ARTS & FARCES internet

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Douglas C. Engelbart, the first of the second-generation hypervisionaries to follow in Vannevar Bush’s footsteps, realized straight away that while hypermedia was going to revolutionize our access to information, some sort of framework was needed to structure the capabilities we were going to be confronted with. His concept of the “augmentation of the human intellect” sprang from those concerns and has provided the framework for not only the budding hypermedia discipline, but most of the personal computer industry as well.

Regarded largely by his contemporaries as a very well-intentioned crackpot (sound familiar, yet?), Engelbart eventually received Department of Defense funding in the 1960s through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Ideas that were birthed at Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) include the mouse, windows, electronic mail, and computer conferencing. Engelbart’s augmentation system for the knowledge worker, however, remains to be implemented in a manner he considers to be acceptable.

If Vannevar Bush was the cerebral intellectual of the underlying concepts of hypermedia, Doug Engelbart was the task master, the visionary who got his hands dirty and got the job on track. Engelbart read Bush’s’ ‘As We May Think’’ piece while he was a radar technician in the Philippines during World War II. The ideas proposed by Bush festered until Engelbart was 25, living in the California of the 1950s, and decided to address in some manner the fact that the most pressing problems facing society were growing faster than the tools we used to solve them. Engelbart envisioned a tool that would give a small work group of people, working together, a better chance at solving problems that were becoming ever more complex.

Engelbart fully understood that what was needed was not a new way to expand knowledge, but new ways of discovering where to look for specific answers—answers that were already in cold storage somewhere. He also perceived a great need for better communication tools between the individuals working together on complicated problems. Although Engelbart’s augmentation system and attendant tools remain “in process,” the underlying framework came to him in a flash:

“When I first heard about computers, I understood from my radar experience during the war that if these machines can show you information on printouts, they could show that information on a screen. When I saw the connection between a television-like screen, an information processor, and a medium for representing symbols to a person it all tumbled together in about half an hour. I went home and sketched a system in which computers would draw symbols on the screen and I could steer through different information spaces with knobs and levers and look at words and data and graphics in different ways. I imagined ways you could expand it to a theater-like environment where you could sit with colleagues and exchange information on many levels simultaneously. God! Think of how that would let you cut loose in solving problems!”

The notion of hypertext as bits of documents linked to other bits of information that were easily retrievable by a nonexpert was only part of a bigger picture in the mind of Doug Engelbart. Engelbart first proposed bis system in a 29-page paper in 1962, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect.” Six years later, in 1968, a working system was up and running under Engelbart’s specification. The system, called NLS (for oN Line System) included such advanced features as electronic mail, computer conferencing, multiple windows on a screen, and a mouse. NLS was designed to allow anyone to read material written by anyone else and make comments and other documents from any terminal connected to the system. The system, in basically its original form, still is offered today as Augment by McDonnell-Douglas and is used mostly by the Air Force, although it is accessible via Tymshare, albeit at rates a bit rich for individuals ($18 per hour as of late 1988). Douglas Engelbart has gone on to form the Bootstrap Institute in Palo Alto, California, with seed money provided by an anonymous benefactor from within the computer industry.

Augment, as the first hypermedia system to actually succeed, includes features such as cross-referenced links between documents and provides the user with the ability to expand or contract the information at the user’s request, thus tailoring the information flow to the individual user’s needs. The amount of information available is further customizable via “viewing filters” that allow the user to specify the level of detail under which a particular document is viewed.

Concepts from both Augment and NLS comprised what was loosely referred to as the “Knowledge Workshop” envisioned by Doug Engelbart. Within the Workshop, any user could log onto the system via any connected display terminal. Once he or she was logged into the Workshop, all owned files as well as any files that were shared among a group of users would immediately become accessible. Files could be read. New files could be created. Shared files could be annotated. In addition, messages that were not connected to any document could be sent—immediately—to other Workshop users. Documents were easily transferred to other members simply by “releasing” them. No paper changed hands, and the transaction was perceptually immediate. Documents could be released to others for their comments and annotations, and the Workshop user would have common access to other members’ documents that were specified as a “shared” document.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar to the modern Macintosh user connected to a local area network, it should. The basic concept of file servers is identical. One of the new buzzwords in the Macintosh community is “groupware.” As you can see, that, too, is borrowed from Engelbart’s very seminal work.

What separates Engelbart’s “Knowledge Workshop” vision from current work group practice is the absence of paper and its attendant paper handling. Paper is eliminated at all levels. If you wrote—especially if you wrote a lot—this meant the end to lost notes that had been scribbled several days earlier on napkins, matchbooks, or other scraps of paper. Within the Workshop, all of one’s writings were available immediately, right there. Cross-references, footnotes, sidebars, and annotations were instant and painless. The Workshop promised an end to the time-consuming paper chase, looking for that scrap of paper containing last night’s brilliant thoughts that just has to be here somewhere.

Figure 1.1 illustrates a hypothetical implementation of the Knowledge Workshop display as it would likely appear using modern Macintosh conventions and software currently available. The smaller window at the top of the screen (two windows in the case of Engelbart’s original specification) would display your commands and a reminder of your query, while the two larger windows below would display the first occurrence of the text requested by the user and the linked occurrences.

Another feature embodied within the Knowledge Workshop was the ability for two people to work in a collaborative manner on the same document or set of documents. Two individuals, connected via a telephone link, could work together on a common document: Changes made by one person on his or her screen were immediately reflected on the other person’s screen. No longer were geographically dispersed workmates subjected to the time delays of revision-by-mail. All revisions could take place in real time, or at least in a reasonable facsimile.

NLS and the Knowledge Workshop used a command language rather than the graphical interface familiar to Macintosh users. Although the language was fairly straightforward and the commands themselves were mnemonic (I for insert, M for move, D for delete, etc.), the user was expected to memorize the commands and enter them into the system in the exactly correct sequence. While such a system may have been acceptable to computer scientists, it is too much to ask of the “real” people Engelbart hoped to attract to the system. The system did, however, use the mouse as a pointing device to inform the system where the user is pointing on the screen.

Engelbart defined augmentation—the term and concept—as “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.” Not only was Engelbart’s intention to define and create new tools, but to define new ways of working with these new tools.

An appropriate example of augmentation, as per Doug Engelbart, and especially relevant to this forum, is the concept of writing. Before human beings knew how to write they could only transmit ideas by telling each other. This oral tradition today survives in some cultures and even as parts of our own culture, specifically the folklorists of the southeastern parts of the United States. Once humans learned how to write, they could communicate their ideas among themselves and could have a permanent storage archive of their writings. Writing enabled the culture to become more informed by the sheer mathematics of the writer reaching more than one audience at a time. Computer screens take the tradition one step further: No longer confined to the printed word, ideas contained as light elements on a display screen promise to reach even vaster audiences and vastly enhance our individual “reachability” in both directions.

Central to Doug Engelbart’s concept of augmentation of intellect was a redefinition of what we recognize as a concept. For Engelbart, a concept was something that, like thinking itself, evolved, and outmoded concepts could be readily replaced by other concepts. In addition, he felt that human thought processes and what he called “concept structures” could not only be monitored and studied, but amplified as well. To quote from his original paper: “We view a concept to be a tool that can be grasped and used by the mental mechanisms, that can be composed, interpreted, and used by the natural mental substances and processes. The grasping and processing done by these mechanisms can often be accomplished more easily if the concept is explicitly represented by a symbol.” This realization—that the human is aided in grasping concepts if the concept is represented by a symbol—led directly to the concept of a hand-held tool used as a pointing device for manipulating representative symbols on a computer screen: what we recognize today as the mouse and similar input devices. Engelbart went on to explain that a concept structure most often evolved on a cultural basis, either on a widespread or individual basis and that it was also, although with less frequency, something that could be “designed or modified.” In addition, through appropriate modifications, these structures would improve the individual’s ability to understand the most complex problems confronting him or her and subsequently reach more insightful solutions to these most pressing problems.

The “conceptual framework” on which Engelbart based his work was in itself designed to be a specific plan for his own augmentation research and he found that the basic principles applied to both the individual and the societal levels of experience. Engelbart proposed that by designing appropriate hypermedia systems that would work in accord with human thought processes—i.e., systems that worked the way people worked—a synergism would result. Fully aware that the human mind is capable of only small steps, and that each successive step relies on and builds on previous steps, Engelbart felt that the resulting synergy was not capable of producing any larger steps, only more surefooted ones.

Engelbart referred to the extension of human capabilities within his system as “augmentation means.” He further divided the augmentation means into a group of four basic classes: artifacts, language, methodology, and training.

• The artifact class of augmentation means referred to the human capability of manipulation of symbols and physical objects to make themselves more comfortable.
• The language class addressed the manner in which the human mind organizes his or her worldview into the concepts that his or her mind uses to create a model of the world and the symbols that are attached to those concepts in the thinking process.
• Methodology spoke directly to the procedures employed by the individual in any problem-solving exercise.
• The training class of Engelbart’s augmentation means was the conditioning needed to make the other three augmentation means work effectively.

Based on his concept of augmentation means, Engelbart further observed that the augmentation means served to break up large, complex problems into more manageable chunks, allowing the individual to approach the problem as a series of small steps. He called the structure of the small steps “process hierarchies.” Although he recognized that each small step—each subprocess—was in itself a process, Engelbart also realized that the human being never uses a “completely unique process every time he performs a new task.” We don’t reinvent the wheel each time we are confronted with a new problem; we build on what we already know, using what we already know. To Engelbart, it was clear that there is a finite number of “tools” with which to fashion new solutions but that the finiteness of the number of tools in no way bore on the solutions to complex problems that could be arrived at. As one of my heroes from the 1960s, Mr. Natural, proposed, we have to use the right tool for the job. Even with a finite number of tools at our collective disposal, few of us ever become proficient with more than a handful of them; we continue to reuse tools that have worked in the past when confronted with new problems. The downside of this is that many of us tend to look at every problem as a nail if the only tool we’re proficient with is a hammer. Engelbart envisioned a way to surpass that “tool-bias” limitation.

The key to Engelbart’s vision of bypassing our built-in tool and process biases was what amounted to screen-based text editing: what we now know as word processing. In an era when it cost hundreds of thousands of 1960s’ dollars to produce a computer capable of on-screen text editing, Engelbart was correctly predicting that such appliances would become commonplace.

One of the main elements of hypermedia is that the user and author are both free of linear-thought process constraints: The new medium enables—even helps empower—us to think in a natural, nonlinear manner. Problem solving generally is experienced as a flash of insight as opposed to a series of plodding, linearly linked thoughts. Doug Engelbart had a firm grasp on this concept as well, stating, “The course of action which must respond to new comprehension, new insights, and new intuitive flashes of possible explanations or solutions is not an orderly process. Existing means of composing and working with symbol structures penalize disorderly processes heavily. It is part of the real promise… that the human can have the freedom and power of disorderly processes.”

Ted Nelson tells a wonderful story about Doug Engelbart’s notion of the augmentation of the human intellect. Engelbart was having a very difficult time explaining his concepts to nontechnoids and came up with a wonderful illustration of augmentation. He tied a pencil to a brick and asked one of the observers to write with it. Because his augmentation system existed only in his brain tissue and he had no physical system to show off, he nonetheless was satisfied with reaching the observer with a demonstration of disaugmentation of the intellect, disaugmentation being what happened when tools for thinking with were worse instead of better.