By Paul Spinrad

The day is December 9, 1968. The place, the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco’s Brooks Hall.

At a table in front of the theater sits Douglas Engelbart, sporting a headset and demonstrating a new powerful computer system complete with monitor, keyboard and mouse. The 2,000-seat auditorium is outfitted with video cameras, microphones, a microwave link and an Eidophor projector beaming massive pictures onto the front wall.

On the screen, the larger-than-life split image shows Engelbart on the right as he guides us through the demo. On the left, we see his computer monitor, actually his office computer monitor 30 miles away at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park. He is remotely connected via 1200-baud modem to the SRI system, keying and editing a simple document. Throughout the demo, a video camera back in Menlo Park is trained at the terminal, while cameras in the auditorium pick up shots of Engelbart’s face and hands, equipment or some other team member involved in the presentation.

THE PROMISED LAND OF COMPUTING
Engelbart (M.S.’53, Ph.D.’55 EECS) was directing what is now known as “the mother of all demos,” a milestone event that earned him the title “the father of personal computing.” Attendees—accustomed to programming mainframe computers via punch cards—were being introduced to what have since become the essentials of modern computing: networking, teleconferencing, word processing, e-mail, file-sharing, hyperlinks, integrated text and graphics, windows and the mouse. He was also presenting his broad vision of a world where computers not only make our lives easier but also serve as the salvation of modern civilization.

Personal computer pioneer Alan Kay was there. “Doug was like a biblical prophet,” Kay recalls. “His talks were not for information, but to show a promised land that needed to be found and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there. He always had a powerful physical presence, and his demos with the projector reminded me of Moses, as played by Charlton Heston, parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.”

The demo—fitting the utopian spirit of 1960s San Francisco—embodied personal empowerment and revolution. While hippies at rock concerts were having their minds blown by music, lights and LSD, Engelbart was blowing minds with his far-out projections. The presentation didn’t just chart a new course for computer science; it also set the bar for demo-craft. The dazzling demos Steve Jobs and his team give at Macworld today tap into the sense of spectacle that Engelbart introduced to the form.

But Engelbart’s example scenario was not just about computing. It showed how someone could use a computer to make a shopping list and a map to help run errands after work, how to edit a document and how to write hyperlinked source code. In an era of plain text, before anyone could fuss about details like fonts or color, Engelbart had developed fundamentally new ways of interacting with information.

The young Engelbart began thinking about using technology to augment human intelligence or “raise the collective IQ” while in the U.S. Navy, just after World War II, running a radar and radio hub in the Philippines. “Twenty years old, and my little shop was the center for communications for the Pacific Fleet,” he recalls. “Imagine that!”

It was a time of triumph, promise and big questions about civilization. Against a backdrop of teletype machines and radar screens, Engelbart read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, As We May Think, which examined the challenge of information overload in an increasingly specialized world and described the electronic logic machines that would help humans navigate it. A few years later, Engelbart was newly engaged and working at Ames Research Center (now NASA Ames) in Mountain View. After seeing Professor Paul Morton give a presentation about computing at UC Berkeley, he knew that’s what he wanted to pursue.

“My brother-in-law had told my wife, ‘It’s so nice that you married a guy with a good engineering job,’” he recalls. “So then what happened? I quit my job to go back to school, and she had to work.”

Engelbart and his wife, Ballard, moved to married student housing on Buchanan Street in Albany, which was filled with other GI-Bill students. He worked on the CALDIC, the California Digital Computer, an early high-speed model that Morton and his students built from scratch with the help of the U.S. Office of Naval Research. “I had grandiose ideas about how people could use computers and screens, like radar screens, to deal with complex, urgent problems,” Engelbart recalls. “I think it took Professor Morton by surprise to have a student so out there.”

After earning his Ph.D. in 1955, Engelbart joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. But he had concerns about getting tenure when others in the department considered his ideas offbeat. So he left to work at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, where he eventually directed his own research laboratory of nearly 50 staff, pioneering his vision for computer systems.

He secured government funding and wrote his 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, a wide-ranging think piece that described how people could work interactively and define connections between documents and represent their structure and underlying logic. Recorded information could be non-linear and interactive, he argued, unlike the static writing systems humankind had inherited.

Engelbart was describing something that did not exist. Fortunately, J.C.R. Licklider at the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency shared enough of his vision to fund Engelbart’s research group, the Augmentation Research Center (ARC, a reference to the “augmentation” of collective human intelligence through technology), and start implementing Engelbart’s ideas. Five years later, the innovations developed by the 12-person group were ready for prime time. And the rest is history.

MANAGING INFORMATION OVERLOAD
The 1968 demo was a high point for Engelbart. A few years later several ARC members left SRI for nearby Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where they furthered their ideas about computing following the same strategy: build the tools you want to use, rely on them for your work, and refine them through experience. Engelbart left SRI in the mid-1970s after a falling-out with the president. Recent collaborator, author Valerie Landau, says that, although Engelbart is widely regarded as a technology genius, he does have his detractors, who might describe him as uncompromising. “Doug is the worst salesman in the world,” Landau says. “He does not cater to male hierarchical protocol, and he won’t negotiate.”

Today, still trying to interest the world in the unrealized possibilities of his 1962 paper, Engelbart says some of his concepts would be easy to implement. For example, the Internet defines links for clicking and jumping to entire pages. Engelbart advocates linking to any section, subsection or sentence of any document, so that you could jump to them individually, as we refer to biblical passages by chapter, number and verse. This would give every sentence in any document a life of its own. Links themselves could also have different types that characterize the relationship between the things they connect: citation, supporting evidence, counter-argument and so on.

A greater challenge is implementing Engelbart’s concept, following Vannevar Bush, of embodying a document’s underlying reasoning and logically tying it into the entire corpus of human discourse. Programming computers to work with language like this is far more difficult than it appeared in the 1960s, but systems being developed today are getting closer. For example, software developed by the company Powerset (recently acquired by Microsoft) has extracted the underlying logic from all of Wikipedia.

With these pieces in place, Engelbart argues, each document added to the system would contribute its logical content to the society’s collective repository of beliefs and reasoning. The result would be a system that would work more like a shared brain than a library, capable of learning and innovating, generating its own logical connections, isolating errors in reasoning, and chaining backwards from any statement to underlying assumptions and supporting or contradictory evidence. Science and law already revolve around logical argumentation and consensus, Engelbart adds, so they would be perfect for utilizing such linked argument structures.

Language raised the collective IQ of our primate ancestors by enabling individuals to learn from the experiences of others, but one individual can assimilate only so much material in a single lifetime. Engelbart’s hypothetical system would raise human intelligence by allowing everyone to benefit from the collective experience at any time. The system digests all the reasoning, and we can tap into it as needed to research questions ranging from how to make lemonade to whether to go to war.

“It’s all one problem,” Engelbart argues. “It’s the meta-problem of how to use technology to increase the collective intelligence and how to co-evolve the society with the technology.”

Retired and relaxed now at 83, Engelbart has been honored many times for his early work, and the list of his admirers reads like a who’s who of computer science from the decades that followed his 1968 masterwork: Andy van Dam, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Jaron Lanier, Marc Andreessen. Where others shared his vision and furthered the work, his instincts proved dead-on. If his most ambitious ideas are ever realized, the worldwide brain that results will probably consider him a prophet of biblical stature.

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Paul Spinrad is a technology writer based in San Francisco. He is projects editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance.