Doug Engelbart's I N V I S I B L E R E V O L U T I O N
Historical Episode Outline D R A F T
This is a rough idea for how the episodes might move, with interviews and visualizations of systems and concepts being the major focus, not the linear timeline.
THIS MAY OR MAY NOT BE USED, AND IS PRESENTED HERE AS A ROUGH GUIDE ONLY - The emphasis of the series will not be a booring linear timeline! ;-)
1 The early years - Pre-Interactive
The first episode sets the scene by explaining what life was like back in the '40s and '50s - what it was like to live without personal computers. It also covers basic computer science and explains what a computer is.
Early computer history will be included, going back briefly to Boole and Babbage and IBM's calculating efforts. The military applications of calculating ballistics are introduced, as are the financial workhorses. 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.
Basic concepts of computing are introduced through Jon von Neuman's work on creating the modern computer architecture and Alan Turing's universal computer concepts. Moore's Law, of computers getting twice as fast for the same cost every 18 months is presented, as a staging post for the future episodes. Moore only came to this insight in the mid sixties, but Doug would be charged with doing a study for the Air Force in the fifties which would lead him to a similar conclusion. We will know what a computer is - and that it gets faster and faster at an amazing rate.
Vannevar Bush is introduced, his role as Rosevelt's science advisor and visionary. He was in charge of all war-time scientific projects, including the Manhattan Project, the building of the first atomic bomb. He will feature again in episode 2. He read an article by Vannevar Bush asking what great improvements science could bring in war time, much like the Manhattan Project had helped the war effort. This article also introduces the concept of a 'flexible work-station' (basically a non-electronic PC using microfilm, allowing the user to look through lots of information and mark up references for others). This would come to influence Doug later on.
You will see early historical footage in this opening chapter. Where concepts are presented they will be illustrated clearly. Some historical re-enactment will also be used to show how computers were used.
We are left with an understanding of what a computer is, how it works, why it was invented and for whom. We will understand that in the beginning it was a rather impersonal, huge beast. The transistor had just been invented and the world was 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.
2 The fifties - Working towards Interactivity
This episode introduces Doug Engelbart, the man and the philosophy. The man who would turn big calculators into personal machines for thinking and communicating.
We learn about his early years in a farm in Oregon, how he came from a rural background with only his mother to support him and his brother. 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. Doug read a self help book on how to focus his life. He reads a book on computers; 'Giant Brains, or Machines That Think' by Edmund C Berkeley. He reads the article by Vannevar Bush.
Doug moves to San Francisco. Gets a good job. Gets engaged. And wonders what to do with his life. While driving to work one Monday morning, way back in 1951 (when he was 26 years old) he asks himself a unique question; "What work can I do for the greatest benefit for mankind?" His answer: "I can work to augment mankind's intellect in the pursuit of collectively solving urgent, complex problems". Not your average kid's dream.
Since he was a radar engineer during the war, and he had read Giant Brains', he felt that computers can help in this pursuit by making computers interactive, by putting a keyboard and screen in front if it. 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!
Doug works on getting his journeyman's card, his credentials. Going about a crusade is not easy. Where do you start? At the bottom. He works at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor but gets strongly discouraged from pursuing this great goal of his. He goes for an interview at HP but they won't be doing computers they say(!). So he settles at SRI where he slowly builds a position until he has his own team and his own budget. Doug wrote a proposal to start work on formalizing his vision in order to begin work on carrying it out. Harold's assistant Rowena Swanson become a real staunch supporter of Doug's work and when Harold would put Doug's proposal into a pile of proposals he was not in favor of - Rowena would come into the office after he'd gone home and move Doug's proposal into the pile of projects Harold favored. This was how touch-&-go it was. Thanks to Harold & Rowena he spent the next two years formulating a conceptual framework for his pursuit which he published in his seminal work, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", which is still the bible for using computers to augment our capability to solve problems together.
As an anecdote to illustrate how much he was alone with his vision, the next spring, after publishing the paper, he was at MIT talking about timesharing. One of the MIT guys came up to him, he was very friendly, "hey gee, I read your report, very interesting, but how do you pronounce (the name of the system Doug had proposed) H-LAM/T?" Doug was surprised: "Hey, I never tried to pronounce it!" It showed how much Doug had been working in isolation up to this point. There had been no active dialog with anyone. Ever the artist, Ted Nelson (who coined the term hypertext) would later suggest the name "Hamlet".
3D computer animations will show how he saw his system, which is conceptually even more powerful and exciting than what we use today. Doug will discuss specific pivotal episodes in his life where they happened.
At the end of this episode we understand where Doug came from, what inspired him and what he's trying to do. 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.
3 The sixties - Revolution
Doug's struggle to make his vision real, building his team at SRI and culminating in the big demo.
During the sixties, Doug's managed, with some incredible co-conspirators, to build an interactive computer system unlike anything the world had ever seen. It was never an easy ride, with Doug's head firmly planted in the clouds and the details, but not seeing all in between. Ever the genius inventor, not the greatest PR man or manager. To quote Jeff Rulifson, Doug's technical architect, Doug was basically very hard to work with at times. He was a perfectionist with a very deep vision.
Some parallel developments are mentioned, like Ted Nelson's writings on electronic literature and how he came to coin the term HyperText for electronic text. This will also include Van Dam's early electronic text systems.
The decades' hard work culminates in the big demo, of which we have access to the original footage. 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 episode, with many of the pioneers talking about what they did. 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 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.
4 The seventies & eighties - Making it easy
In the seventies the idea of making computers easy to use for non-computer people took hold and Doug's ideas were seen as too corporate, too technical. Too hard for the average person. This episode is not largely about Doug, but it does put his work in perspective and honors the period's pioneers, many of whom we meet in person.
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.
So we start the fourth episode a little confused. We have seen a vision formed in the second episode. In the third episode we have witnessed the perseverance and struggle to make the vision real. We have come to see how important this vision is and the effect it had. And then in the beginning of this episode it is halted. Why? Doug asks why could there not have been work on both making computers easier to use for new users and casual users - and at the same time continue work on making computers more powerful for expert users? Doug's house burnt down. His lab, left with fewer people, were sold to Tymshare, then Boeing. And finally completely disbanded. These were not happy times.
The question of what would have happened if Doug got to keep working will be hinted at here, but this is the episode about making computers easier to use. We will spend some time to search for reasons why augmentation became un-fashionable. Main areas will be the rise of the promise of Artificial Intelligence, which promised us that computers would do all the work, making the user un-necessary. The falling cost of electronic components also meant that it was finally realistic to build a computer for a single user - as opposed to groups of users. And when that happened, a lot of people who had never used a computer and had only the old-fashioned idea of the computers the size of rooms, would need persuading that the PC's, the personal computers, really were easy to start using. This made the emphasis on marketing and first impressions, not on users real experiences over time. Some call it 'feature-itis' when the marketing department adds features just to sell. This was a very different approach from Doug's teams where the users were integral to the development process.
Ease of-use, though not Doug's way of doing things, did bring about computers to the masses. Alan Kay, who was prominent at XEROX PARC, will introduce his innovations of the graphical interface and the ideas of computers for 'everyone'. Others from PARC will discuss the buzz of democratizing computers. Bruce Horn (who worked at both PARC & later Apple as a senior Macintosh programmer) and other Apple folks will tell us what inspired them to build the computer 'for the rest of us'.
The rise of Microsoft will illustrate how power went from the big old mainframes to the end users computer, the PC. Personal computing had become big business.
This episode is one with bad news for Doug, which will be be covered in the introduction with him talking and with newspaper clippings and other documents. The large part of the episode will feature the champions of the new users and their systems, with plenty of video from their development and of the systems themselves, with some promotional material form the period to show what they were promising, including the original Macintosh commercial directed by Ridley Scott.
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.
5 The nineties - The Net
We start with a quick history of the Internet from it's days as an idea through to the concept of the the ARPANET deployed in in 1969 and its transition to the Internet.
The designers of the ARPANET will discuss why and how they built it. This will include some of our already-confirmed interviewee's; Robert Taylor (ARPANET/Internet & XEROX PARC Computer Science Lab Founder). Lawrence G. Roberts (ARPANET Manager & Designer.) Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn. (Co-creators of the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet technical specification).
The web will also be presented, by its creator Tim Berners-Lee. We will also introduce some of the popular Web services, like Google. In 1990 Nelson Mandela is freed and the first visual Web browser is introduced. Slowly finding information on computer networks, socializing - keeping in touch - is no longer just for geeks and anoraks.
The history of email will fit in well here as well, as a more immediate aspect to allow people to connect to the story. The first email sent between networks in 1971 will be introduced as will the advent of the smiley :-) in the eighties.
The .com bubble will be highlighted, though not dwelt on, as it's a story known to us all and not much part of the history of interactive computing, it's more of a business tale, which others have told well.
The story of the net (ARPANET, Internet with the Web & Email) is a story of the big and small; government contracts and graduate student ingenuity. This will be shown through interviews and where possible discussions between the pioneers. The way the Internet works will be shown with simple computer graphics.
At the end of the fifth episode we should have a clear idea of how computers are connected - an appreciation which goes all the way back to Doug's epiphany in 1951 of computers connecting people. Where was Doug during all of this? Doug had the first computer on the Internet/ARPANET. All his work was always about networks. Networks of computers, networks of people.
6 The future - Visionaries focus
A look at current high tech and trends, tied tightly with the visions of the pioneers. Not only discussing where it looks like where we are going, but also where should we go. This about today. This is about the future.
Doug and the presenter 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 will cite a few reasons and demonstrate how his system can do more with less effort on than modern Mac or Windows. 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.
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.
One of the projects Doug is working on now is something he calls a HyperScope which will make the web more interactive. We will illustrate this with a short HyperScope segment.
In this concluding episode you'll see examples of modern computer environments, including some from the movies. This will be contrasted with Doug's systems. We'll learn that being able to speak to a computer is useful in some cases, but in many cases it's more of a hindrance. Imagine surfing the web without being able to use the mouse and keyboard for example. Clear visualizations will illustrate how Doug suggests we interact with computers instead.
We close the series with a sense of awesome achievement - so few people have changed our lives so 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.