In Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russians put a freeze on the Prague Spring, the modest democratic reforms begun by Alexander Dubcek, and students rallied against 650,000 Russian troops and tanks. College campuses around the world were up in arms, too. In 1968, SDS members occupied a building at Columbia University, and campus revolts in Paris led to a general strike crippling the French government. The antiwar movement spawned massive demonstrations, some of them turning very bloody, most memorable of all was the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968 in Chicago, where angry protestors battled police in the streets outside the Convention Center. The media, too, played its part, as Maltby (1989) notes:

Television reporting was brutally attracted to scenes of violence and dissent—they made good pictures. By the end of the 1960s political groups denied conventional access to the media had recognized the staged act of violence as effective means for getting attention. Terrorism happened for television camera. (p. 172)

In Saigon, to protest of the corruption of the South Vietnamese president and the war itself, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire and cameras caught his self-immolation.

The decade ended with even more violence. In June of 1969, the violence of the Stonewall riots sparked the beginnings of the gay liberation movement, while in August of 1969, Charles Manson and his “family” committed the Sharon Tate murders in a suburb of Los Angeles. In November 1969, at a Rolling Stones's Concert at Altamonte, California, the Hells Angels stabbed a fan who then died. The Vietnam War was still being fought as the decade drew to a close. The war left over 50,000 American soldiers dead, and many thousands more were physically and emotionally scarred.

Civil Rights and Wrongs

While civil rights had been seeded at the turn of the Twentieth Century with the Niagara movement and WEB Dubois’s novel Up From Slavery, and had begun in earnest in the 1950s with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1960s was a time of powerful transformation for civil rights, much of it extremely painful. Landmark legislation was passed, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech and the March on Washington in August 1963 reached not only the over 250,000 in attendance, but a worldwide audience as well via television and satellite, as one of the first events to be televised live internationally. Dr. King, a gifted orator invoked America as the nation could and should be, instead of citing a myriad of injustices, as he might have done. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was in attendance that day, said: If I had to pick one day in my public life when I was most encouraged democracy would work, when my spirit soared on the wings of the American dream, it was that day” (Jennings & Brewster, 1998, p. 382). In 1964, King would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, even today, over 40 years later, King’s dream has not yet been realized.

Southern cities were spotlighted and the glare was harsh indeed. Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, all were etched in the national imagination as television and print pictures captured the senseless brutality unleashed against peaceful protestors. In 1962, James Meredith was the first African-American to enroll at University of Mississippi, although federal troops had to be present to ensure this. Birmingham, Alabama, which actually boasted that it was the “most segregated city in America,” became a battleground for civil rights. Jennings and Brewster (1998) said of Birmingham: “There were 220,000 whites in Birmingham and 140,000 blacks, two populations living side by side, equal only in the brimming reserves of rage each carried for each other…this was a city made for racial drama” (p. 381). King made his stand in Birmingham, as he led peaceful demonstrators, including children, into the streets to face arrest. The image of a police dog attacking a black woman so stunned, saddened, and sickened President Kennedy that he thereafter increased the scope and pace of civil rights legislation.

Science and Technology Take Off

Space—The Final Frontier

The Space Race was on during the 1960s and the United States continued to lag behind. According to Jennings and Brewster (1998), the space race symbolized “the competitive life and death struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union (p. 358). Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space in 1961, and the Russians then had a number of other firsts including: dual flights with two space vehicles close together in 1962, sending the first woman into space in 1963, the first multi-person mission in 1964 and the first ever floating in space in 1965.

In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American person into space as the Mercury space flights began. The first American was actually a chimpanzee named Enos. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. The United States began two-person flights in 1965 with the Gemini missions, and the first American spacewalk by Ed White, occurred that June. Early Bird, the first commercial satellite, was also launched in 1965, and Mariner missions in 1965 and 1969 sent back pictures of the Martian surface. The first unmanned lunar landings for both Soviets and Americans occurred in 1966.

In 1967, tragedy struck as Apollo I astronauts Grissom, Chaffe, and White burned to death in a tragic fire on the launch pad during a practice countdown on January 27, prior to the actual mission. The first manned Apollo flight took to the skies in October of 1968 with Apollo VII, which sent back seven live television broadcasts from space. Apollo VIII was the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon on Christmas Eve and it was the first time humans saw the dark side of the moon. On May 18 of 1969, Apollo X sent back the first live color television broadcast from space, and less than two months later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. In a decade that saw so much division, this moment was one of unity, as Jennings and Brewster (1998) explain:

Child and parent, Republican and Democrat, hawk and dove, all sat together as kin, united by curiosity and wonder, and above all by their sense of awe. Particularly for those who took the opportunity to join large outdoor public gatherings, there was the unmatchable feeling that came with breathing the night air, watching a picture transmitted across 240,000 miles, showing man—man!—bouncing and tumbling and playing like a child on the cratered surface, at the same time they could divert their eyes from the large screen and look upon the powdery sphere itself, the very one that had occupied the imaginations of poets and lovers since the beginning of time. (p. 418)

America had come from behind and fulfilled the goal that President Kennedy had set at the beginning of the decade but sadly never lived to see.

Meet the Man Behind the Other Mouse

The year after Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech, Doug Engelbart got funding for his dream. Engelbart’s, now decade-old vision (of augmenting human intelligence through the use of computers) finally attracted funding after the publication of his paper “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” which laid out his vision. [link] Engelbart and his co-workers at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) revolutionized the world. Engelbart was the first to desire a better way for people to interact with computers, and he invented the cathode ray display, the mouse, the chord keyboard as well as other visionary aspects that have still not been fully implemented. Each time you point and click, or cut and paste, or go from window to window on your computer, you have Doug Engelbart to thank, and yet most people do not even know about him. Let us look a little closer at the man behind this mouse, because without him we literally would not be where we are today, and if I had not met him, my dissertation may very well have taken a very different form. So, join me if you like on an Engelbart background excursion. Let us take a few paragraph tangent to bring us up to speed, and into the 1960s.

Doug’s Dream

Engelbart had been a radar technician during World War II and had come across Vannevar Bush’s article 1945 “As We May Think,” which was a major influence on him. In that article, Bush proposed a device to improve human thinking called a memex. In the early 1950s, Engelbart pursued a graduate degree at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and at that time kept asking about the possibility of actually using the computer to teach people. Rheingold (1985) describes Engelbart’s request and the response he received:

“When we get the computer built, would it be okay if I use it to teach people? Could I hook it up to a keyboard and get a person to interact with the computer? Maybe teach the person typing?” … The engineering people said, “there’s no way that kind of idea is going to fly.” The interactive stuff was so wild that the people who knew about computers didn’t want to hear about it. Back then, you didn’t interact with a computer, even if you were a programmer. You gave it your question, in the form of a box of punched cards, and if you had worked very hard at stating the question correctly, you got the answer. Computers weren’t meant for direct interaction. And this idea of using them to help people learn was downright blasphemy. (p. 178-179)

In 1957, Engelbart began to work for SRI (Stanford Resarch Institute), and one of the people who interviewed Engelbart for the job, to whom Engelbart had described his vision, advised Engelbart not to tell anyone else about it because it sounded “too crazy,” and would prejudice people against him (Rheingold, p. 180).

In 1962, however, after over a decade of working on this idea of augmenting human intelligence, Engelbart finally finished a paper containing his ideas, entitled “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” which was published in 1963. By the mid-1960s technology had caught up enough with Engelbart’s vision so that he could begin to implement some of his ideas. At first, the computer community greeted Engelbart's framework with silence but in 1964, his project—the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) finally received early funding from Bob Taylor at NASA, and also from JCR Licklider who was funding the defense department's ARPA (Advanced Research Planning Agency).

Engelbart’s concept for augmenting man’s intellect deals with helping increase man’s problem solving capabilities in different ways to help people better cope with the wide variety of “complex situations” that they are faced with daily. Part of this concept deals with being able to access information more quickly, to get a better understanding of that information, and to be able to communicate it to others. In his article, Engelbart writes:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for the situation” usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods and high-powered electronic aids. (Rheingold, 1985, p. 181)

One of Engelbart’s first considerations was hardware, a low level component of the system, but one that would help to augment higher levels because “human intellect uses tools, but the power of the human mind is not itself limited to the tools the human brain automatically provides” (Rheingold, 1985, p. 181). Engelbart felt that by introducing tools to help people communicate more efficiently and effectively, the entire system could be better leveraged and in his paper, as Rheingold relates, Engelbart proposed:

“Suppose you had a new writing machine, a high-speed electric typewriter with some very special features.” In a few words, he proceeded to describe what is known today as a “word processor” . . . . “This hypothetical writing machine thus permits you to use a new process of composing text. For instance, trial drafts can rapidly be composed from rearranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which you insert by hand typing…if the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft becomes too complex, you can compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs. You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record. If it is easier to update any part of your working record to accommodate new developments in thought or circumstance, you will find it easier to incorporate more complex procedures in your way of doing things.” . . . The point he [Engelbart] wanted to make had to do with the changes in the overall system—the capabilities such an artifact would open up for thinking in a more effective, wider-ranging, more articulate, quicker, better-informed manner . . . . (p. 184)

Keep in mind that Doug wrote this in the early 1960s. We can see play concepts of bricolage and transitional space at work here, too. A later stage was envisioned by Engelbart of automated external symbol manipulation:

In the limit of what we might now imagine, this could be a computer, with which individuals could communicate rapidly and easily, coupled to a three-dimensional color display within which extremely sophisticated images could be constructed, the computer being able to execute a wide variety of processes on parts or all of these images in automatic response to human direction. The displays and processes could provide helpful services and could involved concepts not hitherto imagined. (Rheingold, 1985, p. 185)

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