9. Key Figures: Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson

Mon Oct 04, 2004

Figures concerned with the interactions between human beings and computers, including the field that comes to be known as Human-Computer Interaction. In each case, the thinkers have large visions about where computers and computer-human interaction may be heading.

• Readings: Bush, "As We May Think " (required); Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect " (recommended)

I. Vannevar Bush

• Biography
  • Born March 11, 1890 (Everett, MA); died June 30, 1974
  • First name pronounced "Van-NEE-var" with same rhythm as "receiver"
  • Mathematician, physicist, administrator
  • Well-known in his own time, especially for his military-related work
    
    VANNEVAR BUSH: GENERAL OF PHYSICS
    Time magazine, April 3, 1944
    Picture from http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/OSRD.html
  • Director of Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 1941-1947
    • This office was responsible for the Manhattan Project
    • Plays critical role in discovery of atomic fission and development of the atom bomb
  • Recommends creation of what became the National Science Foundation, still the government's main institution for guiding and utilizing technical and scientific research
  • Also worked in commercial world; co-founder of defense contractor Raytheon, second-largest military contractor in the world
    • Raytheon (the name means "light of the gods") focuses in missiles, including nuclear missiles such as long-range ballistic missiles, and semiconductors and integrated circuits
    • This sort of connection was exactly what President Dwight D. Eisenhower referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex
      • "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society."
      • "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." (Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex speech, Jan 17, 1961 (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex)
  • Bush has wide-ranging interests and generates many new ideas; many turn out to be easier (or harder) than he may have thought; unlike some others, also thought carefully about the relationship between science and democracy, and about the military use of technology
  • The term "vannevar" is used in computer science to refer to a bad prediction or concept:
    • "A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept" (definition from http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/V/vannevar.html).
    • This was "owing to his habit of overestimating technological challenges. He asserted that a nuclear weapon could not be made small enough to fit in the nose of a missile as in an ICBM. He also predicted "electronic brains" the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara Falls-scale cooling system." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush)
  • 
    QuickTime movie from http://sloan.stanford.edu/s/Secondary.html
  • Figures in conspiracy theories as one chair (along with Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein) of Majestic 12 or MJ-12, a supposedly super-secret agency formed by Eisenhower in the early 1950s in the wake of the "Roswell Incident." MJ-12 is the archetype of the world-controlling, alien-contacting conspiratorial star chamber that figures prominently in fictional programs like the X-Files.
    • The FBI insists that MJ-12 never existed, and has produced documents under the Freedom of Information act to support this denial.
• Writings
  • "Science: The Endless Frontier" (report to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938), report that gave rise to OSRD and NSF
  • "As We May Think" (1945)
  • Endless Horizons (1946)
  • Modern Arms and Free Men (1949)
  • Science Is Not Enough (1967)
  • Pieces of the Action (1970)
• The Differential Analyzer
  • One of the most sophisticated analog computers ever built
  • Based in part on the ideas of (and named after) Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
  • 
    Closeup of Bush with part of the Differential Analyzer
    Photo from http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/analyser_pic2.htm
  • Performed differential equations and integrations—that is, calculus
  • A mechanical instrument—gears, wheels, belts, shafts and pulleys used to mimic the arcs and other features of calculus operations
• "As We May Think"
  • General perspective
    • Scientific inquiry used in a collective way during WWII; important and possible to harness this resource for civilian purposes
    • Especially concerned about the development of nuclear weapons: "It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets" ("As We May Think," 55)
    • "publication has extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record" (emphasis added, 56)
    • "modification and extension" (emphasis added, 56)
  • Photography
    • 
      Camera from "As We May Think"
      Image from http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/BUSH_BERRNIER.html
    • "As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use." (56)
  • Voice Interaction
    • 
      Dictation machine from "As We May Think"
      Image from http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/BUSH_BERRNIER.html
    • "One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. ... Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute." (57)
  • The Memex
    • 
      Original illustration of the Memex from the Life reprint of "As We May Think"
      Image from http://www.home.gil.com.au/~bredshaw/memex.htm
    • "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." (59)
  • Associative trails
    • "The essential feature of the memex [is] the process of tying two items together. ... When the user is building a trail, he names it in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. ... Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space." (59)
    • This idea is often taken with parts of the Memex to lead to hypertext and the World Wide Web

II. Douglas Engelbart

• Biography
  • Born Jan 30, 1925 near Portland, Oregon. Still living. BA and PhD from UC-Berkeley
  • Inventor, electrical engineer
  • Radio and radar operator the Philippines during World War II
  • 
    Photo from http://www.adeptis.ru/vinci/m_part2_2.html
  • Inspired by "As We May Think"
  • Most prominently associated with Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where he worked from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, where he formed and ran the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), and with Xerox PARC (where many of his ideas were realized) and ARPA (which funded much of his early work)
    • Became alienated from some of his team, who then joined Xerox PARC, with whom they had already worked closely
  • Then worked for what became McDonnell Douglas, but few ideas materialized
  • Now runs Bootstrap Institute
• Writings
• "Augmenting Human Intellect" (1962)
• "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" (1968)
• Philosophy
• "[In the early 1950s] he thought about the world's problems, and what he as an engineer might possibly be able to do about them. He had read about the development of the computer, and seriously considered how it might be used to support mankind's efforts to solve these problems. As a radar technician he had seen how information could be displayed on a screen." (from his official biography, http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html)
• Engelbart has a deep overarching philosophy, that connects the nature of language to cognition and technological change
• Concerned that "the complexity of man's problems grows still faster [than the rate at which population and productivity increase]" ("Augmenting Human Intellect," 95)
• Augmentation: increasing human capabilities; similar to what Engelbart means by bootstrapping
  • "Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.  
  • The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.  
  • Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.  
  • We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.  
  • The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.  
  • The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.  
  • Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success." (from Engelbart, "Reasons for Action," http://www.bootstrap.org/)
• Augmenting technologies
  • The mouse, screen-based display and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) as connected
  • The result of looking for a "systematic approach to increasing human intellectual effectiveness" ("Augmenting," 96)
  • A direct commentary on "As We May Think"
  • Notion of the "workspace," abstracted from Bush but essential to future computers (100)
  • Notion of "associative linking," links and trails, much like Bush's ideas
    • Seemingly more complex than HTML links
  • Also much like modern word processing:
    • "you start through the list of statements you've made and begin to edit, re-word, compile, and delete. It's fun—'put that sentence back up here between these two'—and blink, it's done. 'Group these four statements, indented two spaces, under the heading 'shorthand,' and blinko, it's done. 'Insert what I say next there, after that sentence.'" (104)
  • Very much a non-linear process, as opposed to the linear process of writing straight through a document, although it's not clear that writers have ever worked in such a linear fashion
    • Non-linearity
  • But Engelbart conceives of this process as being applied to whole areas of reasoning and research and even computer programming, not just text generation
  • A vision of mathesis universalis—that the logical and symbolic structuring powers of the computers could become second nature to human reasoning
• Human-Computer Interaction
  • Name for the contemporary field that examines these issues in detail
  • Usually a part of Computer Science or Electrical Engineering
  • One of the philosophically most challenging areas of current computer work

III. Ted Nelson

• Biography
  • Theodore Holm Nelson, born 1937, US. Still living.
  • Estranged son of US movie star Celeste Holm (most famous for appearing in All About Eve, 1950) and TV director Ralph Nelson
  • BA, Swarthmore, 1959; MA in Sociology, Harvard, 1963; PhD in Environmental Information, Keio University, 2002
  • Writer, computer scientist, software developer, "visionary"
  • Claims to have invented word hypertext; and also to have invented words transclusion and intertwingularity
  • 
    Photo from http://www.digiville.com/gazette/TNelson/ZZaXan.html
  • 
    Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart
    Taken at QuantumViz event, SF Exploratorium, June 10, 2002
    Photo and caption from http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/
• Writings
  • "A Conceptual Framework for Man-Machine Everything" (1973)
  • Computer Lib/Dream Machines (self-published, 1974; reissued by Microsoft Press, 1987)
    • 
      Front cover of Computer Lib/Dream Machines
      Scan of owner's copy from http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/
    • 
      Back cover of Computer Lib/Dream Machines
      Scan of owner's copy from http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/
  • The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
  • Literary Machines (1981)
  • "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful" (1997)
  • "Way Out of the Box" (1998)
  • "XML Is Evil" ("too inflammatory to publish in its current form," 2002)
• Hypertext
  • An idea derived from Bush's "As We May Think" (he does not cite Bush directly, but admits to knowing the article and to the fact that his father often read from The Atlantic Monthly at the family dinner table)
  • The term is apparently introduced by Nelson in a talk at Vassar College in 1965. The talk, "Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word," discussed a system Nelson called PRIDE (Personalized Retrieval Indexing and Documentary Evolution), and was written up in the Vassar newspaper, where the reporter wrote that "Nelson introduced the concept of hyper-text, which would be a more flexible, more, generalized, non-linear presentation of material on a particular subject" (from http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/MiscNews_Feb65.html)
  • The reporter also writes that Nelson said, "the educational possibilities in the use of the hyper-text are vast. For example, it is possible that basic texts on a subject could be interindexed, so that the necessity and difficulty of tracing footnotes and rare sources would be eliminated. In this way the problems of information retrieval because of widespread writing today would be alleviated, making decisions in many fields easier."
  • Also envisioned cathode-ray tube (screen) visualization as essential to hypertext
  • Connection between the humanistic or literary notion of text and computer text
  • Like the visions of hypertext implied by Bush and Engelbart, seems to be something beyond the hypertext realized by the web, although how this plays out is not entirely clear
  • "Hypertext, as suddenly adapted to the Internet by Berners-Lee and then Andreesen, is still the paper model! Its long rectangular sheets, aptly called 'pages,' can be escaped only by one-way links. There can be no marginal notes. There can be no annotation (at least not in the deep structure). The Web is the same four-walled prison of paper as the Mac and the Windows PC, with the least possible concession to nonsequential writing ('nonsequential writing' was my original 1965 definition of hypertext) that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly have made. Whereas the Xanadu Project, our original design which was beaten out by the Web, was largely based on two-way links by which anyone could annotate anything. (And by which thoughts could branch sideways without hitting walls.)" (from "Way Out of the Box," http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html)
• Projects
  • Project Xanadu
    • Name from Coleridge
    • The Xanadu Model
    • Not entirely clear what Xanadu is, but seems similar to the total system Bush had described
    • Several implementations attempted, most famously at Autodesk corporation in the late 1970s and early 1980s; Autodesk chose to focus on its successful core business, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, especially the product AutoCAD
    • Many different versions and visions over the years
    • Also see Xanadu history
  • ZigZag
    • Unclear how this differs from Xanadu, but it is more modest
    • Actual software release, although not widely used
    • Difference from available systems not entirely clear
    • See the ZigZag tutorial (a linear hypertext...)
  • TN's personal web page: http://ted.hyperland.com/
• On the Web and today's computers
  • "HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT—ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." (from Ted Nelson One-Liners)
  • "The usual story about Xerox PARC, that they were trying to make the computer understandable to the average man, was a crock. They imitated paper and familiar office machines because that was what the Xerox executives could understand. Xerox was a paper-walloping company, and all other concepts had to be ironed onto paper, like toner, to be even visible in their paper paradigm." (from "Way Out of the Box," http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html)
  • "But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away. It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM." (from "Way Out of the Box," http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html)
  • "Even stranger is the 'browser' concept. Think of it-- a serial view of a parallel universe! Trying to comprehend the large-scale structure of connected Web pages is like trying to look at the night sky (at least, in places that stars are still visible) through a soda straw. Yet people are used to this sequential "browser"; by now it seems natural; and now this 'browser' is perhaps more standard than the structures it views and the changing protocols that show them." (from "Way Out of the Box," http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html)
  • "XML is Evil" (article title)

Study Questions

1. What connections can you draw between Vannevar Bush's scientific interests and his military ones? Is he what Eisenhower was worried about?
2. In what sense do humans and computers interact the way Bush seems to have expected? Is the web a "virtual" Memex?
3. How does Engelbart's notion of "augmentation" square up against McLuhan's idea of "extension"?
4. Having read Bush, Engelbart and about Nelson, what do you think hypertext is? Is the web hypertext or not? Why or why not?

Reading for next class

• Required reading: Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, Chapter 8