early SRI Institutional inroads

What we need to convey: This section covers the early years at SRI.

Mood: We need to show Doug entering a research environment and gradually trying to steer the research in his direction.

Background: To put it into perspective: Harold 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.

Visuals: Locations again.

: He settled on a research position at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, in 1957. 

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. 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.

Existing Disciplines

The early years at SRI was remarkably slow and sweaty work: He first tried to find close relevance within established disciplines. For a while he thought that the emergent AI field might provide him with an overlap of mutual interest. But in each case he found that the people he would talk with would immediately translate my admittedly strange (for the times) statements of purpose and possibility into their own discipline's framework -- and when re-phrased and discussed from those other perceptions, the "augmentation" pictures were remarkably pallid and limited compared to the images that were driving him.

For example, he gave a paper in 1960 at the annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute, outlining the probable effects of future personal-support use of computers, and how this would change the role of their future systems and also provide valuable possibilities for a more effective role for the documentation and information specialists.

No response at all at the meeting; one reviewer gave a very ho-hum description as ... the discussion of a (yet another) personal retrieval system. Later, at lunch during a visit to a high-caliber research outfit, an information-retrieval researcher got very hot under the collar because I wouldn't accept his perception that all that the personal-use augmentation support I was projecting amounted to, pure and simple, was a matter of information retrieval -- and why didn't I just join their forefront problem pursuits and stop setting myself apart.

RAND

Then I discovered a great little RAND report written by Kennedy and Putt which described my situation marvelously and recommended a solution. Their thesis was that when launching a project of inter- or new-discipline nature, the researcher would encounter consistent problems in approaching people in established disciplines -- they wouldn't perceive your formulations and goals as relevant, they would become disputative on the apparent basis that your positions were contrary to "accepted" knowledge or methods, etc.

The trouble, said these authors, was that each established discipline has its own "conceptual framework." The enculturation of young professionals with their discipline's framework begins in their first year of professional school. Without such a framework, tailored for the goals, values and general environment of its respective discipline, there could be no effective, collaborative work. Furthermore, if such a conceptual framework did not already exist for a new type of research, then before effective research should be attempted, an appropriate, unique framework needs to be created. They called this framework-creation process the "Search Phase".

So, I realized that I had to develop an appropriate conceptual framework for the augmentation pursuit that I was hooked on.