Launched a long-term R&D program with the following basic Framework Principles:

There are many inventions, skills, methods, working conventions, organizational modes, etc. which have been integrated into the human's knowledge-work environment to "augment" his basic, inherited, biological capabilities. Let a working assemblage of all of these be called an Augmentation System; my Framework considers this whole system to be a valid object of study and improvement.

I broke the many parts of the Augmentation System into two main sub-systems: one contained all of the hardware, software and other artifacts -- the Tool System; and all the rest of it I called the Human System. Note that the Human System contains our natural languages, and the conceptualizations and formalisms of every discipline: an overwhelming network of invention. (Sometimes, in the early years, I called these the Service System and the User System).

The emergent information technologies promised such startling innovation in the Tool System that, according to my Framework, most of the Human System elements that are involved in our knowledge work are likely to be up for improvement or replacement. And the Framework further predicted very large improvements in human knowledge-work capability as a result -- after we have gone through a few generations of evolution.

The challenging strategic question for me was: how best to invest whatever resources are available in a manner that best serves the evolution toward truly high performance by our knowledge organizations?

One answer: begin consciously scouting for elements in our Human System that are candidates for being changed as a means of better harnessing the technology toward our human ends.

This led directly to such things as our structured-text, with its links and views, and also to the mouse and the keyset.

"Bootstrap" leverage was another answer. Look for the innovations that will boost not only our regular productive capability, but will add as much as possible to our capability to further improve our Augmentation System.

This kept me focused on documents -- which carry the knowledge, plans, arguments, etc. that are critical to helping us better climb the evolutionary hill. It also very directly pointed to the importance of developing improved support for collaboration among distributed workers; and from there to community support, etc.

The whole Augmented Knowledge Workshop concept emerged from the Bootstrap strategy -- working toward coherent, integrated access to an open-ended, evolving collection of resources and people. And doing this in a way that best enables evolutionary freedom of parts of the whole system without being unnecessarily anchored by the needs of other parts. From this arose such things as the Procedure Call Protocol, the application-indpendent User Interface System, the Network Virtual Terminal, etc.