the bad years Going out of fashion.

What we need to convey: How complete was his removal from the active field of work and why. 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.

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.

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.

Interviewee's: Bruce Horn.

Visuals: Locations. Apple, XEROX etc. Lots of shiny Silicon Valley shots.

Background: Woodstock turns on and drops out. Sesame Street first airs. Yasser Arafat Becomes Leader of the PLO. Richard M. Nixon president of the United States. Beatles Break Up. Elvis dies. Apple incorporates - as does Microsoft. Lennon is assasinated and Elvis dies. Star Wars gives the world a 'new hope' and science fiction continues to inspire. New Coke hits the market. The Berlin wall comes down. Nelson Mandela is freed. The Soviet Union collapses. There are two guld wars.

: The mother of all demos went down a storm and changed the way people develop computer systems. As some say, it looked like science fiction (Jim Spohrer).

After the storm Doug was energized and looked forward to continuing implementing the vision of computer-augmented-networked groups.

But fashion shifted. XEROX PARC was formed. The 'inn' thing to do was to focus on the 'real' user - personified at PARC by 'Sally' the secretary. She need to have a computer she could figure out how to use quickly and have her paper-based work on. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive 'knowledge worker' directly.

Doug's group gradually bled away, many of his best people going to PARC.

Eventually he lost his lab entirely.

His house burnt down.

His wife died.

He got a word for being a bitter old man.

But before it all fell apart XXX internet a couple of graduate students installed and connected an 'IMP' to the computer at Doug's lab, something which Doug had lobied for since a meeting at Ann Arbor in 1969. They plugged it into a phone line and connected to another 'IMP' at UCLA. One broken packet at a time, one word of intelligible text on the screen at the time, the ARPANET - precursor to the Internet - breathed it's firtst breath in Doug's lab.

Most of Doug's work is disected and altererd at PARC and Steve Jobs comes by for a visit, see's the mouse, tells Doug it needs only one mouse, hires a few people from PARC to build the Lisa then the Mac and not much is heard from Doug.