Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing

Writing Science

by Thierry Bardini

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Bootstrapping establishes Douglas Engelbart's contribution through a detailed history of both the material and the symbolic constitution of his system's human-computer interface in the context of the computer research community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart's project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." What he ultimately envisioned was a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form. The book also offers a careful narrative of the collapse of Engelbart's laboratory at Stanford Research Institute, and the further translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time of the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution."

Genres: History, Technology, Nonfiction, Computers, Design, Biography

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow is there anything in the modern computer age Douglas Engelbart wasn't on the ground floor for? From email to ethernet to the mouse. Thierry Bardini's writing is not nearly as interesting as the endless journal entries and notes by Engelbart they packed in to this book. In his mild mannered style of writing Engelbart tells us how he got from innovation to innovation like he he is telling us about a recipe for grandmas oatmeal until you realize, my god this man defined every way a person works and interacts in today's technological world. I highly recommend watching his presentation on the first ever demonstration of a mouse. It's on YouTube.

[Alain van Hoof · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a lot about how to look at "the user" and how different views on "the user" let to different approches for designing an interface to the computer.

[Meadhbh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The future is often seen in terms of yesterday's questions, just as the past is seen in terms of what prevailed. But some of yesterday's questions remain unanswered about the future of the personal computer, and indeed, about the person who used it." -p. 216

When I picked this book up I assumed it was a light-weight history about Engelbart's development of the computer mouse and "the mother of all demos." To be sure, those events are well covered, but they're far from the only thing you'll find here. And it's not exactly light-weight; by page 44, we're already talking about Heidegger, Descartes, Leibniz and Hobbes.

Thierry Bardini takes us through the development of not only the computer mouse, but of the man who developed it. We learn how Doug Engelbart became probably the most influential unknown individual in personal computing. We learn how he developed a team at SRI and the range of projects they worked on. And we also learn why. Why was the mouse conceived and developed? (spoilers: it was a better fit for the project than the light gun, light pen and stylus.) And what was the project the mouse was invented for? NLS (oN-Line System) -- a tool emerging from a modest proposal to extend the human intellect with computational hardware.

The path forward looked a bit foggy in 1962, but the general direction seemed sound. By 1970, however, the industry and internal team dynamics had changed markedly. The "Augmentation Research Center (ARC)" at SRI eventually failed, it's researchers scattering to the wind (many landing at the newly opened Xerox PARC). Bardini takes us down these trails as well. How is it we know the story of PARC and Alan Kay and Ethernet and Laser Printers, but not of the mouse's origin and NLS' intellect expanding software?

I really liked this book. Bardini takes us on a ride through Silicon Valley's pre-history and fills in many gaps. But it is a little dense, so bring your thinking cap.

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book covers very important topics and conflicts in the beginning of PC era: Engelbart belief in “trained” user, who would achieve new heights of productivity by human-computer symbiosis vs. the approach by Xerox PARC focused on ease of use UX. As we know, second approach was adopted by Apple and Microsoft and won. But was it the right choice?
The only problem is when the author goes into some post-modernist mode and writes a couple of pages of incomprehensible text. Luckily, after Introduction it was just a few places.

[Blisscast · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst it gets better in the last couple of chapters, most of the writing is excessively complicated and academic, making it really hard to understand what the author is trying to say. If the topic absolutely interests you, then read it, but make sure to skim past the complicated parts.