| A Conversation with Doug Engelbart | ||||
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Cut into sections: 1a Overview of Doug's achievements. Suggestion, add: 1b Pre Doug. 1c Intro to character. Story told in V/O where necessary but mainly through I/V Doug's quote about being a dreamer. Mainly VO. Montages. Social overview. |
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| 1a OVERVIEW: Overview of Doug's achievements. | ||||
| Background | Q & A | Interviewes | Locations | Visuals |
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1b OVERVIEW: World Pre-Doug What we need to convey: How innovative Doug's work was: Before Doug, people could not interact with computers directly. We need to show how alien the idea of a single person working on a computer, interactively. We need to set the scene for how revolutionary his work was. Mood: The mood of the first sequence will be one of 'what? - it was that primitive back when he got his ideas?!" |
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Background Until Doug was ready for graduate work, there was no computer at all on the Eastern seaboard. People could not interact with them directly at all. In the forties, computers were basically big calculating machines (as were the people they were named after; 'computers', people who compute). There was no such thing as personal computing. Early computers, the way we look at computers, first appeared during the second world war. These computers were lumbering beasts; expensive and slow. Need ways of illustrating differences computing wise- MORE factoids like one |
Q & A
VO: The transistor had just been invented and the world is slowly crawling out of the wreckage of the second world war. The sound barrier is broken by Chuck Yaeger. Polaroid cameras and holograms are invented. So is the microwave oven. We see the arrival of credit cards and the first human organ transplant takes place. But still no personal, interactive computing. Q: What were computers like during the 40's and 50's? |
Interviewes Bletchley people. (i didnt really like that guy) Harold? |
Locations New York (cars) Bletchley Park Tech Museum SJ |
Visuals Showing the colossus in use. Historical pictures/other footage from the era.
relevant footage for VO if we can |
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Intro to character Intro to character: a dreamer, loner, crusader. |
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| Background |
Q & A A: "I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me "just a dreamer." That offended me, the "just" part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing your dreams." - Douglas Engelbart |
Interviewes | Locations | Visuals |
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| 2 GROWING UP | ||||
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What we need to convey: Where did he come from? Why did he turn out the way he did? His innocence, curiosity, 'outsider' status and tendency to want to push/augment his abilities, as illustrated by his interest in doing tricks with his bikes. Childhood: loner; rural etc; Dad died so no male role model. |
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Background Mood: The mood of this piece is probably one of curiosity, Fleur probing to learn more of the man behind the work. Lots of light hearted questions even though there were some negative issues when he grew up, such as poverty and no father. Background: His rural childhood, the loss of his father, the support of his mother, his fascination playing with his Ford Model T (the start of the engineers brain) and his school years where he felt inadequate and isolated. Douglas Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925, in Portland, Oregon. He grew up during the Great Depression on a small farm stead near Portland, Oregon. After graduating from high school in 1942, he went on to study Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University. We learn about his early years in a farm in Oregon. There is no additional background at this point. The audio files on this site might be useful though. |
Q & A Q: What were your early years like? Q: Did you feel that you could relate to many of the other kids? Q: Your mother took care of the family? Q: You started with simpler augmentation didn't you?... Q: But you also had the leanings of an engineer early on Q: How old were you when you lost your father? How did it affect you? where you always a crusader?(last q) to brother: what was doug like?..where you close/ did you play together? did doug have many friends? was he always a crusader? how where you two different? |
Interviewes Brother. |
Locations |
Visuals Casual interior set-up: D takes F through photo album. Family photographs, of which we need to re-scan, as the ones we got last time got lost with the laptop. Maybe some archival stuff?
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Navy: lone man amongst men. 2 years as radar technician ('constantly searching' )?-as part of the epiphany.he was not really before then) sure, with some further elaboration What we need to convey: Growing sense of mission. Mood: The mood of the navy years section is one of inquisitiveness and a sense of a young man looking for something worthwhile |
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Background We follow Doug to the Navy during the Second World War and his experience in the Philippines, where he came to be shaped intellectually and early signs of his course in life would emerge. Setting his studies aside, he joined the Navy during World War II, serving for two years as an electronic/radar technician in the Philippines. He heard about a 'cool new unit which got to work on secret stuff'. Doug read a self help book on how to focus his life. He reads an early book on computers; 'Giant Brains, or Machines That Think' by Edmund C Berkeley. He reads the article by Vannevar Bush which inspired him and may have given him specific ideas, but he is not sure about this as he didn't remember reading it until years after his epiphany. As We May Think' was published by Vannevar Bush in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The editor introduces the article: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind... Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages." The self-help book was called 'Making the most of your life'. He read it while in the navy. He also read a book about computers (Giant Brains, or Machines That Think by Edmund C Berkeley, Consultant in Modern Technology, 1949.) This gave him some understanding of computers. He read this book around 1950. If you want you can listen to the audio files of his early years and navy years to get a better idea of his perspective of the time. It adds color. I will try to get around to transcribing some, but for now I have to focus on clarifying the philosophy and Augment and such for you. After the navy years and completed his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1948, he settled contentedly on the San Francisco peninsula as an electrical engineer at NASA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA). |
Q & A Q: What was the Navy like, what affected you? Q: How did the experience of living in a war torn country affect you? Q: Your job during the war? Q: You got some reading done though I read 'a self help book called Making The Most Of Your Life. I read 'As we may think' Q: After the war?
why did you read a self help book?what did you learn from it? what else did you read that was important to you? why was that?yes how did the time in the navy change you? how did you feel when you were back home for a while? |
Interviewes Cannot think of any.
i think we should have dougs bit first and then cut to: vo: doug also read the artice ..but van. bush which he believes might have influenced him, the article is about .... |
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Visuals War footage? If we can get it without spending a fortune. If we get cheap tickets maybe we should go to the Philippines... Shoot at dock where navy boat departed and the sea around San Francisco, which is where Doug shipped off. He shipped of from the main SF port which we need to know exactly where it is. |
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Finding his mission/crusade: back home, but 50's ideal not enough. Remembers Vannebar Bush article on scientists expanding intellect... he does not remember it. He comes across it years later and thinks it might have inspired him. He is not sure if it did. but Invention of interactive computing. How the technological/human interaction it facilitates illustrates his personal Would it be possible for D and F to get into display/ interact with Colossus? No, they are on different continents. There were no 'old' computers on the west coast at all. What we need to convey: At the end of this section we need to feel Doug's fire and understand his problem statement and solution. That was a major breakthrough and we are feeling the shockwaves still; this is interactive computing. This is personal computing. You would no longer hand off a stack of punched cards to a technician. You would use the computer - live - yourself. The thought was ludicrous: Give what then cost multiple millions of dollars to an individual to work with? Never! Mood: The mood of this section is initially that of frustration - a suitably worthwhile mission is not to be found, they're all too complex! And revelation - its the general complexity of important problems that's the problem! We could show more of Doug looking at early options, not just the simple question and solution, in other words, we should emphasize the struggle more. |
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Background This is the core of the story, in terms of what Doug is about. It shows his character in how he looked for a worthwhile task. It shows his knowledge through his radar work and his understanding of computers and engineering. It shows his genius in the simplicity of his solution. From his web site: "He began to envision people sitting in front of cathode-ray-tube displays, "flying around" in an information space where they could formulate and portray their concepts in ways that could better harness sensory, perceptual and cognitive capabilities heretofore gone untapped. Then they would communicate and communally organize their ideas with incredible speed and flexibility.t his sounds like graphics to me this is a problem to our current chronology, we already talked about bekeley So he applied to the graduate program in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, to launch his crusade. Berkeley had a serious R&D program for developing a general-purpose digital computer, the CalDiC. There was no computer science department at that time; the closest working computer was probably with MIT's Project Whirlwind." Against the backdrop of the start of the cold war and the full war in Korea, a vision for helping us work together to solve problems is born. |
Q & A
why did you start looking for a crusade? have you always been a crusader? when you were thinking about crusades, what crusades/ problems came to mind? no Q here, cut straight in i think.. I was driving to work. Just gotten engaged and I realized I had no professional goal. Is this it? What am I going to do with my life? He then calculated the amount of professional minutes he would have for his career. Assuming he would work till he was 65. He was then 25 and taking an assumption of an average work year containing 2,000 hours a year that would make it 65-25=40 years *2,000 hours a year= 8,0000 hours of professional work or 4,800,000 minutes. I kept thinking. The first issue and question on that Monday morning was a view of this empty hallway of my career, there was no plan - which was embarrassing. what sort of plans came to mind? So what kind of plan and objective - goals should I have: Money? Enough for raising a family yes, but he didn't find that in itself really interesting. Sometimes that morning he had a thought: I am investing a career, what kind of return would I like? What if I could maximize the value my career contributes to mankind? that is pretty big, wha tsort of contributions were you thinking about? A: I spent a couple of months crusade hunting. By February/March I had spent enough time thinking about crusades. Real crusades, not just 'lets clean up this neighborhood'. Well, you know, one thing is to think about is great contributions, but how have individuals changed history? Gengis Khan and Adolf Hitler come to mind. Not laudatory examples, but interesting. This didn't lead me very far. Other crusades like health in third world etc came to mind. I read about someone who wanted to drain swamps where natives where living and were suffering from malaria. So the swamps got drained and the mosquitoes went away. And the population went up. However... the bigger population ruined their environment and a couple of generations later they were back where they started. A: One Saturday it dawned on me: Boy, the world is complex, jeez, the problems are getting more complex and urgent and have to be dealt with collectively- we have to deal with them collectively. A: So here came the crusade: how to deal with maximizing the improvements we could make for mankind's abilities to deal with complex, urgent problems. could you eleborate on that? A: In the next half hour or so I really got the picture of computers and interactive displays. A: I had read a book about computers (Giant Brains) and I was a radar technician in the second world war. I also had an electrical engineering degree. what was giant brains about? A: The thought went like this: The radar could draw stuff on the screen for the operator, but in a limited way. Having seen the internal electronics which could provide the display for the operator, I knew that if a computer could print on a line printer electronically it would be able to produce anything you wanted on the CRT! what is a CRT? The radar could watch the operator and do things. Jeez, the computer could watch the operator and do whatever you want on the screen: The computer could interact with the display in all sorts of flexible portrayals. It could do fast retrieval and it could do jobs for you: It could allow you to type - what we now call word processing. what is fast retrieval, how do you make the link to typing? more importantly: is this important to explain? or should we just make clear that doug is clever so he worked it out , we dont go in to explaining this.. It could retrieve for you, submit to someone else at a distance. Distance work! is that time-sharing? explain teh term now if yes. Large numbers of people could be interacting with the knowledge. What a revolutionary thought- a real, feasible, way to allow people from afar to work together. so for you computers are always networked? is this comparable to email and the internet nowadays?? One could only think of explorable options about what the computer could provide for you which your typewriter cannot. The picture came easily, within half and hour once the right question had been formulated and digested. how well did you actually know computers? (is this a really stupid Q?) who did you tell your crusade to(yes, new interviewee!!!few people, they said what?! like berkeley prof) what was her reaction? how did you feel after you had your crusade worked out? what did you do? |
Interviewes Cannot think of any. Maybe a historian or something? |
Locations
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Visuals Doug telling story in car, driving along (to computer museum?) . (Ref. Story about driving home and doing sums).
Archive to illustrate swamp story This is where we will benefit from computer graphics. I will see what I can do and who to talk to. Fleur, you talk with your friend. We need to show the 'act' of putting a radar screen in front of the computer so one user could use it and communicate with others. Old radars, computers etc. I think a visit to the tech museum in San Jose for this would make sense. When talking about crusades, maybe speakers corner in London, someone looking passionate? When filming the beginning of his epiphany (searching for a crusade), maybe some slow shutter speed camera work, moving around his head, to indicate confusion? I will experiement before hand so we can all see what it looks like. tricky! |
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What we need to convey: His basic, simple, top level vison and some of his framework. Mood: The mood of this section is contemplative and well, intellectual. |
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Background
Background: There is not much to tell here. His work really is simple on the top level:
Now, flowing out from this, it get s bit trickier. This is his framework, his systems for how we can go about the augmentation.
Have a look at http://www.bootstrap.org/engelbart/hist_pix/index.jsp for pictures he uses to illustrate points with as well. this link doesnt work |
Q & A Q: So, what is your basic philosophy? Q: What kinds of problems do you mean, specifically? Q: How central are computers to your philosophy? Q: We know about IQ, but you talk about collective IQ. What is that? Augmenting an individual is useful. Augmenting a group, an organization, is many times more powerful. i think saying this last bit is enough collective IQ needs to be mentioned here if nescessary. could you explain bootstrapping? how did you come up with the term? when did you come up with the idea? i dont know about the rest, it seems to me a logical extention of what is already said. it might get confusing after this. do we Really need it? dont forget, we just had the epiphany. any ideas? and what is this scale thing? ? i really dont get it. . . .
Q: You have a very specific way of looking at how organizations operate, and how they can be improved. Within this you talk about A, B & C levels of activity. Can you explain? Q: This is very involved. Q: But you don't think this can be done in a day, that you have all the answers, or that someone else does and it's just a matter of implementing it? Q: But not alone... Q: What are networked improvement communities? separate section?: Q: Tell me how scale matters. |
Interviewes Maybe Jerome Glenn? definately, and i think it would make it easier to understand if he can explain it as much as possible, cause it might make it a bit more practical. how about calling him before we interview doug about this? |
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Visuals Maybe a cool looking diagram? Maybe film this in a different style, to emphasize that we are now inside his head? hmmmm... On scale, we could do some animations. sorry not very creative, cant think of any, how about doug in garden? |
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5 SOCIAL REALITY CHECK What we need to convey: How little he was understood when he got started (as we will see later, he's not much more understood today). Mood: The mood is one of lonelieness and isolation, fortified by a vision. Since this section is mostly about the world not understanding him I have moved the edication and career section in to this as he got his epiphany when he was 25 and decided to pursue his further education and career as a result of his crusade. Not everyone sees Doug's vision. GROWING UP : studies IV- get Doug to summarize (at Berkeley) his time there BRIEFLY. It illustrated his lonely vision quite well though , University: biding time -writing programs by hand, calculating was as advanced as computing got; family demands; dream takes the backseat. Doug learns to talk up solid history Not sure what u mean - PhD, patents rather than his unrealised dream for the future. Getting credentials and knowledge. What we need to convey: He needed to get his journeymans card. The two main points here may be how people didn't understand him and the historical events of what and where he studied etc. Mood: The mood of this section is more story oriented. We could be showing anyone who doesn't fit and who's trying to get something done here, this is more about the person who thinks different, the geek, the artist, the outsider. It's color basically. GROWING UP : career The Job Hunt: H P; SRI (set up in response to Sputnik, no, APRA was, more later); interesting time, but 'How can I make my dream?' What we need to convey: How hard it was to get going. Similar to the last section, but getting hired at SRI was a bit of a breakthrough so that's why this section is separate. SRI is where he would be doing his work. Mood: The mood of this episode is probably pretty light hearted. ? i have to disagree... |
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Background Education To do this kind of research he probably needed a PhD. He Applied to Stanford and Berkeley. Berkeley had a research project to build a computer called CALDIC (California Digital Computer) so that made him decide. However it never worked when he was there - it was not finished before he got his degree and left. At Berkeley he was biding time, learning about basic electromagnetic wave propagation, solid state physics, symbolic logic. Doug puts in a very nice way: I was basically getting my journeyman's card. I also got a bunch of patents - 13-14 from the PhD thesis. Doubt they were useful in the world... They had labs and courses on digital circuit design. Making adders and multipliers and arithmetic controls, watching registers. They wrote programs in machine language. By hand. And exchanged their designs with other students to debug each others work. There was talk of research projects to make assemblers and compilers, but that was not quite a reality yet. Pretty geeky days! Then he was an acting assistant professor at Berkeley. Teaching basic electrical engineering,. One singular event happened- he and his wife had had 3 children. His wife got this great theory if you get your first 2 closely together there would be less sibling rivalry, but the unplanned number three came and hour later! It became a matter of teaching and bringing up the kids. 2-3 hours a day of great focus and concentration. So no more evening time for the crusade. He made some friends in other faculty though. There was a BBQ at an economics professors. Doug helped clean up afterwards and they got talking. The economics professor wanted to know what kind of research he was planning to get started. What kind of research he'd do would be important for his career etc. Doug told him about computers and augmentation - there came a point when he didn't look very interested. He looked at Doug and said: Do you know how promotions are done at university? Doug remembers the moment well: My jaw dropped, guess I don't. It's about peer review: If you don't get papers published you won't advanced. Papers get published by peer review.Talk like this and they won't get reviews. So much for blindly looking for an academic career! Background Career The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in 1958 as the United States' response to Sputnik. This will be important later for Doug's funding and the Internet. Doug knocked at HP's door, who were in the instrument business at the time. They were nice and offered him a job as they liked the patents. Both Mr.. Hewlett and Mr.. Packard interviewed him. I he asked if they planned to get in to computers. The head of research said "gee Doug, not a chance". Doug settled on a research position at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, in 1957. This position had nothing to do with his goal. He had learnt to keep the augmentation goal quiet and talk about his PhD and patents. He thought SRI was the best place in the Bay Area. SRI had had a project with Bank Of America to build a computer to process cheques or something - it was called ERMA. All vacuum tubes. So he knew about that they had been doing this for a while and he interviewed them. He got hired. But maybe only because the guy who interviewed him, a Danish guy by the name of Torben Meisling, had been a couple of years ahead of Doug at Berkeley. He got hired on the basis of his patents. Torben warned him not to talk about the computer stuff. It was time to bide time and build a position. Doug got in involved with Hewitt Crane. He had a project going where he invented - according to Doug it was ingenious -it was all magnetic materials, they were little ferrite little things with multiple apertures (MAD's ). It was a fair amount of work and various parties were interested. Doug invented new things and got more patents. But all the time he kept thinking ahead how I could do what I wanted to do. Background Scaling Question for Frode: is there a way in which we relate his Scaling work back to his vision, show how it developed things literally or metaphorically? Sure: If you change the physical scale of some device, making it 1/100th the size of what it was, you cannot assume it will work. A lot of factors change so you have to sit down and re-design the whole thing. It is the same with scaling an aircraft up in a wind tunnel. It definitively won't work. The aeronautical guys learnt this way back in school and told him about this. They told him about something called dimensionless numbers. Every measurement generally has dimensions, kg, miles, etc. so there's this amazing thing that if you take all the numbers which are significant you can arrange them in a way so all the dimensions cancel, and you get a dimensionless number, if this works, you can then depend on the numbers. Very mysterious. A the Solid State Conference 1959 Doug was going to talk to them about the effects of scaling electronic components. He said if you change the scale you get surprises. He was met with looks of disbelief. They were engineers and physicists, how could he possibly lecture them? So he said would you notice if everything and everyone here increased by 10 in each dimension? What would happen? Many said they wouldn't notice a thing as the angles would be the same; looking at someone bigger would look the same if you yourself was 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). Let me go into that a bit more: If you look at strength as how much force you can exert by, lets say, stretching a cylinder of a given material before it breaks. Fair measurement? Then you will notice that you have the same pressure at every point pulling the cylinder apart. Or you can think of it as a rope, or anything you can picture stretching. At every point where the cylinder is stretched - a force is applied - in the direction of the force, so that only leaves two dimensions for strenght. A little weird but everyone happy with that? So for scaling a person- you, you've be 1,000 heavier but only 100 stronger. There becomes a difference of a factor of ten between weight and strength. That is the same as if you were 10 times heavier right now without the increase in size (normal human is about 70kg - so imagine 700kg), and had the same (muscular and skeletal) strength. You may not even be able to sit on a chair. You could fall, and break bones. So the Solid State people started to listen to the significance of scale changes. In the world of electronics there'd be issues too, just like there would be if we were scaled. You could have trouble if you expected the device to work the same at this scale - the temperature and so on is also affected. The scale of change of the tools out there... wow the impact. it will start changes... The scale of the rate of change is also a scaling factor. If it becomes too fast we will not be able to integrate it into society. Doug puts it this way: The only thing we can help protect yourself with is if we get collectively smarter. It' not just interesting, it's a matter of the survival of humanity. |
alll good ones.how did you think you could realise your epiphany? did you have a strategy plan? why did you choose bercely? how did you find it? what did you study and why? how did you get on with your crusade? (A: work and family should be mentioned here if not promt) did you talk to people about your crusade? what were their reactions? how did you feel? what happend when you graduated? where were you looking to get hired? add job hunting and jirig at sri what was your job at sri? (short) how were you trying to get on with your crusade?
to curt:curt won't know many of these. taylor is better to ask about funing, he dunded doug don't forget, SRI takes credit now, but never really got it. how did doug end up at sri? why did he get hired? what was his career like? did he talk about his crusade? how did he get funding? what did people exepct to get out of the demo? what were the expecations for the future? how were the reactions afterwards? did anyone ever talk about doug's vision? what do you see happening in the future?
i honestly dont think we should mention this scaling, maybe only sth like: if you make things smaller they get faster... and moores law has already hinted towards this,
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Interviewes Curt Carlson. CEO of SRI. |
Locations Berkeley. Doug's Lab at SRI. Early HP? Silicon valley in general. |
Visuals Berkeley. SRI. His lab, which looks very different now. Early HP? Silicon valley in general. |
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Writing his 1962 seminal work Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework Outline of Augmentation paper. Doug had found the language with which to communicate and start building his dream. Frode: perhaps there's an activity through which Doug could explain his ideas? I.e. (I can't think of one but something along the lines of ) If this carrot is xxx then by chopping it into pieces you have xxx and add a little salt and how that enhances it is like how our intellect can be enhanced (inspiration from your side of Atlantic yah?) also explain by showing not tellin. Sure. There is a demo in the paper + the research paper has some more on this now. I'll write something up, but for now, the difference between ease of use and augmented knowledhe worker can be seen by the difference between pressing a button and having a machine make a statue and a sculptor who can make almost any statue. What we need to convey: The significance of the 62 paper; Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework Mood: The mood of this section is probably one of concentration and dedication, as he puts his philosophy down on paper. Amid bureaucratic nonsense. |
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Background Before he got to work on his paper though a couple of projects came along which were closer to his intended direction. One of them was a project which was very very important to him and was an accident. Doug talked to air force research manager about components getting smaller. Transistors etc. So Doug suggested that he carry out a study to see what would happen if you make the components smaller - knowing that there would be more demand for computer power and the only practical ways to get faster and more powerful computers is to make the components smaller. So how could you make them smaller? Would there be any problems? What happens? His answer is covered in a separate document called, 'Scaling'. Suffice to say, the conclusion was, changing scale results not only in a quantitative difference but also in a qualitative difference. More is different. He spent the next two years formulating a conceptual framework for a new discipline that became the guiding force for his work. This (now seminal) paper simply and clearly states the goal of his work, to augment human intellect: By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. This is important, simply because man's problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society. The other contenders for first importance are all critically dependent for their development and use upon this resource. |
Q & A Q: By 1959 you were making some headway though? how did you persuade your goal/crusade? what was in the plan? what is augmentation? how did you see it physically realised? after you wrote the plan, how did you get your first funding? he got funding to write the plan (harold and rowena) and Licklider funded him after that, with Taylor
Q: You finally had a chance to put together a plan. How did this come about? Q: Has your plan changed much? Q: What were the main points of the paper? |
Interviewes can ted mention theH-LAM/T bit? just as an anecdote? he could start with saying ''apparently doug was working very secluded and concentrated...etc.." H/LAM/T is much more than an anecdote, you must skim through the 62 paper. It is his whole philosophy and system. |
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Visuals Maybe this should be filmed by his desk, as if he is writing it kind of? Lots of Doug thinking shots, close up of eyes, hand on mouse, using computer etc... We need to film pages from an original print of the paper, with cover etc. Re-enactement, close up of Rowena swapping papers on desk |
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Vision into reality: NLS/Augment He can talk the talk but can he walk the walk: paper celebrated but Doug secretly seen as a dreamer; more experienced man put in charge. I think I should say no here, but we might be misunderstanding each other: Doug gradually got more funding, from Lick + Taylor (we're interviewing him) but for a while SRI put some idiot in charge. Lick got furious! Experimentation. What might the mouse have been? What they did with the secretaries/typing. ? There was the light pen and not much else, though they did try many things, including a knee pad! What we need to convey: This section covers the construction of NLS/Augment. How did it get built? Who helped? (Lick) Why? (information processing research) Mood: At this point its easy for us to get into just a chronological listing of what happened at his lab and when. We really need to focus more on the people he worked with. What have they got to say about working with Doug? |
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Background Initially, it was really hard to get funded for what he wanted to do. Don't forget that back in the 1950's there were very few computers around: "Four high-quality civilian experts had been enlisted by one agency as a site-visit team; brain researcher, psychologist, computer expert -- and for me it was a very enjoyable day's dialog. But the later letter from the agency informed me regretfully that [paraphrased] "... since your interesting research would require exceptionally advanced programming support, and since your Palo Alto area is so far from the centers of computer expertise, we don't think that you could staff your project adequately..." dont understand this To put it into perspective: Harold who? funded paper. Lick got him started on the real work. Lick was opening an ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same government agency which started the ARPA NET, which was the precursor to the Internet) office called IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office). Their mandate was for advanced reach on information processing. In 1962, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had brought to Washington a man who made a singularly important difference in the history of computers and networks. Dr. Joseph C. R. Licklieder (always called Lick ) came from Harvard, via the Cambridge consulting firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman (big on early ARPANET/Internet work), with an unusually open charter to foster research associated with the theme on which he himself had previously published, "Man-Computer Symbiosis." and toward the technology necessary to do "time sharing" of a computer's processing power between a number of concurrently active online users. When J. C. R. Licklieder came to IPTO, I was figuratively standing at the door with the Conceptual Framework report and a proposal. There the unlucky fellow was, having advertised that "man computer symbiosis," computer time-sharing, man-computer interface etc. were the new directions -- how could he in reasonable consistency turn this down, even if it was way out there in Menlo Park. Because Engelbart's published framework of 1963 and the pursuits proposed therein were so much on line with his, Licklieder began steering funds to him despite voiced misgivings of some of his colleagues -- something that came into the open some years later from unguarded chatter by some of them at a cocktail party. "Nothing personal, you understand," it's just that "way out there in Palo Alto, there isn't the computer and programming talent to justify investing good R&D dollars." The year before, a proposal made to a government funding agency had been turned down in almost those exact words in spite of being rated as "a very interesting proposal." The first 2 years were flops. The 1st year SRI managers were really concerned about the publication about the 62 report: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" It seemed arty fartsy blue sky stuff with no reality. Still, money from ARPA came for this and they put a 'more experienced guy' in charge. Doug got a promotion to be Senior Research Engineer. But the job would be done by the project leader. Doug was out of the loop. The other guy was in control. Doug protested. Helplessly and frustrated. Doug says: I wasn't cogent enough to call Lick but he came out for a project review. He asked me what it was all about. He said 'god damn it, this stuff is so bad if my boss found out he'd fire me!' So I explained and he called them, he said more money would be sent, but don't do that again. 2nd year Lick wanted Doug to go ahead with an idea of an augmentation system at SRI where he wanted Doug to program a client program on a small computer and a little CRT display. The display could show letters etc. but it was supposed to work through a modem with a time sharing computer at LA who he was already supporting to be time shared.Doug's group was amongst the first groups to be time shared. But it only lasted for about 3-5 minutes before crashing. So the second year didn't mature much either But Lick kept going. In the third year Doug said we'd like to have our our own computer which would be big enough to run our own real time system. A CDC 3100 arrived. It was a real boon to have a machine. They needed a display for that so they built their own. It cost $80-90,000. In those days there was no way you could have enough high speed memory to store the bit map of the display. You couldn't store it and have it operate fast enough, so they had to build the electronics for it as well. It would have to move the beam into position and turn it on and move it around to display the characters. It could only do upper case characters. They used this for 4 years or so. BTW, upper case was indicated by a bar over the character. As Doug says: This was the best we could do for a ton of money, you can then see how people said it would be crazy to spend this on individuals, but we said it wouldn't stay that way for long... Lick was willing to put some more support into the direct goal (more or less as originally proposed), but the support level he could offer wasn't enough to pay for both a small research staff and some interactive computer support. Mind you, the CDC 160A, which was the only commercially suitable mini-computer that we knew of, even though having only 8K of 12-bit words, and running at about 6 microseconds per instruction, cost well over $100K (1963 dollars). Paper tape in and out; if the system crashed, you had to load the application program from paper tape, and the most recent dump of your working file (paper tape), before you could continue. A crude, industry-standard Flexowriter (online typewriter) could be driven; otherwise it was paper-tape in and out. What saved my program from extinction then was arrival of an out-of-the-blue support offer from Bob Taylor who at that time was a psychologist working at NASA Headquarters (then in Washington, D.C.)(Later, Taylor moved to ARPA and became a significant factor in launching the ARPANet.). I had visited him months before, leaving copies of the Framework report and our proposal, and I had been unaware that meanwhile he had been seeking funds and a contracting channel to provide some support. The combined ARPA and NASA support enabled us to equip ourselves and begin developing Version 1 of what evolved into the NLS and AUGMENT systems. That started a project to experiment and evaluate various available "screen selection" devices -- pointers -- to see which would be most appropriate for use in on-line computer interaction. Engelbart proposed the research, and was listed as the Principle Investigator, but it was his friend Bill English, an extremely effective engineer and organizer, who put together the tests and analyses which yielded the effective results. Engelbart had thought of the basic idea for the computer mouse several years before and, almost incidental to this, suggested with a few simple sketches that maybe building and testing this kind of a device would help round out the experiments. So, Bill built it, and some unknown person in the small group of designer, programmer, machinist, test subjects -- no one can remember who -- started referring to it as the mouse . And it just happened to win the tests; and people on the project began building and using them throughout the following fifteen years. The Augmentation Research Center was developing the kind of technology that Engelbart believed would be required to augment human intellect, and to support the bootstrapping/augmentation process as well. Throughout the '60s and '70s, the lab pioneered an elaborate hypermedia-groupware system called NLS (for oN-Line System) most of whose now-common features were conceived of, fully integrated and in everyday operational use, by the early 1970s. Among the Augmentation Research Center's Pioneering "Firsts": the mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, in-file object addressing, linking, hypermedia, outline processing, flexible view control, multiple windows, cross-file editing, integrated hypermedia email, hypermedia publishing, document version control, shared-screen teleconferencing , computer-aided meetings, formatting directives, context-sensitive help, distributed client-server architecture, uniform command syntax , universal "user interface" front-end module, multi-tool integration, grammar-driven command language interpreter , protocols for virtual terminals , remote procedure call protocols, compileable "Command Meta Language" Said Doug Engelbart, "Many of those firsts came right out of the staff's innovations -- even had to be explained to me before I could understand them. They deserve more recognition." Color: He was then working at a teletype at home, which makes a punched-tape record of all that is typed. Codes embedded anywhere in the text could cause the later "batch" process to correct any previous error or omission, including those in any prior commands. He made himself write most of that report this way. And his wife made him move out into the garage to do it because the Model-33 was so noisy. He remembers the extra problem of typing with cold fingers. |
Q & A Q: You got a mentor and supporter helping you fund the actual building of NLS/Augment? Q: Bill English arrives. Q: Jeff arrives. Q: More people arrive. Q: What was the atmosphere like. Q: Tell me how the mouse was invented! Q: So by the mid 60's things were going well! |
Interviewes There is Bill English who was Doug's Doer, whom we have not reached yet, as well as his wife who was Doug's secretary. Bob Taylor? Jeff Rulifson helped Doug a lot and he's signed up. he is also in the actual demo. Robert Taylor Beyond that, we're looking to see who we can get. Ex-colleagues where ever possible |
Locations Maybe the demo hall? City conference center downtown. Can't find out where it was on the net. Doug doesn't remember. He says I will have to ask Bill. |
Visuals The demo. I found some photographs on the web as well. We need to try to get permissions. Cutaways: Doug resketching first mouse RE-ENACTMENT RE-ENACTMENT yah yah Hmmm.. Or just sketching to show F? CU some-one typing (as per experiment or whatever would be most appropriate to illustrate experiments) Yes. |
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The mother of all demos. Doug takes Fleur through it. Cut to demo. 1st ever demo of computer mouse, hypermedia, on-screen video conferencing. |
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Background What we need to convey: What was it? How did it come about? What was shown, who were inspired by it? Mood: The mood of this one has to be positive, up-beat and in a way, a bit reverential - the audience is about to see what this whole thing has been leading up to. Background: The decades' hard work culminates in the big demo. During the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference (a semi-annual joint meeting of the then major computing societies) held in San Francisco. At a special session, Engelbart, operated his system from the stage through a home-made modem, and used the system (called NLS at the time, for oNLine System) to outline and then concretely illustrate his ideas to the audience while members of his staff (with their faces shown on the screen) linked in from his lab at SRI. A standing ovation concluded this "mother of all demos," the first public demonstration of the computer mouse, of hypermedia, and of on-screen video teleconferencing. It was a spectacular success influencing a generation of computer scientists. This is a very lively and upbeat section, with many of the pioneers talking about what they did (if we get them, we have Jeff and may get Bill English). We will see the original places and systems they worked on. The 1968 demo will be shown in part and the way the system worked will be shown graphically. The system by 1968: NLS by now had a full set of basic features that have since characterized it and AUGMENT (its commercial successor). E.g.: full-screen, integrated outline and text processing; in-file addressing; in-file and cross-file text or structure manipulation by address; basic repertoire of view-control commands; content filtering; generalized, computer-executable citation links; verb-noun, consistent command syntax with optional use of ultra-fast, concurrent control using the mouse and chord keyset; Included also was a calculator package, integrated into NLS: mouse-selecting operands; totaling columns; inserting accumulator contents at selected locations or replacing selected numbers in a file; executing user macros with pauses and prompts for users to select file variables or provided typed in values. Put together our home-designed, custom-built displays system to run with the SDS-940. Two custom-built, random-deflection display generators were each time-shared to drive six, small, 5" high-precision CRTs. In front of each of these CRTs was mounted a high-quality, video camera so as to scan the CRT face. These twelve video lines were brought out to our work area, where each work station had a high-quality video monitor for its display. This gave us four sizes of alphanumeric characters, and accelerators vector-graphic figures. The display generators were connected on a Direct Memory Access bus so that switching from one stored view to another occurred essentially in a thirtieth of a second. We came online with an improved NLS on a time-shared, SDS 940; large swapping drum; special, home-made display system operating from direct-memory access, providing integrated text and graphics, and delivering video to up to twelve workstations out in our laboratory. The Demo: Made a public debut at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, December. For this event, we added another layer of new technology on top of NLS, a system that was already very complex for its day. It is worth an extra bit of description here. Bill English and I wrote a paper for this conference describing ARC's objectives, physical laboratory, and the current features of NLS. In the Spring, when the Program Committee was considering candidate papers and organizing its sessions, I also proposed that they let us have a full hour-and-a-half session to put on a video-projected, real-time presentation. After considerable deliberation, and no less than two site visits to our lab at SRI, they consented. It was a considerable gamble, possibly an outright misuse of research funding. I have no illusions that it could possibly have been pulled off without Bill English's genius for getting things to work. Our new display system provided us with twelve video cameras; we left about half of them working as display generators, and used the others to provide video views of people, borrowing tripods and drafting all kinds of people as camera operators and prompters. We leased two video links to send images from SRI to the Conference Center in San Francisco -- a direct distance of about 30 miles. It required temporarily mounting four pairs of dishes -- two atop our SRI building, two atop the Conference hall, and four on a truck parked on top of a relay mountain. We procured some video-lab equipment: frame splitters, switches, faders, and mixers. We made special electronics to get our mouse and other terminal signals from the podium to the 940 at SRI. It required a special video projector, whose rental included a specialist from New York to set it up and operate it. He proved invaluable in making other things work that day, too. Two cameras were mounted on the stage where I sat at the special work station (which the Herman Miller Company had made for us, and donated). I was on-stage as anchor man during the continuous, 90-minute presentation, and Bill sat in the canvas-enclosed, raised booth at the back of the auditorium, directing the participants according the the script that I had prepared. People in our laboratory had key roles, and Bill coordinated us all via a voice intercom; while he also did the switching and mixing and frame splitting to put together the projected images. During that 90 minutes, we used the projected display images (composite text & graphics) both to present agendas and descriptive portrayals, and also to demonstrate what NLS could do and how we applied it to our planning, documenting, source-code development, business management, and document retrieval. The same year, 1968, Intel was founded. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. A year later people would land on the moon. Heady days. Hippies with counter-culture & revolution, technology and the promise of progress. We will leave the third episode quite excited; so this is how it came about; a man and his team built the mouse, hypertext, windows and all that against the odds of an establishment who saw computers as big old calculating machines. The real revolutionaries of the sixties were not the hippies protesting, the people building the technology which would change our world. |
Q & A Q: The 1968 demo changed so much. How did it come about? |
Interviewes Cannot think of any other than the same guys from the previous section, other than someone who was there?... All daughters were there. Andy van dam who did hypertext as well, he wants to talk with us. Will research. Reactions from people who were there very positive but also through to negative: did people get it? Yes, though a few didn't. No negative opinions I am aware of i meant with regards to his phylosopy..?in regards to what he was doing
Bruce Horn (he was at apple, but many because of this? Confused) Jeff Rulifson Bill English |
Locations The hall?
doug @ home |
Visuals doug explaining his system augment at home. cut to: the demo |
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The crusade loses popularity as new zeitgeist takes over. Contrast between D's vision of augmenting and popular desire for easy use. What we need to convey: How complete was his removal from the active field of work. Mood: The mood of this one has be not too negative, more like 'Oh well, this had to happen and is good in some ways, but can we please also do it Doug's way' to put words in his mouth. |
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Background Background: In 1971 XEROX PARC opened its doors and promised research opportunities of making computers easy to use, making the secretary the important user. Doug's team left him almost overnight. 'Ease-of-use' became fashionable. The focus became on the the user who had 'better' things to do than play with the machine. That was the end for Doug's active work. The seventies and eighties zipped by in our story: Doug looses his team. XEROX PARC develop some neat stuff. Steve Jobs comes by their lab. Build the Mac. Bill Gates makes Windows. So now we all use computers. Pocket Calculators are introduced. Pioneer 10 swings by Jupiter. The seventies see advances in the big and the small. The movie 'Star Wars' comes out - science fiction is popular. But the work of supporting computer users to be as powerful as possible is put on hold. |
Q & A Q: What was it like after the demo? Q: After all that, what makes you tick, what keeps you going? Q: What are some of your concerns? Q: What are you doing now? |
Interviewes Bruce Horn maybe? Steve Wozniak. I emailed him. |
Locations Apple XEROX Silicon Valley shots. |
Visuals Lots of shiny Silicon Valley shots. |
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How does Doug see his contribution? What of his vision remains? Bootstrapping. Millennium project. Hyperscope (in brief). Need a strategy to cope with tsunami of information. An old man, he keeps moving towards his dream; the loneliness of the long distance thinker yet more than ever in a network of his creation... What we need to convey: How he reflects on the challenges and how he believes we should move forward. Mood: The mood of this one has to be positive. |
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Background The main things here is how amazingly far things have moved. And the changes are only getting quicker... Jerome Glenn at the UN and others can help frame the current issues which concern Doug. He can point out how Doug's work can help us with the environment, the economy, health and politics. A dialog with Doug and Noam Chomsky will further reinforce the issues of computers not really helping us work and think. (unlikely we will be able to make this happen soon though) On the problems: This year, one company shipped half a billion mice. As of 2003, there are around 800 million people on the internet. A modern computer can complete a calculation in less time than it takes the light from the screen to reach your eyeball. "More information has been produced in the 30 years since Doug's demo than in the previous 5,000 years. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years," according to Peter Large in Information Anxiety. "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. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage" (Berkeley). On the solutions: One of the projects Doug is working on now is something he calls a HyperScope which will make the web more interactive. We may illustrate this with a short HyperScope segment. An awesome achievement - few people have changed our lives as profoundly. We will also share some of Doug's frustration of what could have been. But finally, when the credits roll, we will also understand what can be done, and how. We will have seen the future. Afghanistan comes online. One company, Logitech, ships it's half billionth mouse. The secrets of the human genes start to be unraveled. It feels like everyone and everything is becoming digital - and that we need a strategy to cope with this tsunami of information. We need to figure out how to use the technology to work together to solve ever more complex and ever more urgent problems. And Doug is there to show us the way. Like he did a generation ago. |
Q & A Doug and Fleur will take some time for quiet intimate dialogue. She'll ask Doug if he's happy - he's changed our lives so profoundly. He's changed the world. He's famous of sorts, he invented the mouse and all. He'll say he is not, there is so much more to be done. Fleur will counter that computers are so much more powerful now, to which he will counter that computers are actually less powerful now as far as the user is concerned. He'll show us that he still works every day with the system he designed 30 years ago. Fleur will ask him to get specific and Doug explain Bootstrapping - making tools to make better tools with. And the concept of networked improvement communities. His philosophy will come together as a coherent whole to inspire us. He's not a just a dreamer. He's got specific recommendations, specific plans. Q: What are your wishes for the future? Q: Are you happy? You've changed our lives forever? Q: But computers are so much more powerful now... Q: You don't pretend you have all the answers do, you, you're offering a useful approach to finding them? Q: What have we got left to do? Q: What good developments do you see? Q: What advice do you have for the augmenters of today, of tomorrow? |
Interviewes Bruce Horn IBM's Jim Spohrer UN's Jeromy Glenn Howard Ted Nelson Paul Saffo(?) and more |
Locations Downtown SF/Chinatown. More shiny Silicon Valley. IBM lab. Nature/ Golden Gate, ocean... |
Visuals Doug in San Fran for cutway- walking slowly away amongst the jumble of city activity. IBM lab. Nature. |
SET-UPS TO SHOOT:
Doug at the tappy-text computer he used in the garage
Museum
Diagrams as drawn by Doug
Square dancing
Cooking?
Does Bill English live locally? Yes Poss to get them together to reminisce? Maybe. Maybe Jeff? I will ask who
Appropriate setting for a dreamer - Doug in San Fran?
University
Pier? For Navy tale?
Demo hall
And
ON SCRIPTING:
Frode- feedback pro favor: we are thinking that this will suit being driven predominantly by a) interview lead questioning, b) voice over. This means we can't think of many places where Fleur talking to camera would be better than Doug/others talking to Fleur. We see scripted bits at this stage mainly residing in chronological overviews - which would be better as VO as well, over archive footage, but for safety could be written now and done to camera.
Fleur points out that Doug rambles and that the strongest line needs to be in specific questioning, prepared in advance, and in vigilant attention to getting him to reiterate things in simple, quick terms. Absolutely, he really is an old man in this sense! Maybe you guys will go over the rushes at the end of every day and see what's missing, what works, what Fleur could throw to on location, what would benefit from being re-addressed. We are a bit sceptical about improvising J but maybe we'll schedule more than 1 days 'extra' shooting?
To me, voive-over is most easily tweaked in post-production, when you know what you are working from and towards. Good point. I would love Fleur to do some reflective shots at great CA locations though
How do you feel about this? Happy. Very happy.
Where do you see Fleur talking to camera? SF streets? By sea, in tech area, maybe at IBM?
What do you feel needs to be scripted for the shoot? ALL THE QUESTIONS
TO BE SCRIPTED:
Opening sequence intro (requires factoids to be supplied)
Fleur to summarise Bush article I can do that
Fleur describing what was happening in different periods setting sctions in context
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Giant Brains, or Machines That Think by Edmund C Berkeley, Consultant in Modern Technology, 1949.
http://www.invisiblerevolution.net