By 1959 I was lucky enough to get a small grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR, from Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson) which carried me for several years -- not enough for my full-time work, but by 1960 SRI began pitching in the difference.

It was a remarkably slow and sweaty work: I first tried to find close relevance within established disciplines. For a while I thought that the emergent AI field might provide me with an overlap of mutual interest. But in each case I found that the people I 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 me.

For example, I 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 (Ref-A) 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. That search phase was not only very sweaty, but very lonely. In 1962, I published an SRI Report entitled, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, . With the considerable help of Rowena Swanson, this was condensed into a chapter of a book published in 1963.

I can appreciate that these framework documents appear to many others as unuseably general and vague, but for me the concepts, principles and strategies embodied in that framework look better and better every year.

The genesis of most of what was/is unique about the products of the augmentation work can be traced back to this framework.