The Engelbart Hypothesis: dialogs with Douglas Engelbart [Paperback]

Valerie Landau (Author), Eileen Clegg (Author, Illustrator), Douglas C. Engelbart (Collaborator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2009

Engelbart is often called the father of personal computing. In 1968, he produced an event so ground-breaking it earned the name "the mother of all demos."

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart and his team demonstrated a powerful integrated personal computing system complete with robust collaborative features (some of which did not yet have these names): word processing, document sharing, trackback links, hypertext, version control, integrated text and graphics and, of course, the computer mouse.

These innovations have become the foundations of personal computing. He has received the highest honors for his contributions, including the 2000 National Medal of Technology from President Clinton. Engelbart is most famous for inventing the mouse, but his legacy lies with his conceptual framework that foreshadowed the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

Engelbart is considered by many to be one of the 20th century's greatest visionaries. Over the past 50 years, he has maintained that the mind-set of the linear book, the alphabet, and even the Web page no longer suffice for serious intellectual pursuits in a global context. To raise the collective IQ (a term of Engelbart's from the 1960s that caught on decades later) he calls for new ways of communicating: new symbols, new ways of structuring arguments, facts, and evidence.

This paradigm shift will enable us to tap into our collective perceptual capabilities for large scale collaboration, creating an evolutionary step well beyond Web 2.0 into a new paradigm for solving complex global problems from environmental threats to war.

Engelbart has always been far ahead of his time. Imagine reading his works in 1962, when room-sized computers, with disks the size of tractor tires, could cost millions of dollars. That was the year he described portable electronic devices connected together, enabling people to look up and share information on any subject.

During the dot.com boom at the dawn of the 21st century, bits and pieces of his framework emerged in interesting and unintended ways. Blogs, wikis, hypermedia, and networked communities of practice using dynamic knowledge repositories, such ass the Center for Disease Control website, the Human Genome project, and Wikipedia proliferated. But the haphazard, market-driven diffusion of technology lacks Engelbart s foundational philosophical framework for augmenting human intellect for solving complex problems. These writings by Engelbart and his colleagues place his well-known technology achievements in the context of his grand vision for a paradigm shift in our thinking. We believe that Engelbart s philosophy is at least as significant as his inventions.

His inventions were a result of his philosophy, thereby proving its validity. What Engelbart wants most and we want for him and for the world is for his philosophy to be understood, applied, improved upon, defined, and understood in a new way, to again be applied, improved, defined and....on and on. He calls it dialog. As a man who has always had ideas before words caught up to him, Engelbart has longed for discussion to help articulate his vision. We responded to Engelbart s call for dialog.

This edition is the latest synthesis of our years of conversation with him (Landau s goes back to 1985, Clegg s to 2004). We have published several versions, starting with an online book in 2004. We have devoted a chapter at the end of this edition to describe how we continually improved our improvement process to work with Engelbart.

In addition to choosing the best of Engelbart s words about his philosophy, we ve also included his memories of episodes in his life that shed light on his philosophy. And in keeping with Engelbart s commitment to dialog we have included chapters from people who have been in conversation with him.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Centuries of silo thinking and win-or-die ideological and economic competition have finally generated a global crisis. Now either we collaborate on a global scale to solve the new global problems, or we won't survive. The technology is available to do so. Billions of intelligences are waiting to participate. How do we bring the two together? We are at a decision crossroads. And as this book vividly demonstrates, Doug Engelbart as been there all along, waiting for us with the answer.

Emmy-Award Winning Historian James Burke --Email to the authors

Product Details

• Paperback: 139 pages
• Publisher: NextPress; 2st Edition edition (November 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0615308902
• ISBN-13: 978-0615308906
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 0.5 x 6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,579,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Father of collaborative computing August 25, 2009

By Jay Cross

Format:Paperback

While Doug Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the mouse, the man is responsible for so much more. Englebart conceptualized social networking more than 50 years ago! He described using connections to boost collective intelligence before computer networks existed. The first connection of the internet ended in his office at SRI. You've probably heard the tale about Steve Jobs lifting the Mac's windows, icons, and mouse from Xerox PARC; PARC got them from Doug Engelbart.

Valerie and Eileen talked with Doug for several years to tease out his amazing story. They've succeeded in capturing Doug's thoughts in 140 pages of simple, accessible language and graphics. If you want to know where Web 2.0 came from, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Doug Engelbart anticipated it all August 11, 2009

By Gary Newman

Format:Paperback

By 2009, computers have become ubiquitous; their use plays some part in nearly everything we do. Even as little as 20 years ago, who could have foreseen the impact computers would have on our lives today? Doug Engelbart did. From getting information from our minds to the computer screen, to sharing the information with others, to making it available to the whole world over the Internet, if Engelbart didn't foresee it or directly create it, he laid the groundwork for it. He didn't work alone, but collaboration was part of what brought his dreams to reality. The Engelbart Hypothesis not only gives us the story of the man and his work, but offers pointers for a style of thinking that could benefit everyone.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book should be compulsory reading for all IT and Business students around the world. September 8, 2009

By J. Freijser

Format:Paperback

This is a remarkable book. A gem. It tells the story of a man with a mission, who started a revolution in the 1950s, which has yet to get going for real, in the 2010s.
The story emerged from a series of interviews and dialogs taking place over six years, about the many groundbreaking themes that arose in Engelbart's mind more than half a century ago.

The book is extremely readable and compact, divided into three main sections, the first dedicated to Engelbart's ideas, work, and life (about 70 pages), the second presenting "Reflections by Fellow Pioneers of the Computer Age" (30 pages), and the third containing case studies by scholars, teachers and scientists about their work and life applying Engelbart's concepts (40 pages). It is the kind of book that you cannot put down until you've read the last page.

In the 1950s Douglas Engelbart started to think about ways of turning the computer into a machine that could help us solve problems.
It is difficult to zap back to the mid 20th century and imagine what it must have been like for a person to start thinking and developing ideas for concepts many of which we now take for granted: we use graphical user interfaces, word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, hypertext, video conferencing, the internet, social networking, and we may use wikis or a collaborative platform in which working knowledge and expertise evolves into an additional random access organizational brain, available on tap. Yet, Engelbart envisaged all those uses and applications over the years when he ran the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He did not only envisage them, but built a system that incorporated all those functionalities. He also invented the mouse, featuring in the original system as just one device of several to aid human interaction with the computer.
It is no wonder that Engelbart himself describes the moment that he became aware of his mission in the early 50s (he came to call it his crusade), as an epiphany. He must have felt the power of that brainwave in every sinew of his body, and understood intuitively that the potential of computer technology could unimaginably revolutionize everything we do, everything we make, and how we live our lives in our different societies all over the world.

His two co-authors Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg point out in the introduction that Engelbart was far ahead of his time, and that is true, if understated. If you put together a team of the world's top innovators, inventors, IT experts now, in 2009, they would be hard put to come up with any idea or notion that had not already been thought of, proposed, or implemented by Engelbart in the 1960s.

An important aspect stressed by the authors is the underlying philosophical framework Engelbart applied to all his endeavours, which were uncompromisingly aimed at augmenting the human intellect. Augmentation, and not automation, was the key concept that fed all his thinking and actions. This is an essential distinction which was also creating separate camps in the small computer community at the time. The automation camp would think cybernetics, AI, and robots, aiming to replace the brain, whereas the augmentation camp would aim at creating some kind of symbiosis between man and machine.
To quote Charles Irby, Information Architect at the ARC for seven years:
"I think a lot of the things that he [Engelbart] was doing had to do with the combination of developing a technology and, at the same time, developing the human side -- ways of dealing with that technology and incorporating that technology into the way you get things done". (p. 40)

There are so many details in the book that anyone reading about them for the first time will find mind-blowing, but I particularly loved the biographical section when Engelbart talks about his youth, and early influences. One story characterizing the man is about how as a teenager he found this 1916 Model T Ford, and spent 7 years working on it, finding out how it worked, and in fact getting it to running condition. When he was barely 20, just after WWII, he read that seminal Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" ([...]), remembering being greatly "intrigued" by it. Another crucial idea he picked up from reading William James, was that humans actually employ only a small proportion of their mental capability.
Then on to his working life, how he invented the mouse, how he was right there when the first two computers were connected in 1969, the first computer network, that became the Arpanet, and later the internet. His thoughts about scalability inspired Gordon Moore (founder of Intel) to formulate Moore's Law. He talks about Capability Infrastructure, Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of knowledge, the Networked Improvement Community, and the ABC Improvement Infrastructure.
And, of course, he talks about the great demo, held in 1968, in which he and his team actually demonstrated the system they had been building. This demo, with an audience of 3000, was so totally mind-blowing, that some attendees could not believe what they had seen, and angrily quizzed Engelbart afterwards, believing he had faked the whole thing. Many, if not all, leading pioneers of the computer age were present at the demo, which has come to be called "the mother of all demos" (See[...] ).

The second half of the book presents the reflections and comments of fellow pioneers like Alan Kay and Vint Cerf, and provides illustrations of how Engelbart's principles and methods were put into practice. Their contributions are highly valuable, as they give you a kind of 360 view on Engelbart's achievements, increasing understanding and bringing home the realization what a giant Douglas Engelbart was, and is.

A final note about the medium: it's a book, printed on paper. Before it was printed, however, it lived on the web for a while, in the form of a weblog, inviting comments from readers. In fact, it's still there, [...] , and still open for comments. Paradoxically perhaps, I think it's great that the book exists in print. I called the book a gem, but I feel that is too static an image. It's really a grain of sand, aimed at irking the mind, stimulating new connections, movements of thought into new territory, providing the potential for developing those softer jewels.