Customer Reviews

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

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These days only the big guys get the credit for the technology we use every day. In Bootstrapping, Bardini looks at the life and contributions of Douglas Engelbart to the personal computing revolution. More than the story of technology, Bootstrapping is the story of a personal crusade to make interfacing with computers easier. Bardini focuses too much on the person and not enough on the context of Engelbart's innovations, hence the 4 stars.

While possibly everyone even mildly interested in the history of GUIs will have heard of Doug Engelbart's groundbreaking "mother of all demos" of oNLine System from 1968, there's usually much less emphasis on its history, relevance and context. "Bootstrapping" provides this knowledge, giving a detailed history of Doug Engelbart's "crusade" -- starting with his studies and ending with the closure of Augmentation Research Center. It also positions NLS in a broader context of Engelbart's vision of the symbiosis of the user and the system, which went much further and deeper than just the mouse and proto-hypertext (that's not to say that these inventions do not get their fair share of attention in the book). Superbly researched, the book suffers from sometimes overly dry and scholarly tone, going into unnecessary details, and perhaps exhibiting too much sympathy for Engelbart. However, it's worth its cover price, even if for accurate portrayal of the future that hasn't been.

I only learned of Douglas Englebart recently, and was impressed. I could have gone to Stanford in the late 60s, and who knows how my life might have been changed if I had met him? His vision that the computer should not be a partner but an intellectual prosthesis was fascinating to me, since I had sort of figured that out in the 1970s myself, but I never articulated it. I appreciated this book's description of his campaign to promulgate this idea. It was also interesting to discover that over time, his group was subject to the same sorts of political and personal problems that Information Technology groups have been suffering from ever since.

The problem is that the author made it very difficult to see the story. The writing style was very difficult to follow, with way too many details not really packaged in a meaningful way. There was a really interesting story hiding in there, but you had to work much too hard to find it.

Audience: Academics, detail-oriented historians of computer interaction

I bought this book looking for a detailed history of Douglas Engelbart's work and Bardini certainly delivers that. Actually too much detail. The result is a very thorough and detailed history, but one that's not engaging to read and meanders into minutia. As written, it's for only those deeply interested with the NLS system history and patient enough to wade through sub-topics better left to appendices. To be of interest to a wider audience it needs serious editing and rewriting to provide a story arc to the history.

Details:

It's clear that Bardini had unprecedented access to many of the key people from Engelbart's group as well as the archives. This means he had a unique opportunity to write a definitive history. The problem is one of editing; it often feels like having that having all this information at hand he decided to incorporate more of it than appropriate for a story narrative. The result is copiously annotated doctoral thesis and not an engaging (hi-)story.

For example, impact of '60s era movements like est as archived in the SRI logs is extensively tracked including several pages of re-presenting another book's story on the event. The author goes into great details of the group dynamics need to be covered and are worthy of following -as if this was new, unique or special because of the time and place where the group worked. Certainly it had its particular nuances, but it could have been summarized in a just a few pages (or paragraphs) to keep the story moving along.

In contrast to the sidebar topics, the famous 1968 "Mother of All Demos" is presented almost as an afterthought. The author seems to take for granted that the reader has seen the video (something easier to do today than when the book came out in 2000) and does little to really capture the impact it had. There's no description or transcript; just a few photos, some comments and a dry inventory of the major effort it represented. What should be a (even "the") climax to the book seems to pass by with less description and detail than many other lesser sub-topics.

That said, the dedicated reader will get a much deeper understanding of what drove Doug and how his group created the computing experience we now take for granted. It does provide the greater picture of how far advanced the vision was. It clarifies the distinction between "user augmentation" and "user friendly" but doesn't really follow that through to the current day. It stops when the NLS project ends (1974) and doesn't follow anything of Doug's work or the themes forward. The "coda" section makes some effort to put the work into perspective but quickly spins in multiple directions and lacks focus.