A Conversation with Doug Engelbart Script Sections with Research

[location/section theme/visuals: Fleur with lots of computers LSE lib w computers or at UCL maybe.]

Doug Engelbart changed the way we learn, work and communicate. He is the inventor of much of what we take for granted when we sit down to use our computers: the mouse, web-links, word processing, windows, email and much more.

It's easy to take all these things for granted today but of course computers did not always provide the immediate interaction and responsiveness that we take for granted today.

[visual: years receeding on the side of the screen as the systems mentioned are shown, going all the way from 1990 to 1968]

Before Windows spread to nearly every computer in the world. Before Apple introduced the Macintosh. Even before XEROX PARC, the legendary computer research company introduced it's Alto computer, Doug's group at SRI went about their daily business of building advanced computer systems to help people work together effectively, using word processing, email in front of interactive computers. In the mid sixties.

Despite sending a rocket to the moon, computers were more stone age than space age back then. The rest of the world flicked switches on large, slow computers.

Before Doug and his group built the first interactive computers, you needed punched cards to feed the machine. And it would reward you with cards punched in a different order. You needed to find out what it all meant through careful analysis.

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in Portland Oregon. [visual: map].

Doug's father started a radio store. He was working hard, going to the shop every night. They didn't see very much of him. The depression hit and clobbered his business.

Doug's fathers health failed and his parents couldn't afford to keep up the rent payments.

Then in 1934 his father caught a cold. In a few days it got much worse. An ambulance came to pick him him up. Doug said 'so long dad'.

His mother brought him and his brother up which was hard during the depression but she worked hard and they were very close.

Doug went to high school in Oregon. Getting there was an adventure in itself. After walking for a mile they could take a bus. Or they could hitch hike. Sometimes one of the nieghbours would drive him, the only man in the village who had gone to college. But even then it was a mile walk on the other end. Of course, this was after waking up at 5:30 to milk their cow.

School was a bit of culture shock. He was too shy to get to know even the people with lockers next to him. He noticed that they were wearing fancy shoes. He only had one pair of shoes, working shoes. Complete with cow shit. It hadn't occured to him to clean his shoes. But he got good grades.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he went on to study Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University.

The war started when Doug was 16. He started college and was defered from the draft as he was studying engineering.

Doug decided to sign up as a radar engineer in the navy. It was top secret stuff, and that excited him - they locked up the training manuals between classes he was told.

Never directly involved in combat, Doug nevertheles saw the reality and the horror of war.

Much of the time it was uneventful though. He turned a teletype into a local system so that he could practice typing, mostly so that he would stay awake.

Doug came across Vannevar Bush's article in Time magazine where 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 Vannevar asserted.

Vannevar discussed making trails through information, illustrated with the technology of the day, microfiche. There were many seminal thoughts presented in the article.

He also read a self help book called 'Making the most of your life' which really affected him. It pointed out that planning what you wanted to do would be worthwile and it encouraged questioning how valuable your contribution to the world would be. The book affected him profoundly. So he stole it.

In so many ways his war years would solidify the direction of the naive and idealistic young farm boy from Oregon.

[location/section theme/visuals: Outside for direction & living room, comfy chair for epiphany.]

Doug was driving to work the Monday morning after getting engaged in December 1950.

He then calculated the amount of professional minutes he would have for his career: Assuming he would work til he was 65 (which is retrospect was a bit of a miscalculation - he's 80 now and working as hard as ever). 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 4,8 million minutes. And he kept thinking.

The first issue and question on that Monday morning was a view of this empty hallway of his career, there was no plan - which was embarrassing.

So what kind of plan and objective - goals should he have: Money? Enough for raising a family yes, but he didn't find that in itself really interesting.

Sometimes that morning he 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?" This started orientating him.

By February/March he had spent enough time thinking about crusades. Real crusades, not just 'lets clean up this neighborhood'. Well, you know, one thing is to think 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 him very far. Did read a lot about Khan though that week.

Other crusades like health in third world etc came to mind. He 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.

One Saturday it dawned on him: 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.

So here came the crusade: how to deal with maximizing the improvements we could make for mankind's abilities to solve complex, urgent problems collectively.

In the next half hour or so he really got the picture of computers and interactive displays. This was 1951.

You see he had read a book about computers (Giant Brains, or Machines That Think by Edmund C Berkeley, Consultant in Modern Technology, 1949.) and he was a radar technician in the second world war. He also had an electrical engineering degree, the engineer in him could generalize what the circuits could to etc.

Once his life's goal had been set, the idea of using his knowledge of radars to use in making computers more useful was a natural step.

The operator could interact with the display on a radar screen - why not allow the operator of a computer to interact with the computer interactively too? It's just a matter of wiring a radar screen to a computer and adding a keyboard.

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, he knew that if a computer could print on a line printer electronically it would be able to produce anything you wanted on the cathode ray tube!

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. It could retrieve for you, submit to someone else at a distance. Distance work! 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. 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.

The concept of interactive computing was born in his mind. This basic picture never changed.

Implementing the vision all presented lots of practical problems. It took 11-14 years to get a chance to tie displays to screens and start doing things with them.

Doug assumed he had to learn about computers. He had been out of college for three years and was due to be married.

To do this kind of research he thought 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.

They had labs and courses on digital circuit design. They wrote programs in machine language. By hand.

He got his masters in 1952 and moved on to getting his PhD which he recived in 1955.

At Berkeley he was biding time, learning about basic electromagnetic wave propagation, solid state physics, symbolic logic. He was getting his journeyman's card. he also got a bunch of patents - 13-14 from the PhD thesis.

After gradutaing he became an acting assistant professor at Berkeley teaching basic electrical engineering.

At this point he and his wife had had 3 children. 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 of course be important for his career etc.

Doug told him about computers and augmentation. His friend 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doug sent him a proposal to his ARPA office. He got pretty quick success. Doug didn't know it then but Licks colleagues thought it was a big risk project. A year earlier the National Institute of Health had turned them down. They interviewed them but sent them a letter saying interesting, but you are way out there in Palo Alto where there are no computer programmers!

The 1st year SRI managers were really concerned about the publication about the 62 report. 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

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. We set it up in a room and it had about six platters (1 1/2' dia). 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...

Then Bill English came to work with Doug at the beginning of 1964. He had gotten his M.S. at Stanford in 62, in engineering. A very energetic and competent engineer. Very bright, very active. He complemented Doug and provided things Doug wasn't good at. Doug had his right hand man, his do'er.

Doug tells of how the mouse came about: One thing we did with this was I could get a special research grant from NASA we need to have screen selection so we got NASA to set up the research money to test how to get screen selection.

Which way would be best? There were lots of ideas so I said lets experiment. Bill sat up and ran the project, testing various devices. We published a paper on it. One of the first things we did was to run a lot of tests. We got some secretaries who all knew how to type. I looked at all these devices and thought 'gee is that all' so I remembered a sketch I had in a little notebook so I gave it to Bill to build and he did. I couldn't have done it without Bill, but the patent attorney didn't agree with me in wanting bill to share the patent.

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).

The decades' hard work culminates in a 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 Doug 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.

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 demo influenced many, computers were no longer thought of as big machines locked off in an airconditioned room somewhere. Computers were now something we could use to communicate and solve problems with.

Soon after the demo couple of graduate students installed and connected a box to the computer at Doug's lab, something which Doug had lobied for since a meeting at Ann Arbor They plugged it into a phone line and connected to another box 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.

The mother of all demos went down a storm and changed the way we look at what a computer is.

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, after all, XEROX was a 'document company'. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive 'knowledge worker'.

Instead of people joining the team after the demo, many left the team. Doug's group gradually bled away, many of his best people going to PARC.

Doug and his team had basically introduced interactive comptuing. People could now interact directly with computers. They no longer had to send work off to be done via punched cards.

Many felt it was important to focus on getting the power of interactive computing in as many people's hands as possible - by focusing one one thing: making the computer easier and easier to use. A goal Doug did not disagree with, but he questioned the wisdom of having this be the only goal: Why not also work to enhance the capabilities of the professional user?

[visuals: for the next section, split screen of some sort. World moving along on the left and Doug frustrated on the right]

Steve Jobs came by PARC and decided to build the Macintosh, based on what he saw. Bill Gates likes the Mac and decided to make Windows, based on what he saw.

Doug's work: the mouse, word processing, windows and soon email, would finally reach the masses. But what we see today is in many ways copies of copies: PARC copied Doug's group at SRI. Apple copied PARC. Microsoft copied Apple.

The original vision of people's abilities being enhanced and extended - augmented - through the power of networked computers was mostly lost. This vision and the working practices that went with it weren't as easy to see as the mouse and the weblinks and the word procesing.

When the effort was on making sure the fictional secretary Sally would be happy, hands were on deck to make sure the computer would be easy to use.

Effort was invested in making ever prettier 'icons' to let the user issue simple commands to the computer.

Anyone who was willing to invest some time and effort to build up their skills and become more proficient at their work would either become very frustrated or a computer programmer.

[visual: Doug in as many places as we can get footage - pull out to show names of cities and places which work on Doug's work]

Something magical has happened in the last three and a half decades since the demo - everyone has become a trained user. We all use computers in our daily lives. Even our mobile phones are more powerful than the supercomputers Doug used in the sixties.

Increasingly people are tired by being patronized with pretty pictures which only allow them to communicate one grunt to the computer at a time.

Increasingly, people are hungering for the power so long left dormant, the power of interacting with computers as richly as we can interact with eachoter.

Increaslingly people are looking at alternatives to icons and windows. They are finding out about Doug's work and his philosophy.

From Oxford in England to Tokyo in Japan, people are beginning to understand the old man. They are beginning to listen and to read. They are beginning to get what he meant when he sais, all those years ago, that he is working to augmenting human intellect,

...any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society's problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration.

This is because our 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.

Research Documents:

Introduction

The World Pre-Doug

Childhood
Navy

Crusade Hunting
Epiphany
Computers

Studies
Career

Early SRI
Scaling
62 Paper
SRI/ARC
Mouse
68 Demo

Bad Years
Today

Future

Closing