"It was quiet and cool and airy inside, with lots of polished bamboo and
books. That was where I ran across that article by Vannevar Bush,"
Engelbart recalls. More than three decades later, he still fondly
remembers the room where he first encountered the dream that has
dominated most of his life. At that time, the news of Hiroshima was
still fresh and searing. He found himself wondering whether the same
inventiveness that produced nuclear bombs might be used to prevent such
destruction in the future. Engelbart started designing computer-based
problem-solving systems in 1951. He hasn't stopped yet.
The earliest and one of the clearest
articulations of the idea that information processing technology could
be used to amplify human memory and thinking was the one Doug found that
day in 1945, in an article entitled "As
We May Think," published toward the end of the war in The
Atlantic Monthly. The author was the highest-ranking scientific
administrator in the U.S. war effort, Vannevar Bush.
Bush, the son and grandson of Yankee seafarers, was the same
mathematician who had constructed analog computers at MIT in the 1930s.
He was also in charge of over 6000 U.S. scientists during World War II,
as director of the Office of Research and Development. His two most
important goals were starting the Manhattan project and finding a means
to stop German bombing, goals that both directly hastened the invention
of computing machinery. Ironically, Bush didn't mention the potential of
the early computers as information-handling devices when he wrote his
article. But he did present an idea that was to bear fruit many years
later -- a description of a science-fiction-like general-purpose tool to
help us keep track of what we know.
Looking toward the postwar world,
Bush foresaw that recent breakthroughs in science and technology were
going to create problems of their own. With all these scientists
producing all this knowledge at an unprecedented rate, how was anyone to
keep track of it all? How would this rapidly expanding body of knowledge
benefit anybody if nobody knew how to get the information they needed?
"The summation of human experience is
being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships," Bush wrote.
He urged men of science to turn their efforts to making the increasingly
unwieldy accumulation of human knowledge more accessible to individuals.
But the future technology that Bush foresaw extended beyond the borders
of science to the ordinary citizenry. The day was coming when not only
scientists but ordinary citizens would be required to navigate through
ever-more complicated realms of information. In the pages of the
Atlantic, Bush proposed that a certain device should be developed, a
device to improve the quality of human thinking. Because one of its
functions was to extend human memory, Bush called his hypothetical
machine a memex. But Bush was one of the first to see that rapid
access to large amounts of information could serve as much more than a
simple extension of memory. Although he described it in terms of the
primitive information technologies of the 1940s, the memex was
functionally similar to what is now known as the personal computer --
and more.
Some ideas are like seeds. Or viruses. If they are in the air at the
right time, they will infect exactly those people who are most
susceptible to putting their lives in the idea's service. The notion of
a knowledge-extending technology was one of those ideas. Fifteen years
after Bush published his Atlantic article,
J. C. R. Licklider
published his article about making computers into a communication
medium. But only five years after Bush's article, Doug Engelbart,
infected by the idea of creating a mind-extending tool, incubated his
own ideas about how to use machines to augment human intelligence.
After the war, with an electrical engineering degree and his
experience with radar, Engelbart found a job at Ames Laboratory in
California, working on contracts for one of NASA's ancestors, the
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. After a couple of years at
Ames, he asked a woman he met there to marry him.
"The Monday after we got engaged," Engelbart remembers today, "I was
driving to work when I was hit with the shocking realization that I
no longer had any goals. As a kid
who had grown up in the depression, I was imbued with three goals -- get
an education, get a steady job, get married. Now I had achieved them.
Nothing was left."
Doug Engelbart tends to think seriously about things when he finds
something worth thinking about. And his own life is certainly not exempt
from being an object of serious thinking.
While he drove along a two-lane paved
road that is now a freeway, he reckoned that he had about five and a
half million working minutes remaining in his life. What value did he
really want from that investment? At the age of twenty-five, in
December of 1950, he started to think about what new goals he might set
for himself.
"I dismissed money as a goal fairly early in the decision process.
The way I grew up, if you had enough money to get by, that was okay; I
never knew anybody who was rich. But by 1950, it looked to me like the
world was changing so fast, and our problems were getting so much
bigger, that I decided to look for a goal in life that would have the
most payoff for mankind."
For several months after he made the decision to commit himself to an
appropriately humanitarian enterprise, Doug searched for the right one.
He contemplated his situation and skills and thought about the various
kinds of crusades he might join. With his radar training, and what he
was beginning to learn about computers, Engelbart was also looking for a
cause that wouldn't require him to retread his engineering education, or
move too far away from his new home. He had a challenging job and a
pleasant drive to work. Santa Clara Valley was still the world's largest
prune orchard, and the electronics industry had only recently moved out
of a couple of garages in Palo Alto. The drive gave him time to think.
Ultimately, the kinds of crusades that appealed to him still didn't
satisfy his needs: there weren't clear-cut ways of organizing one's
thoughts to run a crusade. He was an engineer, not a political
organizer, and the world was becoming too complicated for anything but
the most well-organized crusades. Suddenly, Doug recognized that he was
running into the same fundamental issue over and over again.
Engelbart realized, as had Vannevar
Bush, that humankind was moving into an era in which the complexity and
urgency of global problems were surpassing time-honored tools for
dealing with problems. He also began to understand, as did
Licklider a few years later, that handling the informational by-products
of problem-solving had itself become the key to all the other problems.
The most important task no longer lay in
devising new ways to expand our accumulation of knowledge, but in
knowing where to look for the answers that were already stored
somewhere. "If you can improve our capacity to deal with
complicated problems, you've made a significant impact on helping
humankind. That was the kind of payoff I wanted, so that's what I set
out to do."
Although many of the details took decades to work out, the main
elements of what he wanted to achieve came to him all at once: "When I
first heard about computers, I understood, from my radar experience,
that if these machines can show you information on punchcards and
printouts on paper, they could write or draw that information on a
screen. When I saw the connection
between a cathode-ray screen, an information processor, and a medium for
representing symbols to a person, it all tumbled together in about half
an hour.
"I started sketching a system in
which computers draw symbols on the screen for you, and you can steer it
through different domains with knobs and levers and transducers. I was
designing all kinds of things you might want to do if you had a system
like the one Vannevar Bush had suggested -- how to expand it to a
theater-like environment, for example, where you could sit with a
colleague and exchange information. God! Think of how that would let you
cut loose in solving problems!"
After thirty often-frustrating years of pursuing a dream that the
computer industry has long ignored, Doug Engelbart still can't keep the
excitement out of his soft voice and the faraway look out of his eyes
when he talks about the prospects he foresaw at twenty-five, and has
pursued ever since. But he's not sure whether today's generation of
computerists, with all their fancy hardware, are getting any closer to
the real issues.
Although history has proved him to be an accurate visionary in many
ways, but perhaps a less-than-ideal manager of projects and people, and
even his friends use the word "stubborn" in describing his attitudes
about his theories, Doug Engelbart still wields the power of a quiet
person. The magnetism of his long-envisioned goal is still strong for
him, so strong that a good deal of it still radiates when he talks about
it. In 1971, his friend Nilo Lindgren described him in Innovation
magazine:
When he smiles, his face is wistful and boyish, but
once the energy of his forward motion is halted and he stops to
ponder, his pale blue eyes seem to express sadness or loneliness.
Doug Engelbart's voice, as he greets you, is low and soft, as though
muted from having traveled a long distance, as though his words have
been attenuated by layers of meditation. There is something
diffident yet warm about the man, something gentle yet stubborn in
his nature that wins respect.
"He reminds me of Moses parting the Red Sea," is the way
Alan Kay
describes Engelbart's gentle charisma. Of course, the original Moses
never set foot in the promised Land. And he never had the reputation of
being an easy man to work with.
In 1951, Engelbart quit his job at Ames and went to graduate school
at the University of California at Berkeley, where one of the first von
Neumann architecture computers was being built. That was when he began
to notice that not only didn't people know what he was talking about,
but some presumably "objective" scientists were overly hostile. He
started saying the wrong things to people who could affect his career,
things that simply sounded strange to the other electrical engineers.
"When we get the computer built," this young engineer kept asking,
"would it be okay if I use it to teach people? Could I hook it up
to a keyboard and get a person to interact with the computer? Maybe
teach the person typing?" The psychology people thought it was great,
but computers were hardly their department. The engineering people said,
"There's no way that kind of idea is going to fly."
The interactive stuff was so wild
that the people who knew about computers didn't want to hear about it.
Back then, you didn't interact with a computer, even if you were a
programmer. You gave it your question, in the form of a box of punched
cards, and if you had worked very hard at stating the question
correctly, you got your answer.
Computers weren't meant for direct interaction. And this idea of using
them to help people learn was downright blasphemy.
After he got his doctorate, Engelbart came to another one of those
internally triggered decision points in his life that his dream
continued to bring his way. Nobody in his department wanted to listen to
talk about building a better way to solve complex problems, and he felt
that he would have to construct a whole new academic discipline before
he could begin the research he really wanted to do. The university,
Engelbart decided, was a place to get his journeyman's card, but not a
place to follow his vision.
Thus, young Doctor Engelbart went to the commercial world, looking
for an opportunity to develop electronic systems that would eventually
help him do what he wanted in terms of augmenting human intellect, and
would pay his room and board as he contributed to the development of
marketable devices as well. Engelbart brought some of his ideas to a
progressive young company down the road in Palo Alto. For a change, here
were some people looking to the future. Not too much more than a decade
out of electrical engineering school themselves, Bill Hewlett, David
Packard, and Barney Oliver (their head of research and development) were
enthusiastic about Doug's proposal. A deal was offered. Engelbart drove
home, elated. On the way home, in typical Engelbart fashion, Doug
started thinking about it.
"I pulled the car over to the first phone booth and called Barney
Oliver and said that I just wanted to check my assumption that they saw
a future in digital technology and computers -- which I thought was a
natural path for their electronic instrumentation company to follow. I
had assumed that they knew that the ideas I proposed to them that
afternoon were only a bridge to digital electronics. And Barney replied
that no, they didn't have any plans for getting into computers. So I
said 'Well, that's a shame, because I guess it cools the deal. I have to
go the digital route to pursue the rest of what I want to do.'"
"So my deal with
Hewlett-Packard was called off," Doug says, wrapping up the
reminiscence with one of his famous wry smiles, adding: "the last time I
looked they were number five in the world of computers."
Doug kept looking for the right institutional base. In October, 1957,
the very month of Sputnik, he received an offer from an organization in
Menlo Park, "across the creek" from Palo Alto, then known as the
Stanford Research Institute. They were
interested in conducting research into scientific, military, and
commercial applications of computers. One of the people who interviewed
him for the SRI job had been a year or two ahead of Doug in the Ph.D.
program at Berkeley, and Doug told him about his ideas of getting
computers to interact with people, in order to augment their intellect.
"How many people have you already told about that?" he asked Doug.
"None, you're the first one I've told," said Doug.
"Good. Now don't tell anybody else. It will sound too crazy.
It will prejudice people against you."
So Doug kept quiet about it. For about a year and a half, he earned
his living and learned the ropes in the think-tank business and thought
about putting his ideas into a written proposal. Then he told his
superiors that he was willing to work hard to pay his way at the
institute but he really had to have a framework to cultivate his idea --
an augmentation laboratory where people and machines could experiment
with new ways of creating and sharing knowledge, or at least a project
to describe exactly what an augmentation laboratory might be. There was
some friction, but eventually he was given the go-ahead.
The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, ever vigilant for
new knowledge about how humans operate machines, provided a small grant.
Doug finally got what he wanted -- the freedom to explore a field in
which he still had no colleagues. "It was lonely work, not having
anybody to bounce the ideas off, but I finally got it written down in a
paper I finished in 1962 and published in 1963."
Total silence from the community greeted the announcement of the
conceptual framework Engelbart had thought about and worked to
articulate for over a decade. But the few people who happened to be
listening happened to be the right people.
Bob Taylor, a
young fellow at NASA who was one of the bright technological vanguard of
the post-Sputnik era, one of the new breed of research funders who
didn't fear innovation as a matter of reflex, pushed some of the
earliest funding of Doug's project.
Fortunately, by that time another one of the few people who were able
to understand Engelbart's vision, J. C. R. Licklider, was moving ahead
with his ARPA funding blitz. As a result of Licklider's support,
time-sharing was coming along rapidly. By the early sixties, some of the
low-level hardware and software tools to build Doug's dreamed-of
high-level methodological and conceptual structures were being tested.
Licklider and Taylor thought Engelbart
was just the kind of forward-thing researcher they wanted to recruit for
the task of finding new and powerful uses for the computational tools
their research teams were creating. They were particularly
interested in the same paper of Doug's that the mainstream of computer
science had chosen to ignore.
The paper that attracted the attention of ARPA and met such a
thundering silence from the wider community of computer theorists in
1963 was entitled "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's
Intellect." In its introduction, Engelbart presented the manifesto by
which he meant to launch an entire new field of human knowledge:
By "augmenting man's intellect" we mean increasing
the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation,
gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive
solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken
to mean a mixture of the following: that comprehension can be gained
more quickly; that better comprehension can be gained; that a useful
degree of comprehension can be gained where previously the situation
was too complex; that solutions can be produced more quickly; that
better solutions can be produced; that solutions can be found where
previously the human could find none. And by "complex situations" we
include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social
scientists, life scientists, attorneys, designers -- whether the
problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do
not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular
situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where
hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a
situation" usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined
technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered
electronic aids.
It was no accident that "hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles," were listed
early and "high-powered electronic aids" was listed last. Although he
knew that widespread access to digital computers was the only means by
which our society could make use of an augmented knowledge system,
Engelbart also understood that the hardware was a low-level component of
the total system he meant to augment. Human intellect uses tools,
but the power of the human mind is not itself limited to the tools the
human brain automatically provides.Our culture has given us
sophisticated procedures for dealing with problems, procedures that
augment our innate capacity for learning new things by giving us the
benefit of what others before us have learned. These ways of doing
things are the software that creates civilization. A member of a
preliterate culture of the remote New Guinea highlands, for example,
possesses the same innate mental capabilities as a Western city-dweller,
but something else must be added to the repertoire of what that New
Guinea highlander knows how to do before he can drive a car, check out a
book from a library, or write a letter.
The "something extra" Engelbart emphasized, is not a property of the
tool. It isn't the nervous system of the individual that separates the
"civilized" person from the "primitive." To certain cultures that we
deem primitive, the most sophisticated urbanite is decidedly lacking in
the necessary survival skills. If the cultural situation of the previous
paragraph were reversed, the same ignorance on the part of the displaced
person would be evident: If you drop a lifelong New Yorker into the New
Guinea Highlands, don't expect him or her to know how to build a grass
shelter or what to do in a tropical storm. Somebody who knows what to do
in those situations has to teach survival skills to the newcomer, thus
augmenting his or her innate capacities.
It is here that the original augmentation of human intellect comes in --
the tools and procedures that cultures make available to individuals:
Our culture has evolved means for us to organize and
utilize our basic capabilities so that we can comprehend truly
complex situations and accomplish the processes of devising and
implementing problem solutions. The ways in which human capabilities
are thus extended are here called augmentation means, and we
define the four basic classes of them:
1. Artifacts -- physical objects designed to
provide for human comfort, the manipulation of things or materials,
and the manipulation of symbols.2.
Language -- the way in which the individual classifies the
picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model
that world, and the symbols that he attaches to those concepts and
uses in consciously manipulating the concepts ("thinking").
3. Methodology -- the methods, procedures,
and strategies with which an individual organizes his
goal-centered (problem-solving) activity.
4. Training -- the conditioning needed by
the individual to bring his skills in using augmentation means 1, 2,
and 3 to the point where they are operationally effective.
The system we wish to improve can thus be visualized
as comprising a trained human being together with his artifacts,
language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate
will involve as artifacts computers and computer-controlled
information-storage, information-handling, and information-display
devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed
here are primarily those relating to those relating to the
individual's ability to make significant use of such equipment in an
integrated system.
The biggest difference between the
citizen of preliterate culture and the industrial-world dweller who can
perform long division or dial a telephone is not in the brain's
"hardware" -- the nervous system of the highlander or the urbanite --
but in the thinking tools given by the culture. Reading, writing,
surviving in a jungle or a city, are examples of culturally transmitted
human software. The hypothetical transplanted native, Engelbart points
out, can move step by step through an organized program by which he or
she may learn to drive a car or check out a book from a library.
How do we adapt to new ways of thinking? Engelbart used the metaphor
of a toolkit, and proposed that we organize our intellectual
problem-solving tools in a hierarchy:
It is likely that each individual develops a certain
repertory of process capabilities from which he selects and adapts
those that will compose the processes that he executes. This
repertory is like a toolkit. Just as the mechanic must know what his
tools can do and how to use them, so the intellectual worker must
know the capabilities of his tools and have suitable methods,
strategies, and rules of thumb for making use of them. All of the
process capabilities in the individual's repertory rest ultimately
on basic capabilities within him or his artifacts, and the entire
repertory represents an integrated, hierarchical structure (which we
often call the repertory hierarchy).
As an example, Engelbart offered the process of issuing a memorandum
-- a task that involves putting specific information in a formal package
and distributing it to other people. The reason for writing the memo,
the memowriter's role in the organization, the intended audience, the
importance of the subject matter of the memo to the organization's goals
-- these are the higher level components of the hierarchy.
At an intermediate level are the skills of marshaling facts,
soliciting opinions, thinking, formulating ideas, weighing alternatives,
forecasting, making judgments, that go into framing the memo, and all
the communication skills that go into putting the memo into form. Toward
the bottom of the hierarchy are the artifacts used to prepare the memo
and the medium by which it is communicated -- typewriter, pencil, paper,
interoffice mail.
Engelbart proposed a hypothetical
method for boosting the effectiveness of the whole system by introducing
an innovative technology into a relatively low level of the hierarchy.
"Suppose you had a new writing machine," he wrote, "a high-speed
electric typewriter with some very special features." In a few words, he
proceeded to describe what is known today as a "word processor."
What might be the effect of such a machine on the memo-writing
process? Engelbart's 1963 speculations sound like advertising copy for
word processing systems of the 1980s -- and more:
This hypothetical writing machine permits you to use
a new process for composing text. For instance, trial drafts can
rapidly be composed from rearranged excerpts of old drafts, together
with new words or passages which you insert by hand typing. Your
first draft may represent a free outpouring of thoughts in any
order, with the inspection of foregoing thoughts continuously
stimulating new considerations and ideas to be entered. If the
tangle of thoughts represented by the draft becomes too complex, you
can compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you
to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might
build in search of the path that suits your needs.
You can integrate new ideas more easily, and thus
harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and
flexibly change your working record. If it is easier to update any
part of your working record to accommodate new developments in
thought or circumstance, you will find it easier to incorporate more
complex procedures in your way of doing things. . . .
The important thing to appreciate here is that a
direct new innovation in one particular capability can have
far-reaching effects throughout the rest of your capability
hierarchy. A change can propagate up through capability
hierarchy, higher-order capabilities can now reorganize to take
special advantage of this change and of the intermediate
higher-capability changes. A change can propagate down
through the hierarchy as a result of new capabilities at the high
level and modification possibilities latent in lower levels. These
latent capabilities may have been previously unusable in the
hierarchy and become usable because of the new capability at the
higher level.
While Engelbart was, in fact, suggesting that computers could be used
to automate a low-level task like typewriting, the point he wanted to
make had to do with changes in the overall system -- the capabilities
such an artifact would open up for thinking in a more effective,
wider-ranging, more articulate, quicker, better-formatted manner. That
is why he distinguished his proposed new category of computer
applications by using the term augmentation rather than the more
widespread word automation.
From Engelbart's point of view, the fact that it took over fifteen
more years for word processing to catch on was not as important as the
fact that people continue to myopically concentrate on the low-level
automation and ignore the more important leverage it makes possible at
higher levels. The hypothesis he
presented in the 1963 framework was that computers represent a new stage
in the evolution of human intellectual capabilities. The
concept manipulation stage was the earliest, based in biological
capabilities of the brain, followed by the stage of symbol
manipulation based on speech and writing, and the stage of manual
external symbol manipulation, based on printing.
The computer-based typewriter was an example of the coming fourth
stage of automated external symbol manipulation, to be brought
about by, but not limited to, the application of computers to the
process of thinking and communicating:
In this stage, the symbols with which the human
represents the concepts he is manipulating can be arranged before
his eyes, moved, stored, recalled, operated upon according to
extremely complex rules -- all in very rapid response to a minimum
amount of information supplied by the human, by means of cooperative
technological devices. In the limit of what we might now imagine,
this could be a computer, with which individuals could communicate
rapidly and easily, coupled to a three-dimensional color display
within which extremely sophisticated images could be
constructed, the computer being able to execute a wide variety of
processes on parts or all of these images in response to human
direction. The displays and processes could provide helpful services
and could involve concepts not hitherto imagined (e.g., the
pregraphic thinker would have been unable to predict the bar graph,
the process of long division, or card file systems).
. . . we might imagine some relatively
straightforward means of increasing our external symbol-manipulation
capability and try to picture the consequent changes that could
evolve in our language and methods of thinking. For instance,
imagine that our budding technology of a few generations ago had
developed an artifact that was essentially a high-speed,
semiautomatic table-lookup device, cheap enough for almost everyone
to afford and small enough to be carried on the person. Assume that
the individual cartridges sold by manufacturers (publishers)
contained the lookup information, that one cartridge could hold the
equivalent of an unabridged dictionary, and that a one-paragraph
definition could always be located by the average practices
individual in less than three seconds. What changes in language and
methodology might not result? If it
were so easy to look things up, how would our vocabulary develop,
how would our habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others
shift, how might the sophistication of practical organization mature
(if each person could so quickly and easily look up applicable
rules), how would our education system take advantage of this new
external symbol-manipulation capability of students and teachers and
administrators?
At the end of the 1963 paper,
Engelbart proposed that the hypothesis should be tested by constructing
an augmentation laboratory in which humans could use new information
processing artifacts to explore the new languages, methods, and training
made possible by the computer systems then coming into existence in
Cambridge, Lexington, Berkeley, and Santa Monica. Since the
ultimate product was to be for everyone, not just computer experts,
people who were involved in editing, designing, and other
knowledge-related fields would have to be recruited to join the
electrical engineers and programmers. Because the goal was to enhance
the power of the human mind, and to learn how to introduce such
enhancements to human organizations, a psychologist would also be
needed.
The laboratory itself would have to be a consciously designed
bootstrapping tool, because the very tools this team would be
constructing first were the tools needed to do their own jobs better.
Before they could hope to augment other people's tasks, they had to
augment their own jobs. Bootstrapping --
building the tools to build better tools, and testing them on yourself
as you go along, was a central component of Engelbart's strategy,
intended to match the pace of anticipated developments in computer
technology. SRI management had few illusions about obtaining the
funding necessary to implement such a scheme.
In 1964, Bob Taylor, who by that time had moved from NASA to ARPA,
told Engelbart and SRI that the Information Processing Techniques Office
was prepared to contribute a million dollars initially to provide one of
the new time-sharing computer systems, and about a half a million
dollars a year to support the augmentation research. It came as a
surprise to Engelbart's superiors, who were eager to procure government
contracts for developing new computer technologies, but who didn't
exactly regard his grandiose plans for a mind-extending laboratory as
their most promising candidate for large-scale funding. One can imagine
the SRI brass pulling out the organization chart after the ARPA funders
left, to find out who and where Doug Engelbart happened to be.
Here was the support Engelbart had been seeking for years, coming
right at the point where the conceptual framework for the system had
already been worked out and the technology he needed was becoming
available. The next step was to assemble the team who would build the
first prototype.
Perhaps the Augmentation Research
Center's greatest effect on computer culture for generations to come was
in the succession of remarkable people who passed through that
laboratory and on to other notable research projects. Dozens of gifted
individuals over the span of a decade dedicated themselves to putting
into action the system Engelbart and Licklider had dreamed about in
previous years. Many of those former Engelbart prot�g�s are now leaders
of their own research teams at universities or the R & D divisions of
commercial computer manufacturers.
The Augmentation Research Center (ARC) consisted of the "engine
room," where the new time-sharing computers were located, a hardware
shop where the constantly upgraded computer systems and experimental
input-output devices were built and maintained, and a model
"intellectual workshop" that consisted of an amphitheater-like space in
which a dozen people sat in front of large display terminals, creating
the system's software, communicating with each other, and navigating
through dimensions of information by means of what was known as NLS
(for oNLine System).
NLS was an exotic and intoxicating
new brew of ARPA-provided gadgetry, homebrewed software wizardry, and
altogether new intellectual skills that were partially designed
in advance and partially thrown together as the designer-subjects of the
experiment went along. After four years of stumbling, backtracking,
leaping forward, then more confidently exploring this new territory,
after hardware crises and software crises and endless argumentation
about how to go about doing what they all agreed ought to be done, NLS
was beginning to fulfill the hopes its builders had for it.
It was time to gamble.
Whenever he consulted the feeling in his stomach, Doug Engelbart had
no doubt that it was a gamble. Sitting all alone on that stage in San
Francisco, watching his support team scramble around the hastily woven
nest of cables and cameras surrounding the base of the platform, facing
an audience of several thousand computer experts, it was all too evident
to Doug that any number of possible accidents -- a thunderstorm, a
faulty cable, a concatenation of software glitches -- could effectively
kill their future chances of obtaining research funds.
But he had begun to lose his patience, waiting for decades for the
rest of the world to catch on to something as important as augmentation.
And his colleagues shrared Engelbart's confidence in the delicate
coalition of people, electronic devices, software, and ideas they called
the NLS system.
Doug's painstakingly thought-out conceptual framework, the prototype
hardware, systems he and Bill English developed, and his bootstrapping
laboratory of systems programmers, computer engineers, psychologists,
and media specialists were only corroborating what Doug had known for
years -- computers can help intellectual workers think better. By
the late 1960s, the problem lay in getting his ideas and the meaning of
his team's accomplishments across to people in the wider computer world.
The augmentation center, as planned, had grown to seventeen people by
1968. They were on their third upgraded computer system, and the
software was evolving from the first crude experimental versions to a
real working toolkit for information specialists.
In a matter of months, the SRI
Augmentation Research Center was due to become the Network Information
Center for ARPA's experiment in long-distance linking of computers --
the fabled ARPAnet.
In the fall of 1968, when a major
gathering of the computer clans known as the Fall Joint Computer
conference was scheduled in nearby San Francisco, Doug decided to stake
the reputation of his long-sought augmentation laboratory in Menlo Park
-- literally his life's work by that time -- on a demonstration so
daring and direct that finally, after all these years, computer
scientists would understand and embrace that vital clue that had eluded
them for so long.
Those who were in the audience at Civic Auditorium that afternoon
remember how Doug's quiet voice managed to gently but irresistibly seize
the attention of several thousand high-level hackers for nearly two
hours, after which the audience did something rare in that particularly
competitive and critical subculture -- they gave Doug and his colleagues
a standing ovation.
The audience, in the same room where the first "computer faire" for
microcomputer homebrew hobbyists was held some years later, witnessed
a kind of media presentation that nobody
in the computer milieu had ever experienced before.
State-of-the-art audiovisual equipment was gathered from around the
world at the behest of a presentation team that included
Stewart Brand, whose
experience in mind-altering multimedia shows was derived from his
production of get-togethers a few years before this, held not too far
from this same auditorium, known as "Acid Tests."
Doug's control panel and screen were linked to the host computer and
the rest of the team back at SRI via a temporary microwave antenna they
had set up in the hills above Menlo Park. While Doug was up there alone
in the cockpit, a dozen people under the direction of Bill English
worked frantically behind the scenes to keep their delicately
transplanted system together just long enough for this crucial test
flight. For once, fate was on their side. Like a perfect space launch,
all the minor random accidents canceled each other. For two hours,
seventeen years ago, Doug Engelbart
finally got his chance to take his peers -- augmentation pioneers and
number crunchers as well -- on a flight through information space.
Fortunately for the historical record, a film of the event was made.
Those who were at the original event say that the sixteen-millimeter
film is a poor shadow of the original show. During the original
presentation, an advanced electronic projection system provided a
sharply focused image, twenty times life sized, on a large screen. Doug
was alone on the stage, the screen looming above and behind him as he
sat in front of his CRT display, wearing the kind of earphone-microphone
headsets that radar operators and jet pilots use, his hands resting on
an unusual-looking control console connected to his chair.
The specially designed input console swiveled so he could pull it
onto his lap. A standard typewriter keyboard was in the center, and two
small platforms projected about six inches on either side. On the
platform to his left was a five-key device he used for entering
commands, and on the platform to the
right was the famous "mouse" that is only now beginning to
penetrate the personal computing market -- a device the size of a pack
of cigarettes, with buttons on the top, attached to the console with a
wire. Doug moved it around with his right hand.
In front of him was the display screen. The large screen behind him
could alternate, or share, multiple views of Doug's hands, his face, the
information on the display screen, and images of his colleagues and
their display screens at Menlo Park. The
screen could be divided into a number of "windows," each of which
could display either text or image. The changing information displayed
on the large screen, activated by his fingertip commands on the five-key
device and his motions of the mouse, began to animate under Doug's
control. Everyone in the room had attended hundreds of slide
presentations before this, but from the moment Doug first imparted
movement to the views on the screen, it became evident that this was
like no audiovisual presentation anyone had attempted before.
Engelbart was the very image of a
test pilot for a new kind of vehicle that doesn't fly over geographical
territory but through what was heretofore an abstraction that computer
scientists call "information space." He not only looked the part,
but acted it: The Chuck Yeager of the computer cosmos, calmly putting
the new system through its paces and reporting back to his astonished
earthbound audience in a calm, quiet voice.
Imagine that you are in a new kind of vehicle with virtually
unlimited range in both space and time. In this vehicle is a magic
window that enables you to choose from a very large range of possible
views and to rapidly filter a vast field of possibilities -- from the
microscopic to the galactic, from a certain word in a certain book in a
certain library, to a summary of the entire field of knowledge.
The territory you see through the augmented window in your new
vehicle is not the normal landscape of plains and trees and oceans, but
an informationscape in which the features are words, numbers,
graphs, images, concepts, paragraphs, arguments, relationships,
formulas, diagrams, proofs, bodies of literature and schools of
criticism. The effect is dizzying at first.
In Doug's words, all of our old habits
of organizing information are "blasted open" by exposure to a system
modeled, not on pencils and printing presses, but on the way the human
mind processes information.
When the new vehicle for thought known as Arabic numbers was
introduced to the West, and mathematicians found that they didn't have
to fumble with Roman numerals in their calculations anymore, the mental
freedom must have been dizzying at first. But not nearly as dizzying as
this. There is a dynamism of the informationscape that needs no
explanation, that needs only to be experienced to be understood. In that
sense, Doug knew he had no choice but to take the risk of putting it up
on the big screen and letting his audience judge for themselves.
Even the chewing-gum-and-bailing-wire version Doug was attempting to
get off the ground in 1968 had the ability to impose new structures
on what you could see through its windows. The symbolic domain, from
minutiae to the grandest features, could be arranged at will by the
informationaut, who watched through his window while he navigated his
vehicle and the audience witnessed it all on the big screen.
Informational features were reordered, juxtaposed, deleted, nested,
linked, chained, subdivided, inserted, revised, referenced, expanded,
summarized -- all with fingertip commands, A document could be called up
in its entirety, or the view could be restricted to only the first line
or first word of each paragraph, or the first paragraph of each page.
One of the example tasks he demonstrated involved the creation of the
presentation he was giving at the moment, from the outline of the talk
to the logistics of moving their setup to the Civic Auditorium. The
content of the information displayed on the screen referred to the
lecture he was giving at the moment, and the lecture referred to the
information on the screen -- an example of the kind of self-referential
procedure that programmers call "recursion."
Doug moved his audience's attention through the outline by the way he
manipulated their "views" of the information. His manipulations
maneuvered the screen display and the audience's consciousness through
categories of information, zoomed down to subcategories, broke them into
their atomic components, rearranged them, then zoomed back up the
hierarchy to meet the vocal narration at a key point in the story, when
the words on the screen and the words coming from the narrator merged
before branching off again. It was an appropriately dramatic
presentation of a then-novel use of computers. While it appeared to be a
radically sudden innovation to many of those in the audience, it was the
culmination of careful experimentation at ARC that had already spanned
most of a decade.
It is almost shocking to realize that
in 1968 it was a novel experience to see someone use a computer to put
words on a screen, and in this era of widespread word processing, it is
hard to imagine today that very few people were able to see in Doug's
demonstration the vanguard of an industry. When time-sharing
systems first allowed programmers to interact directly with computers,
in the early 1960s, the programmers developed tools known as "text
editors" to help them write programming code. (The first one at MIT had
a hand-lettered sign that dubbed it "expensive typewriter.") But "word
processing" for non-programmers was still far in the future, despite
Engelbart's demonstration of its potential.
The quality of video display technology in 1968 was also amazingly
primitive by today's standards. The letters and numbers on Doug's screen
looked as if they were handwritten -- closer to crude swaths "painted"
onto a radar screen than the crisp pixels we are accustomed to seeing
today on video display terminals.
In seeking a domain where a small success would mean a large boost in
effectiveness, and where success would attract a large-scale research
and development effort, Doug chose to
augment the "humdrum but practical and important sorts of tasks" that
occupy an increasing proportion of the people in our society: preparing,
editing, and publishing documents. This area of document
preparation and communication was but a small slice from the grand range
of applications he envisioned, but it was one tool that the augmentation
team itself needed immediately, and one that every laboratory and office
in the world would want -- as soon as people understood that computers
weren't just calculators.
The seventeen members of the Augmentation Research Center, Engelbart
explained during their 1968 show, were attempting to create a medium
that would be useful to the other ARPA computer researchers and
eventually to anyone who works with information.
At the same time, this was a behavioral
science experiment as well as a computer systems experiment, because the
project team would be the subjects as well as the architects of the
research. Making computers do what they wanted was only the beginning.
The really difficult work was adjusting themselves to new ways of
working and thinking.
Consequently, one of the first projects was to create a system to
make it easy for the members of the research team -- and eventually for
other intellectual workers -- to compose, store and retrieve, edit, and
communicate words, numbers, and graphics. "Text editing" had to become
more amenable to non-programmers and more suited for the expression of
thoughts and composition of prose.
They needed to invent display devices and adapt the computer and
write the programs; then they had to use what they had invented to
compose a description of the system. The hardware and software
specialists worked on representing symbols on screens and storing them
in the computer's memory. Then the communications specialists used the
text editors to write the manuals to instruct future members of the
growing project in the use of new tools.
The text-editing system was the first stage of Doug's long-term plan.
The actual use of the system to design and describe the next generation
was the second stage. Both stages were accomplished by 1968. Even as
early as 1968, NLS was not limited to what we now call a word processing
system. The third-stage goal was to build an entire toolkit for
intellectual tasks, and develop the procedures and methods by which
those tools could be used, individually and collectively, to boost the
performance of people who did information-related work. The toolkit
would then be used to develop new modes of computer-aided human
collaboration.
Software was created to connect the text-editing system with a
special kind of electronic filing arrangement that would serve as a
unifying memory, record, and medium for their individual efforts.
The software journal through
which individuals and groups could have access to a shared thinking and
communicating space had been in development since 1965-1966; it
enabled individuals to insert comments into the group record of the
augmentation experiments (or browse through them), and enabled
programmers to trace the way system features had evolved. The journal,
along with shared screen telephoning to enhance real-time,
one-to-one communications, was part of the overall dialogue support
system designed to help increase effectiveness of group
communication and decision making.
The idea of the journal predated the development of computer networks
and teleconferencing, originating as it did with a dozen terminals
connected to a single multiaccess computer. It was an important first
try at "reaching through" the toolkit to engage in communication with
another human user of the system. It was
a theoretical precursor to the "electronic mail" medium that was
to evolve when the ARPA network became operational in the early 1970s.
When ARPAnet came along, connecting many computers in different
locations into a shared computational "space," it wasn't such a shocking
new medium to those few ARC pioneers who had been working on a smaller,
localized version for years.
The journal was designed to bring order to a stream of dialogues,
notes, and publications generated in the process of building the system
and finding out how to work it. Besides serving as an electronic logbook
that would be useful to human factors specialists and systems
programmers, the journal was meant to be a medium for a formal dialogue
among users that would serve the same purpose as today's traditional
libraries and professional journals -- but would do so in such an
amplified manner that it would become a uniquely powerful method of
transmitting knowledge.
For example, scientific journals in every field follow a form in
which a paper describing research results is refereed, then published,
after which subsequent papers can cite the previous paper. The record in
any field of scientific knowledge -- and the forum in which the
significance of findings is debated -- consists of a growing list of
journal citations and accompanying text. It takes time for new
innovation and comments to circulate, and it takes a relatively long
time for individuals to thread their way through a branching history of
citations. In the NLS version, it is very easy to jump directly and
quickly from any article to the text of cited articles and back --
reducing to seconds or minutes procedures that would take hours or
months in even the most efficient library/journal system.
Publication and distribution are radically changed by a computerized
system, since it is so easy to automatically notify everybody on a
certain kind of reading list material matching their interest profile is
now available. Distribution lists can be members of distribution lists
-- you can designate a list to be the recipient of an announcement, and
every member of the designated list will receive your message. Messages
and articles can contain lists of citations, and catalogs and indices
can be message forms of their own. Ideas and hypotheses could be
conveyed by telling interested members of the community to read a
certain list of cited articles in a particular order.
This more formal and highly structured kind of intellectual discourse
is essential to science, but is not the usual mode of communication used
in the day-to-day affairs of ordinary citizens.
As Licklider and Taylor, Doug's
long-time colleagues and principal funders, pointed out in 1968, the new
interactive computers and new intercomputer networks would make it
possible to use tools like NLS to construct a
computer-aided community in which not only intellect but
communication could be augmented.
At the most fundamental level, communication begins when two or more
people need to share information, transact business, make decisions,
resolve differences, reach agreements, solve problems, communicate
plans. One of the early creations in the NLS collection of software
levers and pulleys and skyhooks brought the other capabilities of the
system to bear on communications. ARC developed a "mode of
teleconferencing" whereby:
. . . two or more people, positioned at separated
display consoles, can link their displays so that all see the same
image, and at option any can exercise control. When simultaneously
talking on the telephone the resulting dialogue can be uniquely
effective -- corresponding to an in-person conference around a
collective assemblage of their scratch pads, working records, and
individual support facilities. . . .But
consider the great potential already existing when some of the
participants -- or even a single participant -- can effectively use
computer tools to work with the relevant materials and processes.
There is a great value in merely
conducting themselves as though they were congregated at a magic
blackboard -- each easily able to pull forth materials from his
notes or familiar reference sources, copy across into his private
workplace any material offered from what the other brings forth.
In 1969, ARC became one of the original nodes of the ARPAnet system that
connected defense-related research computers around the country into a
network. The network, Bob Taylor's brainchild, used common-carrier
communication lines to interconnect computers in different parts of the
country. While the separate time-sharing communities were busy
exchanging data, programs, and messages, the ARC people saw their
participation in the network as an opportunity to put their knowledge to
good use, and to extend their experiment beyond their SRI laboratory to
include everyone around the country who was connected to the network.
As the network grew, ARC branched out from its primary activity of
continually redesigning itself. It began serving as the Network
Information Center, offering referencing and organizing services for the
distributed community of ARPAnet users.
No longer languishing in a half-forgotten Quonset somewhere on the huge
SRI grounds, the augmentation laboratory, equipped with the latest
time-sharing hardware, was by 1970 the proud subject of VIP tours.
After so many years of solitary envisioning, Engelbart had become
even more optimistic about the ultimate significance of their enterprise
than he had been when he started. In the spring of 1970 he told his
colleagues at the Interdisciplinary conference on multi-access Computer
Networks:
. . . It has been my business to struggle with these
concepts for two decades now, and the signs that I read at least
tell me that the changes in our ways of thinking and working will be
more pervasive and extreme than ANY OF US appreciates -- a
revolution like the development of writing and the printing press
lumped together. . . .It will take
explorers of this domain decades even to map its currently visible
dimensions. The real rush hasn't begun: this Conference is a meeting
of suppliers looking for the prospector trade; we haven't really
been giving attention to the developments that will follow the
prospecting.
My research group is now moving into a next stage
of work that we call "team
augmentation." Here, instead of just the individual facilitating his
private domain searching, studying, thinking and formulating, as his
office place provides for him, we are exploring what can be done for
a team of "augmented individuals" who have in common a number of
terminals, a set of computer tools, working files, etc. (as we do),
to facilitate their team collaborations.
The problem-solving assistance Engelbart had dreamed about alone in
the 1950s became the "integrated working environment" he proposed in
1963, which in turn grew into the toolbuilders' toolkit that he and his
small group of colleagues used to build an "intellectual workshop"
throughout the remaining seven years of the decade. By the early 1970s,
the wider community of ARPA-funded computer researchers and
representatives of the business world were joining the bootstrapping
process. Paradoxically, just when their leader decided that "team
augmentation" would be their goal, his own team began to react
negatively to growing pressures -- technological, psychological, and
social.
Doug had always warned that "the larger augmentation system is much
more complex than the technological 'subsystem' upon which it depends,"
and the 1970s were the era when ARC began to practice what Engelbart had
preached. During the first decade of the laboratory's existence,
computer technology had progressed at an astonishing pace, and the SRI
crew were doing their utmost to use the innovations as quickly as they
came along.
The "rule of two" (that computer power would double every two years)
and the Engelbart-induced zeal of the augmentation team kept them fueled
for an effort to bootstrap and continually adjust themselves to the
capabilities of their upgraded tools -- an effort that required
extraordinary intensity. The bootstrapping and readjusting continued
with unabated enthusiasm, at least until the early 1970s, when the idea
of building a system that was meant to "transcend itself every six to
eight months" to keep pace with hardware and software advances turned
out to be more pleasant to contemplate than to carry out. It had been a
challenging and exhilarating to build this new system for augmenting
thought -- but it wasn't as much fun having one's work habits augmented
at a forced-march pace.
When both the old-timers and
newcomers to the growing project faced the task of learning new roles,
changing old attitudes, adopting different methods, on regular basis,
just because the system enabled them to do so, the great adventure
became more arduous than any of the ARC pioneers/experimental subjects
had anticipated. So a psychologist was brought in to consult
about those parts of the system that weren't found in the circuitry or
software, but in the thoughts and relationships of the people who were
building and using the system.
Dr. James Fadiman joined ARC as an observer-catalyst-therapist.
Fadiman was particularly interested in the ways human consciousness and
behavior change in new situations, and it didn't take him long to
realize that the process of "being augmented" was in fact a new,
nonchemical form of altered consciousness.
Several of the things Fadiman learned about the "augmentation
experience" have taken more than a decade to filter out to people who
design computers for nonexperts. One thing he learned almost immediately
was that most people resist change, especially in the workplace, and
resistance works both ways -- people who are resistant to learning an
augmentation system are equally resistant to giving it up once they have
adopted it. The initial resistance is partially grounded in a general
fear of the unknown.
Doug Engelbart, of course, saw these things on his own scale, and
through the eyes of an engineer. There would be rough spots, software
and interpersonal bugs, arguments and conflicts, to be sure -- but the
master plan was progressing nicely, considering all those years he had
worked alone. The toolkit had become a workshop, and they knew the
workshop indeed worked because they had been their own guinea pigs for a
decade.
In the same 1970 address in which he referred to the multiaccess
computing community as a "meeting of suppliers looking at the prospector
trade," Engelbart also predicted that
the future would see "a steadily increasing number of people who spend a
significant amount of their professional time at terminals," and
speculated that the future of dispersed personal augmentation systems
linked together into network communities would create new kinds of
societal institutions: "In particular, there will emerge a new
'marketplace,' representing fantastic wealth in commodities of
knowledge, service, information, processing, storage, etc."
In his usual forge-ahead manner, Engelbart was already bringing
members of the business community into the ARC experiment. Business
managers and management scientists had been working at ARC,
experimenting with using NLS tools to manage the steadily growing ARC
project. In proper bootstrapping style, they looked at their attempts to
apply the system to their own research management as yet another
experiment. Richard Watson and James C. Norton worked closely with ARC
to develop their experimental discoveries into a system that would be
usable by people who were not computer experts but whose occupations
involved the manipulation of information.
Sometime in the early 1970s, Engelbart was inspired by a book, just
as he had been enthused by magazine articles by Bush and Licklider in
years past. This time, it was the theory proposed by business management
expert Peter
Drucker in the late 1960s. Knowledge, by Drucker's definition, is
the systematic organization of information;
a knowledge worker
is a person who creates and applies knowledge to productive ends. The
rapid emergence of an economy based primarily on knowledge, Drucker
predicted, would be the most significant social transformation of the
last quarter of the twentieth century.
Drucker noted something about the future of knowledge in the American
economy that seemed to converge, from an unexpected but not
unpredictable direction, with the course Engelbart had plotted for the
augmentation project at the beginning of its second decade. Drucker was
one of the first of a growing number of social scientists who have
claimed that an examination of labor statistics reveals a great deal
about the role of knowledge work in everybody's future.
In 1973, ten years after his solo "Framework . . . ," Engelbart,
Watson, and Norton presented a paper on "The Augmented Knowledge
Workshop" to the National Computer Conference. Acknowledging their debt
to Drucker's ideas, the authors pointed out that the special computer
systems that had been evolving at ARC were designed to alleviate the
problems associated with "the accelerating rate at which knowledge and
knowledge work are coming to dominate the working activity of our
society':
In 1900 the majority and the largest single group of
Americans obtained their livelihood from the farm. By 1940 the
largest single group was industrial workers, especially semiskilled
machine operators. By 1960, the largest single group was
professional, managerial, and technical -- that is, knowledge
workers. By 1975-80 this group will embrace the majority of
Americans. The productivity of knowledge has already become the key
to national productivity, competitive strength, and economic
achievement, according to Drucker. It is knowledge, not land, raw
materials, or capital, that has become the central factor in
production.
Noting Drucker's use of terms such as "knowledge organizations" and
"knowledge technologies," Engelbart, Watson, and Norton specified an
augmented knowledge workshop that was nothing less than a totally
redesigned working environment for everybody in the "knowledge sector."
The authors acknowledged that ordinary
knowledge workshops -- offices, boardrooms, libraries, universities,
studios -- have existed for centuries. Augmented knowledge workshops,
however, existed only as prototypes, and would not come into widespread
usage until the technologies pioneered at ARC (and by then, at a new
place across the creek, called
PARC) grew
economical enough to sell as office equipment. This was the
origin of an idea that was later adapted by others in a truncated
version known as "The Office of the Future."
The authors described the technology they had built and used for
augmenting their own knowledge as individuals and in groups, but
emphasized that the tools were only the first part of a total
transformation of the system -- including changes in methods, attitudes,
roles, lifestyles, and working habits. They knew from their own
experience that the psychological and social adjustments would be the
most intense and volatile changes set off by the introduction of these
systems into existing organizations.
In 1975, after twelve years of continuous support, ARPA dropped ARC.
The staff quickly shrank from a high of thirty-five to a dozen, then
down to a few, and finally down to Doug Engelbart and a large amount of
software. A decade of useful work is an unheard of length of time in the
hyperaccelerated world of software technology, but bootstrapping had
kept NLS continually evolving as it expanded its usefulness, as it moved
up to machines with larger memories and faster processors, and as the
community thought of new things to do with it.
Even before ARPA drastically reduced its funding, ARC had started a
subscription service to several corporations who wanted to experiment
with using the services of the augmentation system. The way Engelbart
saw it, it was time to bring the system out of the research world, after
its extended gestation, to test it on a community of real-world users.
The way SRI saw it was that the whole project was obviously finished as
a magnet for research funds, and they might as well sell it. In 1977,
SRI sold the entire augmentation system to Tymshare Corporation, and
Engelbart went with it. The system, renamed "Augment," is now marketed
by Tymshare as one of their office automation services.
Nobody disputes that Engelbart's vision was the single factor that
stayed stable through twenty of the most turbulent years of computer
science, and those few colleagues who know of his importance to the
evolution of computing are loathe to speak unkindly of him, yet
the tacit consensus is that Doug
Engelbart the visionary allowed himself to remain fascinated by an
obsolescent vision. NLS was powerful but very complex, and the notion of
a kind of knowledge elite who learned complex and difficult languages to
operate information vehicles is not as fashionable in the world of less
sophisticated but more egalitarian personal computers created by
Engelbart's students.
The twelve years of ARC's heyday at SRI, from 1963 to 1975, were
technologically wild years. That period was one of enormous historical,
social, and cultural upheavals, as well. Mistakes, conflicts, blind
alleys, and other pitfalls were unavoidable during the course of a
project that began in the Kennedy administration and continued
throughout the years of the Vietnam war, campus revolts, assassinations,
the emergence of the counterculture, the advent of women's liberation,
Watergate, and ended during the Carter administration.
As individuals, and as a group, ARC wasn't immune to the conflicts
that affected the rest of the culture, although it was privy to its own
mutated forms of it. Before the counterculture made its media splash and
thousands of affluent American offspring started acting weird and
growing their hair long, places where
powerful computers were to be found had already spawned their own brand
of weirdo -- the hacker. The advent of this new subculture within the
computer subculture was not the direct cause of ARC's downfall, but it
was symptomatic of the problems Engelbart faced in the 1970s.
Engelbart found himself caught between the conservatism of his
employers and the radicalism of his best students. ARC had seemed a bit
strange to the old-line data-processing types at SRI, and these new
people hanging out at Doug's lab added cultural as well as technological
differences to an already strained relationship. To say that SRI is
conservative is an understatement. Although some of the subjects their
researchers pursue can be unorthodox, their clients are such straitlaced
institutions as the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and
the top one hundred corporations.
Hackers were barely tolerated in the long, clean, high-security halls
of SRI. But when the counterculture started to infiltrate, and the
rumors started about some of the hackers augmenting their consciousness
in more ways than one, SRI brass became extremely uncomfortable.
There was trouble from within, as well as from above. Some of the
experiments in "new-age" social organization, encouraged by Engelbart
himself, threatened to split the ARC group into two camps -- those who
were still techies at heart, concerned only with the advancement of the
state of computing art, and those who saw augmentation as an integral
part of the wider countercultural revolution that was going on around
them. And there were those who felt that even Doug's technological
ideas, although they might have once been radical and futuristic, were
becoming outmoded. The idea of augmentation teams and high-level
time-shared systems began to seem a bit old-hat to the younger folks who
were exploring the possibility of personal computers.
In the early 1970s, some of Engelbart's first and most important
recruits, who had helped him create the first NLS system, left SRI for
PARC, the new research center Xerox was putting together. The new Xerox
facility was a hotbed of augmentation-oriented thought, but with a major
difference -- the advent of large-scale integrated circuitry made it
possible to dream of, and even design, high-powered computers that could
fit on an individual's desk. This
emphasis on one person, one computer made for important philosophical
and technical differences with Engelbart's approach.
For a while, Engelbart at SRI and his former students at Xerox were
engaged in collaboration, but eventually PARC and ARC drifted apart.
Doug still dreamed of creating augmentation centers in universities and
industries, providing a service for any team of people who worked with
information. The former ARC members were looking forward to an even
wider potential computer-using population. The idea at Xerox was to use
the new integrated circuit technology to create computers more powerful
than the previous generations of minicomputers -- and to devote an
entire computer to each person, instead of sharing it among thirty or
forty users.
PARC, as we shall see, went on to become the new mecca for those who
saw the computer as a tool for augmenting the human intellect. ARC never
seemed to make it to the promised land, and the former point-man for
radical technology seemed to be more and more isolated in an interesting
but less than influential backwater. As more and more of Engelbart's
earlier dreams became realities in other institutions, this judgment
seemed to be less than fair. It is impossible to tell if there would
have been a PARC if there hadn't been an ARC, and while the
miniaturization revolution made personal computers inevitable in a
technical sense, there is good reason to question whether the kind of
personal computing that exists today would ever have been developed if
it had not been for the pathfinding work accomplished by Engelbart and
his colleagues.
Doug Engelbart and the people who helped him build ARC did not
succeed in building a knowledge workers' utopia. Some hackers do seem to
be pathologically attached to computers. These facts might have very
little to do with the way other people will use the descendants of the
tools they created. In fact, if you think about it, some of the wildest
and woolliest of the MAC and ARC hackers were following in a long
tradition of people who weren't exactly run-of-the-mill citizens -- from
Babbage and Lovelace to Turing and von Neumann.
It must be remembered that MAC and ARC were only part of a larger
effort to raise computing to a whole new level, and hackers weren't the
only scientist-artisans involved in that effort. Whatever future
historians decide about the personalities of the people involved in
carrying out this unprecedented exercise in planned breakthrough, they
will have to consider the role of the
hackers who created time-sharing, computer networks, and personal
computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, not out of sick obsession or in-group
frivolity, but out of a serious desire to construct a new medium for
human communication.
For the time being, Doug Engelbart still works away at his original
goals, adapting the core of NLS to the new kind of computers that have
come to use in the 1980s. To Tymshare Corporation's customers, the
Augment system seems less science-fiction-like and more practical in
this age of office automation. People in
the business world are beginning to pay attention to what Doug is saying,
for the first time since he started saying it, decades ago.
Still, Doug is neither rich nor famous nor powerful -- not that these
were ever his goals. All he seems to
hunger for is all he ever hungered for -- a world that is prepared for
the kind of help he wants to give. Ironically, his office at Tymshare in
Cupertino, California, is merely blocks away from the headquarters of
Apple Corporation, where icons and mice and windows and bit-mapped
screens and other Engelbart-originated ideas are now part of a billion-dollar
enterprise.
