Another concept that was central to Engelbart’s vision was bootstrapping, “building tools to build better tools and testing them on yourself as you go along” (Rheingold, 1985, p. 186). This was a necessity for Engelbart, because what he was conceiving of, no one else had ever done before. For example Engelbart and his co-workers needed to develop text editing so they could describe and design other more advanced phases.

Doug’s Daring Demonstration

Even in the mid-1960s the computer industry could not really wrap its head around Engelbart’s ideas, because they could not conceive of people interacting with computers in the way Engelbart imagined. Thus, in 1968, in an effort to show the computer world the reality of his dream, Engelbart demonstrated the capabilities of his new system, by taking a “test flight” in what has since become affectionately known as “the Mother of all Demos.” A film was made of this demonstration and can be viewed on the Internet (Engelbart, 1968) http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Engelbart staked his reputation and his life’s work on a “demonstration so daring and direct that finally, after all these years, computer scientists would understand and embrace that vital clue that had eluded them for so long” (Rheingold, 1985, p. 188). After the demonstration, Engelbart and his colleagues received a standing ovation, something rarely done in that milieu.

The demonstration used state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment from around the world, and the presentation team included Stewart Brand who had previously produced “mind altering multi-media shows” known as “Acid Tests” (Rheingold, 1985, p. 188). During the two hour long demonstration, Doug took his audience on a flight through information space, from his computer console. which was hooked up to a large screen behind him, so that the audience could view what was on Engellbart's display screen. Engelbart's console was equipped with now familiar objects, most of which at that time were cutting edge: the display screen, the five key chord keyboard, a standard keyboard, and the mouse. On the display screen were a number of windows that Engelbart could switch between at will as he demonstrated different things. Rheingold (1985) poetically describes the demonstration:

Imagine that you are in a new kind of vehicle with virtually unlimited range in both time and space. In this vehicle is a magic window that enables you to choose from a very large range of possible views and to rapidly filter a vast field of possibilities—from the microscopic to the galactic, from a certain word in a certain book in a certain library, to a summary of an entire field of knowledge. The territory you see through the augmented window . . . is an informationscape in which the features are words, numbers, graphs, images, concepts, paragraphs, arguments, relationships, formulas, diagrams, proofs, bodies of literature and schools of criticism. The effect is dizzying at first. In Doug’s words, all of our old habits of organizing information are “blasted open” by exposure to a system modeled, not on pencils and printing presses, but on the way the human mind processes information . . . . Even the chewing-gum-and-baling-wire version Doug was attempting to get off the ground in 1968 had the ability to impose new structures on what you could see through its windows. The symbolic domain, from minutiae to the grandest features, could be rearranged at will by the informationaut, who watched through his window while he navigated his vehicle and the audience witnessed it all on the big screen. Informational features were reordered, juxtaposed, deleted, nested, linked, chained, subdivided, inserted, revised, referenced, expanded, summarized—all with fingertip commands. A document could be called up in its entirety, or the view could be restricted to only the first line or the first word of each paragraph, or the first paragraph of each page . . . . Doug moved his audience’s attention through the outline by the way he manipulated their “view” of the information. His manipulations maneuvered the screen display and the audience’s consciousness through categories of information, zoomed down into subcategories, broke them into their atomic components, rearranged them, then zoomed back up. (pp. 190-192)

Engelbart and SRI were one of the original nodes of ARPANET, which debuted in 1969, the Defense Department precursor of what would later become the Internet. ARPANET allowed different types of defense related research computers to be linked together into a network.

Like McLuhan, Engelbart realized that the medium is the message and that with computers we did not have to be constrained by linear print technology. Engelbart saw that computers could allow us to be multidimensional and to be able to access many different layers of information with different levels of detail. While this may be obvious to us now, when Engelbart had his idea of augmenting human intelligence in the 1950s his ideas were so radical that his colleagues advised him not to discuss them, and only at the end of the 1960s after Engelbart's demonstration did people begin to understand the implications of Doug’s dream, and begin to awaken to its revolutionary possibilities.

Innovations, Discoveries and New Views Illustrated

Americans reached new technological highs in the 1960s, as many things that had before been previously only imagined became a reality. The 1960s were the decade that science fiction came true:

Modern science stealing sci-fi ideas at an alarming rate. Technology was plagiarizing such staples of the sci –fi imagination as computers that could calculate millions of times faster than the human brain, laser beams to light up the moon, and vehicles to take men to the bottom of the ocean. (Bowen, 1970b, p. 356)

Computers made everything into numbers—cities became zip codes and geographic locals became area codes. Edward Lorenz’s famous coffee break took a chaotic turn, and he accidentally found the first mathematical system with chaotic behavior. E. Lorenz was using a computer model to study atmospheric behavior, and due to a rounding error, he found that small initial changes in atmospheric conditions initially can lead to big changes over time. This lead to chaos theory which we explored previously in the "Cosmic Game" chapter [link], What E. Lorenz found is known as the “butterfly effect,” or Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions. Poincaré had gotten the first peek into chaos at the turn of the Twentieth Century. In 1967, other aspects of chaos theory revealed, such as self-similarity across scale, wherein different things repeat at different levels of detail. For example, coastlines are composed of penisulas and bays, which themselves exhibit this same pattern: within a peninsula, smaller pennsulas and bays can be seen. If we use more detailed measurements, such as was done on the coastline of England, we find that more detailed measurements lead to more length, resulting in the coastline of England being infintiely long.

In 1963, a hotline was established between Washington and Moscow, and believe it or not being defensive can sometimes pay. Many of the marvelous technologies and inventions that we all use everyday come to us compliments of the Defense Department and the space program in particular. From Velcro, to Teflon, to video cameras, and the miniaturization of computers, to health sensors, and even Tang breakfast drink—all were the result of defense and space technology as well as ARPA's funding for Engelbart's work. Let us just take a brief look at a few of the inventions and discoveries of the decade.

Hughes Aircraft built the first lasers and the halogen light was introduced. Geosynchronous satellites revolutionized global communications, as the first navigational and first weather satellite were launched. The bullet trains began running in Japan, and the Aswan Dam opened in Egypt. The bathysphere, Trieste, descended to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, around 35,800 feet below the surface, and deep-sea submersibles Alvin and Aluminaut were “good to go.” Sea-floor spreading was first theorized and then observed, which along with the notion of continental drift, led to the theory of plate tectonics.

Wilson and Penzias discovered the background radiation that was the remnants of the Big Bang, and we learned that Venus’s rotation was retrograde from the other planets, and that Mercury did indeed rotate, instead of showing one side only to the sun. Quasars and pulsars were discovered, as well as quarks on a much smaller scale. Rainbow holograms were invented that could be embossed on a credit card or a magazine.

Louis Leakey discovered Homo habilis and Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees eating meat and making tools. Speaking of tool-making, the 1960s produced the following technological improvements: Polaroid invented instant film, pop-top cans were patented, Pampers disposable diapers appeared as did soft contact lenses. Cassette tapes were introduced by Phillips, replacing reel-to-reel for recording, and Sony introduced the first portable video recorder.

Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA and many new discoveries concerning DNA and RNA occurred during the 1960s including the deciphering of DNA’s triplicate commands by Nirenberg, Khorana, and Holley. Stem cells were discovered in blood marrow and cloning occurred. The first heart, lung, and liver transplants occurred, and Sperry ran his split-brain tests revealing the different functions of the right and left hemispheres.

The computer industry was on fire and the first integrated circuits for mass production were made available, the first supercomputers were built, and IBM introduced its 360 version that was a great success due to its compatibility with a wide variety of peripherals. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse, and Theodore Nelson developed hypertext. The Defense Department began plans for the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) to establish a network that could connect different types of computers, and ARPANET began in 1969. So by the end of the 1960s the seeds of the future were sown.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structures of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 gave us the notion of paradigms—what they were and how they shifted. This was a good thing, because in the 1960s, there was "a whole lotta shiftin’ going on." Marshall McLuhan, too, helped us to see our world differently, enabling us to see that “the way people get information, rather than the information itself, is the key factor in history; or in McLuhan’s words, the medium is the message” (Bowen, 1970b, p. 135). McLuhan believed that television and other forms of electronic media and communication were launching “one of the greatest revolutions to hit modern man”:

According to McLuhan, the new media were reordering man’s senses, weaning him from the age-old habit of collecting information from the printed page, conditioning him to be “tribal” again, to live “mythically and integrally.” Like the “horizonless, boundless” world of primitive people around a campfire, the modern world was without boundaries, “time has ceased,” McLuhan said, “space has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening.”

Print made man linear, it addicted him to straight lines of all sorts, from straight ahead, logical, step-by-step thinking to straight-up-the-corporate-ladder personal ambition. But television, with its combination of picture and sound, was changing all that—and fast . . . . A few decades hence, McLuhan prophesied, “ it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image.” (Bowen, 1970b, pp. 134-135)

The power of the media to shape culture was growing rapidly; television made images more immediate and they were almost instantly available, due to the new communications technologies. “The image came to define reality rather than merely be a representation of reality” (Rielly, 2003, p. 183). McLuhan published his ideas in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962 and Understanding Media in 1964, and along with Quentin Fiore wrote The Media is the Massage in 1967. McLuhan began as a university professor in Wisconsin and found the students unable to understand him and so he “felt an urgent need to study their popular culture in order to get through” (Bowen, 1970b, p. 134). Speaking of popular culture, let us look at what was happening in the entertainment industry during the 1960s.

That’s Entertainment?!—
Baring It All on Broadway and What TV Showed

Broadway au natural

Many musicals and plays that would later make their way to Hollywood graced the Broadway stage before appearing on the silver screen, including: Sound of Music, Camelot (1960), and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960); Bye Bye Birdie and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962); Oliver and Barefoot in the Park (1963); Funny Girl, Hello Dolly, and Fiddler on the Roof (1964); Mame, Sweet Charity, and Cabaret (1966).

Dramas such as The Sandbox (1960), The American Dream (1961), and A Delicate Balance (1967) by Edward Albee altered American theater. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) also by Albee “helped bring before the public a worldview that saw life as lacking the sorts of large, eternal truths that made life meaningful and bearable, substituting instead a world in which individuals must seek out their own meaning” (Rielly, 2003, p. 207). On the lighter side, Neil Simon showed different pairs of opposites in his comedies, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1963), and The Odd Couple (1965). Later in the decade, with Promises Promises (1968) and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), Simon's focus turned to the sexual revolution (Rielly, 2003). Cashing in on the sexual revolution, Broadway also staged some very controversial shows: actors appeared nude on stage in Hair (1968), Dionysus 69 (1968), and Oh Calcutta (1969); while Boys in the Band (1968) concerned homosexuality (Rielly, 2003).

Continued on page 4

Innovations, Discoveries and New Views Illustrated

That’s Entertainment?!— Baring It All on Broadway and What TV Showed

Broadway au natural

That’s Entertainment?!—
Baring It All on Broadway and What TV Showed