The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 74

The result, at once both simple and profound, was a classic physical expression of the augmentation ideal and the hands-on imperative. It made use of the human talent of mind-hand-eye coordination (something robots are not good at) to provide a natural interface with a computer. Instead of acting independently, humans and machines would act in harmony.

Engelbart gave his sketch to Bill English, who carved a piece of mahogany to make the first model. When they tried it on their focus group, it tested better than any other device. At first, the cord was in front, but they quickly realized it worked better coming out of the back end, like a tail. They dubbed the device a “mouse.”

Most true geniuses (Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and even Steve Jobs, to name a few) have an instinct for simplicity. Engelbart didn’t. Desiring to cram a lot of functionality into any system he built, he wanted the mouse to have many buttons, perhaps up to ten. But to his disappointment, the testing determined that the optimum number of buttons the mouse should have was three. As it turned out, even that was at least one button too many, or perhaps, as the simplicity-freak Jobs would later insist, two buttons too many.

Over the next six years, culminating in 1968, Engelbart went on to devise a full-fledged augmentation system that he called “oNLine System,” or NLS. In addition to the mouse, it included many other advances that led to the personal computer revolution: on-screen graphics, multiple windows on a screen, digital publishing, blog-like journals, wiki-like collaborations, document sharing, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, Skype-like videoconferencing, and the formatting of documents. One of his technocharged proteges, Alan Kay, who would later advance each of these ideas at Xerox PARC, said of Engelbart, “I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug’s ideas.”³⁸

THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS

Engelbart was more into Greek folk dances than Trips Festivals, but he had gotten to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab. Brand’s succession of ventures, including the Whole Earth Catalog, were based just a few blocks from Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center. Thus it was natural that they team up for a demonstration in December 1968 of Engelbart’s oNLine System. Thanks to Brand’s instincts as an impresario, the demo, which later became known as the Mother of All Demos, became a multimedia extravaganza, like an Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on silicon. The event turned out to be the ultimate melding of hippie and hacker culture, and it has remained unchallenged, even by Apple product launches, as the most dazzling and influential technology demonstration of the digital age.³⁹

The year had been turbulent. In 1968 the Tet Offensive turned America against the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Peace protests shut down major universities and disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Russians crushed Prague Spring, Richard Nixon was elected president, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. Also that year, Intel was founded and Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog.

Doug Engelbart (1925–2013).

Englebart’s first mouse.

Stewart Brand (center) assisting at the Mother of All Demos in 1968.

Engelbart’s ninety-minute demonstration occurred on December 9 in front of a standing-room-only crowd of close to a thousand at a computer industry conference in San Francisco. Wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark skinny tie, he sat on the right of the stage in a sleek Herman Miller “Action Office” console. The display of his computer terminal was projected onto a twenty-foot screen behind him. “I hope you’ll go along with this rather unusual setting,” he began. He wore a microphone headset that a fighter pilot might use, and he spoke in a monotone, like a computer-generated voice trying to emulate the narrator in an old movie newsreel. Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture guru and chronicler, later said that he looked like “the Chuck Yeager of the computer cosmos, calmly putting the new system through its paces and reporting back to his astonished earthbound audience in a calm, quiet voice.”⁴⁰

“If in your office,” Engelbart intoned, “you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that?” He promised that the combination of technologies he was about to demonstrate would “all go very interesting,” and then he muttered under his breath, “I think.”

A camera mounted on his terminal provided a video stream of his face, while another camera overhead showed his hands controlling the mouse and keyboard. Bill English, the mouse crafter, sat in the back of the auditorium like a newsroom producer selecting which images were mixed, matched, and projected on the big screen.

Stewart Brand was thirty miles south at Engelbart’s lab near Stanford, generating computer images and working cameras. Two leased microwave lines and a telephone hookup transmitted to the lab every mouse and keyboard click Engelbart made, then sent images and information back to the auditorium. The audience watched incredulously as Engelbart collaborated with distant colleagues to create a document; different people made edits, added graphics, changed the layout, built a map, and embedded audio and visual elements in real time. They even were able to create hypertext links together. In short, Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today. The demo gods were with him, and to his amazement there were no glitches. The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Some even rushed up to the stage as if he were a rock star, which in some ways he was.⁴¹

Down the hall from Engelbart, a competing session was being presented by Les Earnest, who had cofounded, with the MIT refugee John McCarthy, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. As reported by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, their session featured a film about a robot that acted as if it could hear and see things. The two demos presented a clear contrast between the goal of artificial intelligence and that of augmented intelligence. The latter mission had seemed rather quirky when Engelbart began working on it, but when he showed off all of its elements in his December 1968 demo—a personal computer that humans could easily interact with in real time, a network that allowed collaborative creativity—it overshadowed the robot. The headline of the story from the conference in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle was “Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s Computer.” It was about Engelbart’s oNLine System, not about the robot.⁴²

As if to seal the marriage of the counterculture and cyberculture, Brand brought Ken Kesey to Engelbart’s lab to experience the oNLine System. Kesey, by then famous from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, got a full tour of how the system could cut, paste, retrieve, and collaboratively create books and other documents. He was impressed. “It’s the next thing after acid,” Kesey pronounced.⁴³

ALAN KAY

Alan Kay struggled to make sure that he got to Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. He had a 102-degree fever and strep throat, but he was able to drag himself onto a plane from Utah, where he was a graduate student. “I was shivering and sick and could barely walk,” he recalled, “but I was determined to get there.”⁴⁴ He had already seen and embraced Engelbart’s ideas, but the drama of the demonstration struck him like a clarion call. “To me he was Moses opening the Red Sea,” Kay said. “He showed us a promised land that needed to be found, and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there.”⁴⁵