The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 73
For the next two months, he assiduously tended to the task of finding for himself a worthy life goal. “I looked at all the crusades people could join, to find out how I could retrain myself.” What struck him was that any effort to improve the world was complex. He thought about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poor areas and discovered that led to a complex array of other issues, such as overpopulation and soil erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more. “Then one day, it just dawned on me—BOOM—that complexity was the fundamental thing,” he recalled. “And it just went click. If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.”27 Such an endeavor would address not just one of the world’s problems; it would give people the tools to take on any problem.
The best way to help people handle complexity was along the lines that Bush had proposed, Engelbart decided. As he tried to imagine conveying information on graphic screens in real time, his radar training came in handy. “It was within an hour that I had the image of sitting at a big screen with all kinds of symbols,” he recalled, “and you could be operating all kinds of things to drive the computer.”28 That day he set out on a mission to find ways to allow people to visually portray the thinking they were doing and link them to other people so they could collaborate—in other words, networked interactive computers with graphic displays.
This was in 1950, five years before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born. Even the very first commercial computers, such as UNIVAC, were not yet publicly available. But Engelbart bought into Bush’s vision that someday people would have their own terminals, which they could use to manipulate, store, and share information. This expansive conception needed a suitably grand name, and Engelbart came up with one: augmented intelligence. In order to serve as the pathfinder for this mission, he enrolled at Berkeley to study computer science, earning his doctorate in 1955.
Engelbart was one of those people who could project intensity by speaking in an eerily calm monotone. “When he smiles, his face is wistful and boyish, but once the energy of his forward motion is halted and he stops to ponder, his pale blue eyes seem to express sadness or loneliness,” a close friend said. “His voice, as he greets you, is low and soft, as though muted from having traveled a long distance. There is something diffident yet warm about the man, something gentle yet stubborn.”29
To put it more bluntly, Engelbart sometimes gave the impression that he had not been born on this planet, which made it difficult for him to get funding for his project. He finally was hired in 1957 to work on magnetic storage systems at the Stanford Research Institute, an independent nonprofit set up by the university in 1946. A hot topic at SRI was artificial intelligence, especially the quest to create a system that mimicked the neural networks of the human brain.
But the pursuit of artificial intelligence didn’t excite Engelbart, who never lost sight of his mission to augment human intelligence by creating machines like Bush’s memex that could work closely with people and help them organize information. This goal, he later said, was born out of his respect for the “ingenious invention” that was the human mind. Instead of trying to replicate that on a machine, Engelbart focused on how “the computer could interact with the different capabilities that we’ve already got.”30
For years he worked on draft after draft of a paper describing his vision, until it grew to forty-five thousand words, the length of a small book. He published it as a manifesto in October 1962 titled “Augmenting Human Intellect.” He began by explaining that he was not seeking to replace human thought with artificial intelligence. Instead he argued that the intuitive talents of the human mind should be combined with the processing abilities of machines to produce “an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” In painstaking detail, he gave many examples of how this human-computer symbiosis would work, including an architect using a computer to design a building and a professional putting together an illustrated report.31
As he was working on the paper, Engelbart wrote a fan letter to Vannevar Bush, and he devoted an entire section of his paper to describing the memex machine.32 Seventeen years after Bush had written “As We May Think,” there was still a radical feel to his concept that humans and computers should interact in real time through simple interfaces that included graphical screens, pointers, and input devices. Engelbart emphasized that his system wouldn’t be just for math: “Every person who does his thinking with symbolized concepts (whether in the form of the English language, pictographs, formal logic, or mathematics) should be able to benefit significantly.” Ada Lovelace would have been thrilled.
Engelbart’s treatise appeared the same month that Licklider, who had explored the same concepts two years earlier in his “Man-Computer Symbiosis” paper, took over ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. Part of Licklider’s new job was to give out federal grants to promising projects. Engelbart got in line. “I was standing at the door with this 1962 report and a proposal,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, with all the things he’s saying he wants to do, how can he refuse me?’?”33 He couldn’t, so Engelbart got an ARPA grant. Bob Taylor, who was then still at NASA, also gave Engelbart some funding. Thus it was that he was able to create his own Augmentation Research Center at SRI. It became another example of how government funding of speculative research eventually paid off hundreds of times over in practical applications.
THE MOUSE AND NLS
The NASA grant from Taylor was supposed to be applied to a stand-alone project, and Engelbart decided to use it to find an easy way for humans to interact with machines.34 “Let’s go after some screen-select devices,” he suggested to his colleague Bill English.35 His goal was to find the simplest way for a user to point to and select something on a screen. Dozens of options for moving an on-screen cursor were being tried by researchers, including light pens, joysticks, trackballs, trackpads, tablets with styli, and even one that users were supposed to control with their knees. Engelbart and English tested each. “We timed how long it took each user to move the cursor to the object,” Engelbart said.36 Light pens seemed the simplest, for example, but they required a user to pick them up and put them down each time, which was tiresome.
They made a chart of all the advantages and drawbacks of each device, which helped Engelbart imagine devices that hadn’t yet been conceived. “Just as the periodic table’s rules have led to the discovery of certain previously unknown elements, this grid ultimately defined the desirable characteristics of a device that didn’t yet exist,” he said. One day in 1961 he was at a conference and began to daydream. He recalled a mechanical device that had fascinated him in high school, a planimeter, that could calculate the area of a space by being rolled around its perimeter. It used two perpendicular wheels, one horizontal and the other vertical, to tote up the distance it was rolled in each direction. “Just thinking about those two wheels, soon the rest of it was very simple, so I went and made a sketch,” he recalled.37 In his pocket notebook he showed how the device could roll around a desktop and its two wheels would register higher or lower voltages as they turned in each direction. That voltage could be transmitted through a cord to the computer screen to move a cursor up and down and back and forth.