago, to solve the complex and urgent problems of today? Can we ever— • reduce the dangers of nuclear weapons? • create peace and justice

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? • save the last rain forests? And on and on. I will not try to enumerate today’s global problems. These are the "complex urgent problems" Doug Engelbart warned us about long ago, which he unswervingly sought tools and methods to solve. (Doug's work was swept aside by paper simulation and the

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world-wide hypertext—AND their psychological and commercial aspects-- at least a decade ahead of anyone else.* (A much fuller list is in the Appendices.) * Doug Engelbart designed a great and powerful text system, but consumer deployment, rights commerce, politics, psychology, snazzy presentation and political issues were not in his picture. Here

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brothers, who form a part of this story for the inspirational effects they have had on me. TIM AND DOUG AND STAN Timothy Leary and Douglas Engelbart and Stan Dale have all spontaneously called me ‘brother’. I accept this with honor and pride. (That term of praise triangulates the coordinates of my

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soul, and almost makes the rest worthwhile.) DOUG ENGELBART ESPECIALLY Doug and I, Marlene and Karen have gotten like family. We have hung out in California, Japan and England. ST. DOUG ! The author and Douglas Engelbart on the patio of Doug's home, August 2010. Unretouched frame selected

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. He cajoled a small grant from the government, and set out to change the way the world worked. And did. I once went to visit Doug Engelbart. His employer in 1983, the inheritor of what was left of the Augmentation Research Center, was a phone networking company called Tymshare. Amazingly, the building

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. And here was the news: The tools to perform this task were at hand. Here is how we will work in the future. And then Doug Engelbart predicted systems in which individuals would have personal computer workstations, networked to each other, and would even compose documents in which "trial drafts can be

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all demos. Engelhart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert. The viewers saw a projection of Doug Engelbart's face, with the text of the screen superimposed on it. At one point, control of the system was passed off, like some digital football

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that would change the way all of us worked, created, and thought. Contemplate the actual products: Word processing. Personal computing. Desktop publishing. Spreadsheets. Not that Doug Engelbart would personally reap the fruits of this transformation. Even as the trajectory of his thought kept rising in the early seventies, the clock was ticking

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some refugees from Engelbart's lab. Xerox had done a lot of testing on the mouse. Bill English, one of several SRI workers who left Doug Engelbart to pursue the bit-mapped dream at Xerox PARC later explained that experiments conducted with people with blood flowing in their veins (as opposed to

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one of the most controversial issues in the industry. People get religious." In 1971, when Bill English and a couple of other SRI workers left Doug Engelbart to pursue the bit-mapped dream at XeroxPARC, the mouse retained its three buttons: red, yellow, and blue. But in preparation for the Star, Xerox

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. As it turns out, Atkinson was not the only one at work on realizing Bush's vision. The memex vision, of course, had originally ignited Douglas Engelbart, who in turn triggered the series of innovations that would lead to Macintosh. But the most vocal proponent of Bush's ideas was Ted Nelson

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by Brian Dear  · 14 Jun 2017  · 708pp  · 223,211 words

focused on gas plasma devices. In retrospect, the work is remarkable if for no other reason than that it was undertaken by none other than Douglas Engelbart, who, by the time Bitzer and company came across his patents, had already abandoned the research and moved over to a project that would lead

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.” Kay was influenced by the work of Ivan Sutherland, also at the University of Utah, who was a pioneer in computer graphics, as well as Douglas Engelbart, who had long ago abandoned his plasma storage device research to embark on research into user interfaces and online software for “human augmentation,” resulting in

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on, Kay visited with Papert and the LOGO project in Massachusetts, and then in early December attended a presentation in Palo Alto, California, given by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute on his “NLS” or “oN-Line System.” Known in the history books as “The Mother of All Demos,” the event

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Dutcher; Kim Duvall; David Eades; Mark Eastom; Fred Ebeling; Chaz Ebert; Roger Ebert; Ernst Eichmann; John David Eisenberg; Richard A. Ekblaw; Mary Eliot; Robert Elmore; Douglas Engelbart; Rupert Evans; Scott E. Fahlman; Peter Fairweather; Margot Fass; Martin Fass; Gerry Faust; J. Michael Felty; Wallace Feurzieg; Lee Fillman; Brad Fincher; Steve Fine; Brice

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(2003); Kay (1987, 1988); Liddle (2003); Pake (2003); Papert (1987); Propst (1997a, 1997b); Tenczar (1986, 1987, 2003). Other Interviews: Kay (2012, 2013, 2016). Published Sources Doug Engelbart Institute, “Doug’s 1968 Demo.” Retrieved 2014-09-16 from http://www.dougengelbart.org/​firsts/​dougs-1968-demo.html. Engelbart, D., and B. English. “A

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