Doug Engelbart's INVISIBLE REVOLUTION

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Concepts Covered

• "Invisible Revolution : The Doug Engelbart Story" will show how Doug Engelbart first got his big idea, his vision: to boost mankind's collective ability to deal with complex urgent problems. Part of the main story is that Doug went far beyond the question of making computers better - he only worked to solve this specific issue.
   
• The documentary will show why he feels the original vision did not get carried out. The current state of affairs will be contrasted with his original vision. The funding crisis he faced when AI & Office Automation become popular will be presented. He lost funding in the late 70's when both AI researchers and Office Automation people both said 'why let the user do the work, let's just automate it'.
   
• Examples of how Doug Engelbart's vision differs from how we use computers today will be presented. These examples are taken from NLS/Augment, his system developed in the 60's and 70's. These are not theoretical issues. They include slow navigation in Hypertext environments and inflexible working models. To show the generally huge gap between the development of capabilities to help us collaboratively solve problems, a word processor from 1984 will be shown. As will a computer game from the same period. This will then be contrasted with a modern computer game - some of which are almost photo realistic - and a modern word processor, Word, which has added a lot less to our capabilities.
   
• Doug's controversial concept of a Collective IQ will be introduced and illustrated through comparing the behavior of organizations with that of individuals. The follow on issue of how to boost our Collective IQ will then be presented.
   
• Provocative questions with a larger historical background will be raised: We have developed written communication from idiographs and pitcographs to sophisticated abstract language. How much faster and more efficient is language today? How did this happen? It's over time with new technologies such as paper and printing. Computers give us new ways to symbolize concepts. We could put them together in ways that with practice our perception could scan quickly. The computer gives us a lot more freedom in creating and presenting symbols. Our perceptual machinery is not just limited to how we process information today.

 

How the concepts will be explained:

 

• The definition of his goal is to boost mankind's collective ability to deal with complex urgent problems.
  • office - Office workers will be shown using computer systems and communicating talking, gesticulating, video conferencing etc. - this is the dream work environment, in a very modern setting.
     
• Doug's emphasis on skilled users interacting through powerful systems will be illustrated.
  • bicycle - This will be illustrated with a hypothetical design problem given to two groups of designers: Both are asked to design a bicycle. One is asked to focus on making the bike easy to use. They are likely to produce a tricycle. The other group is asked to focus on performance. They will likely produce a racing bike.
  • sculptor - The skilled user part of Doug's philosophy will also be illustrated with comparing a sculptor - who only has a limited set of tools, such as a just their hands, and a cook using a 'cookie cutter'. The 'cookie cutter' is easier to use to produce a quick, simple shape. But not flexible enough to produce the wide array of shapes the sculptor can.
  • architectural - Bringing the examples into the realm of computer users, architects will be shown richly manipulating architectural models. This will be contrasted with the timid professional who barely uses 'Word'.
  • race car driver - Issues of training will be addressed by the argument of someone who doesn't want to invest time in a computer system will be compared to a race car driver who doesn't want to get a drivers license.
     
• Continual Improvement - getting better at getting better
  • NICs - The concept of 'Networked Improvement Communities' will be shown with professionals working local groups as well as over longer distances - through film and computer graphic overlays.
  • interviews - Interviews with organizations which are investing in the philosophy, such as elite military units and academic institutions which invest in improving teacher training. interviewees with the military and academics as they invest in the philosophy
  • bootstrapping - using what you have to get continually better is central to the story.
     
• The notion of a Collective IQ will be covered. If individuals can have an IQ, defined here as a measurable success or lack thereof, of moving in their environment advantageously, organizations can be thought of in the same way.
   
• The scale of the problems will be explored - and our failure to take the scale of current problems into account.
  • room example - Doug's famous people-in-a-room example of importance of scale: Would you notice if everything and everyone in a room increased by 10 times their length in each dimension? What would happen? Some would say they wouldn't notice a thing as the angles would be the same; looking at someone bigger would look the same if you yourself were bigger. But what about weight? And strength? If you make something 10 times bigger you get 1,000 times the volume (10 times in each of the three dimensions) and 1,000 the weight. But the strength? In most materials strength is dependent on the cross sectional area of the material. How much stronger does the material become? Only 100 times as strong (as you are only expanding it in two dimensions).
  • digest - The problem of a user having to digest masses of information will be demonstrated with a library example, showing realistic animation of the presenter manipulating books.
  • UN - The UN's Millennium Project will discuss some of the large scale problems facing us.
  • Moore's Law - Moore's law will be used and it itself will be described by numbers and examples of exponential growth.
  • Bay Area - Aerial of the Bay Area in San Francisco will be employed to give an impression of change in our working environment since the early 50's.
    • digital data - The first example will be to show how much more information was in digital form in 1951 when Doug Engelbart had his ephphany compared with 1968- the year of his big demo and now. A voice over will explain: "In 1951 hardly any information was stored in digital form. If you were to visualize this information in the form of printed pages, you'd hardly be able to see them in this view of the Bay Area. In 1968, the year of Engelbart's famous demo, there was considerably more (real number wil be researched). Today the world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total". This is illustrated in the sidebar.
    • computer speed - The same view of the Bay Area will be used to show the amount of digital information will be used to show the increase in computer speed, though this time the speed increase of computers will be visualized by suggesting how much faster a car would be today if the speed of cars increased by the same rate. This is illustrated by lines showing how far such a hypothetical car could travelin one minute in the sidebar.
       
• Features of Doug's system Augment:
  • Full sentence interaction which means being able to give commands to the computer as we would while speaking; in full sentences such as ' scroll down to the third paragraph and follow the link in that paragraph'. Full sentence interaction includes verbs (actions) and nouns (which to do the actions to/with) as well as modifiers and even timing. These sentences can then be saved and used in conjunction with others in the future.
    • demo -Actual and enhanced screen grabs of Augment with commentary will be shown.
  • Addressing & Jumping will be demonstrated with an analogy of current HyperText and real world mail.
    • 'walk through' -A person following the hypertext way is shown posting a packet. When using Augment style relative addressing, the person is shown able to givve relative, impromtou directions such as; "Turn left at the white building and walk teo blocks".
  • Reader-driven dynamic hypertext will be demonstrated, where the reader may navigate text in much freer ways than we can today, jumping around based on any criteria, not just pre-programmed links.
    • demo - Hypertext with the visual quality of a newspaper will be shown manipulated dynamically.
  • Issues which we regard as relatively new in our Internet-networked world: version control and being able to ascertain the authority of documents has also been solved by Doug from the very beginning. His world has always been a networked one. An example of this is his 'Journal' which is simply a repository, a database, which users may add to, but never modify. So if you have 'published' a document to the 'Journal' you many update it, but not change the original. This way other users will always be able to refer to a specific version of the document.
    • simple mention - This may not need a larger demo than being mentioned by the by.
    • multi-level UI - Supporting the rise of skilled users will be multiple levels of user Interface. This concept will be shown to support users comfortable entry into using a system, as many 'ease-of-use' advocates work for, but also allowing users to achieve a much higher level of skill.
       

 

The timeline of the documentary follows Doug Engelbart's major eras:
 

• The early years
• crusade hunting
• the epiphany
• gaining credibility
• implementation
• loosing credibility
• soldiering on - realizing the bigger size of the problem needing a strategic approach
• the future.