Prepared by:

Paul Kahn – Experience Design Director

October, 2014

Media Lab, Aalto University

Helsinki, Finland

A Person(alized) History of Hypertext

 

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A Personal History of Hypertext

— Four individuals whose work and writing inspired how we think

about and use computers today:

• Vannevar Bush

• Theodore Nelson

• Douglas Engelbart

• Alan Kay

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Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)

— Inventor of ANALOG COMPUTERS for solving complex differential equations

— Engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1920-1939

— President of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1939-1955

— Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1940-1945

— Founding partner of Raytheon, director of Merck pharmaceuticals

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Analog computers: Astrolabe

Analog computers: slide rule & electronic

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Analog computers: Paris Metro

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Differential Analyzer

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Designed by Bush and Harold Hazen at MIT, 1928-31 for solving differential equations

The picture is reproduced from IEEE Spectrum, July 1995Found on http://www.science.uva.nl/museum/vbush_tbl.html

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Differential Analyzer

Overall view of the Differential Analyzer. The integrator units (six of them) are inside the wood and glass boxes at left, the bus rods which carry numerical information are in the center, and the input and output tables are at right. In the foreground is a numerical tabulator which converted shaft positions to printed numerical output. Samuel Caldwell is standing at left. [from David A. Mindell website (not available 2013]

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Differential Analyzer

Operator's console of the Differential Analyzer, a literally "graphical" user interface. The operator (at left, Samuel Caldwell) manipulates a pointer by hand to follow the curves on the paper, which are then integrated or otherwise processed by the machine, which drives a plotter to make another graph as output. Vannevar Bush is looking on. [from David A. Mindell website

http://web.mit.edu/mindell/www/analyzer.htm]

The UCLA Differential Analyzer

— Commercial computer built by General Electric in 1947

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Concept: A machine that solves complex problems

— Earth versus the Flying Saucers (1956)

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Concept: A machine that miniaturizes and displays

document

— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) developed the first home-movie camera

— demonstrated high-density microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)

— Build a prototype microfilm “desk” for storing and retrieving documents

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Emmanuel Goldberg’s Statistical Machine (1931)

— Patent drawing for Goldberg’s Statistical Machine

— See Emanuel Goldberg page

— http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/

~buckland/goldberg.html

Concept: High-speed photography

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— Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s stroboscope for high-speed photography could be used for precise control of light source and shutter speed

— 1931: Develops and perfects the stroboscope for use in ultra-high-speed and stop-motion photography. Forms a partnership with Kenneth Germeshausen, an MIT research affiliate to develop further uses for the stroboscope. Edgerton receives his D.Sc. in electrical engineering from MIT.

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Concept: Miniaturization and duplication of

knowledge

— Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, novelist, social commentator, science fiction writer: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds

— Fabian socialists and pacifist

— essay “The World Brain” (1937), an essay for the Encyclopédie Française, proposed that the libraries of the world would soon be available to everyone on reels of microfilm

(See https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html)

Concept: Miniaturization and duplication of

knowledge

— There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. And not simply an index; the direct reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to any properly prepared spot. A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail.

World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia (1937)

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Rapid Selector Concept (1930s)

— Sound-on-film development of composite 35mm film techniques throughout the 1920s

— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) demonstrated high-density microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)

— Harold Edgerton’s stroboscope (1931) for high-speed photography was used for rapid detection and re-photographing of coded frames.

— H.G. Wells essay “The World Brain” (1937) proposed that the libraries of the world would soon be available to everyone on reels of microfilm

— Chester Carlson’s (1938) combination of electrostatic printing and photography (xerography) to capture pages on film

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Vannevar Bush’s Microfilm Rapid Selector (1938)

A machine to rapidly select documents recorded as microfilm images on reels of 35 mm movie film

Coding of document topics as dot patterns on film

Strobotron to fire photo cell detectors matching a topic pattern “mask”

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Publication of “As We May Think” (summer, 1945)

— Bush writes “Mechanization and the Record” in 1939 and files it away

— The machine he describes as the Memex (memory extender) is a microfilm rapid selector miniaturized into a desk

— Features he imagines include projection of pages onto dual screens, photo annotation, xerographic input and recording trails between documents

— He mentions a machine to translate voice into text (Vocoder) similar to a device demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York

— He describes a forehead-mounted miniature camera (Walnut camera) to permit “hands-free” photographic recording in the laboratory

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Concept: A machine that extends memory

— Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

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Concept: Literature accessed and linked by a

machine

— Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

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Concept: navigational links as trails

— The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

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Memex (illustration by Alfred Crimi)

Illustrations for As We May Think (1945)

— The essay is published in July 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly, weeks before the first atomic bomb is used in the war with Japan

— An illustrated version of the essay appeared in LIFE Magazine in September

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Annotating on the screen (illustration by Alfred

Crimi)

— Memex animation (1995) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c539cK58ees

— Bush speaking about the brain and machines: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAUC7Q8C6m8

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As We May Think on the web today

— Atlantic Monthly versionhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/

— LIFE version: Google Bookshttp://books.google.fr/books?id=uUkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA136&dq=LIFE%20september%201945&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q=LIFE%20september%201945&f=false

Vannevar Bush Legacy

— Bush ends his post-war governmental career as the founder of the National Science Foundation (NSF)

— Rapid Selectors built in the 1950s and 1960s for the Library of Congress, Department of Navy, Central Intelligence Agency all fail to operate properly.

— “As We May Think” influences the work of J.C.R. Licklider, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart

— “As We May Think” is reprinted and taught in Information (Library) Science from 1960s onward.

— Computer Science Hypertext research literature refers to Bush’s essay as the earliest example of hypertext concept, starting in the 1980s.

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Theodor Holm Nelson (b. 1937)

— Inventor of new poetic language including

• hypertext *

• hypermedia

• cybercrud

• softcopy

• electronic visualization

• technoid

• docuverse

• Transclusion

* first appears in 1965: “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate”

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Concept: Simple Hypertext (1965)

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Ted Nelson

— Collaborator on Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University (1972)

— Author of “underground” computer books

• Computer Lib / Dream Machine (1974)

• The Home Computer Revolution (1977)

• Literary Machine (1981-1993)

— Introduced the concepts of Project Xanadu in the 1980s through many talks and articles in Creative Computing, Byte, and other magazines

— Xanadu system project at Autodesk in late 1980s

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Concept: universal access, follow and publish links

— At your screen of tomorrow you will have access to all the world’s published work: all the books, all the magazines, all the photographs, the recordings, the movies. (And to new kinds of publications, created especially for the interactive screen.)

You will be able to bring any published work to your screen, or any part of a published work.

You will be able to make links – comments, personal notes, or other connections – between places in documents, and leave them there for others (as well as yourself) to follow later. You may even publish these links.

from Literary Machines

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Concept: digital rights management &

micropayments

— Royalty to each publisher will be automatic, as materials are delivered over the network. Each piece delivered will be paid for automatically, from the user’s account to the publisher’s account, when the user receives the piece sent for.

Any document may quote another, because the quoted part is brought – and bought – from the original at the instant of request, with automatic royalty payment and credit to the originator.

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Harsh critiques of the file hierarchy and WWW

— Calling a hierarchical director a "folder" doesn't change its nature any more than calling a prison guard a "counselor". 

— Hierarchical directories were invented around 1947 – I should check this – when somebody said, "How are we going to keep track of all these files?  "Gee, why don't we make a file that's a list of filenames?"  And that was the directory.  It's a temporary fix that doesn't scale up.

— The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.

— Recent books: Geeks Bearing Gifts and Possiplex, both published via Lulu.com

Ted Nelson lectures: Computers for Cynics

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfai5reVrck

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Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)

— Educated at University of California, Berkeley

— Worked at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)

— Published his first theoretical paper, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework in 1962

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Concept: Augmenting Human Intellect

— By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.

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Concept: engineering tools for complex situtations

— And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers–whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in 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.

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oNLine System (NLS)

— Augmentation Research Center developed oNLine System (NLS) in 1968

— Focus on developing new Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) models and tools

— Introduced new concepts

• Computers Supporting Collaborative Work (CSCW)

• Bootstrapping – using the development group to test new tools

• Co-evolution – the co-dependent evolution of the software interface and human behavior

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NLS (continued)

— Developed the Mouse (analog pointing device) and Chord (5-finger) keyboard

— The NLS system (circa 1968) also included:

• Mixture of text and graphics

• Hypertext links

• Outline processing

• View control of text and graphic data

• Collaborative work space

• Shared pointing device

• Video conferencing

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William English at the augmentation laboratory at

SRI

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See Douglas Engelbart 1968 demohttp://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html(see Clip #5)

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Engelbart after 1968

— NLS failed due to timesharing computer technology: the more people using it, the slower it responded.

— Many researchers from his laboratory moved to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1971, where the mouse and the personal workstation was (re)invented

— Engelbart developed Augment, a commercial timesharing system for documentation in the aerospace industry

— Engelbart worked on the first network protocols for the ARPAnet, the foundation of the current Internet (early 1970s)

— Engelbart created Bootstrap Institute in 1999,

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Alan Kay (b. 1940)

— Worked with Ivan Sutherland (Utah) on graphics programming

— Worked with Seymour Papert (MIT) on educational programming

— Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, 1971-1981

— Chief Scientist at Atari, 1981-1984

— Apple Fellow and Disney Fellow, 1984-2001

— Viewpoints Research Institute (since 2006) “reinventing programming”

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Some of Alan Kay’s Contributions

— Combining cognitive science, learning theory, and programming languages

— Development of Object-Oriented Programming Language – SmallTalk

• Support for direct manipulation graphical objects as interface

• Use of graphical icons to represent programs

• Cascading menus to select actions

— Interest in making computer programs as simple to use as possible

The Macintosh Child Video

— http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdL6dzWvm5M

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DynaBook Concept (1972)

— A Portable Computer

— Powerful enough to manage all kinds of media

— Simple enough to be used by children

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from “A Personal Computer for Children of All

Ages”

— Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

We envision a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems. Visual output should be, at the least, of higher quality than what can be obtained from newsprint. Audio output should adhere to similar high-fidelity standards.

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from “A Personal Computer for Children of All

Ages”

— There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner’s wishes. Imagine the absurdity of a one-second delay between blowing a note and hearing it!

These civilized desires for flexibility, resolution, and response lead to the conclusion that a user of dynamic personal medium needs several hundred times as much power as the average adult typically enjoys from timeshared computing. This means that we should either build a new resource several hundred times the capacity of current machines and share it (very difficult and expensive), or we should investigate the possibility of giving each person his own powerful machine. We choose the second approach.

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The Xerox Alto (interim Dynabook system)

— Stand-alone computer processor connected to other disc and printers via Ethernet

— High-resolution graphic CRT

— Typewriter keyboard, chord keyboard, music keyboard

— Mouse pointing device

— See “Alto Playroom” video:http://www.viddler.com/explore/mprove/videos/2/

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Xerox Alto’s Descendents

— Xerox Star – the first office product with graphical user interface, mouse and ethernet, $20-50,000 network configuration (1981)

— See Xerox Star Demo 1984 on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYvxgNhUwBk

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Xerox Alto’s Descendents

— Apple Lisa – the first personal computer with graphical user interface and mouse, $10,000 each (1983)

— See Apple Lisa Demo 1983 on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W35vpsPIwlU&watch_response

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Xerox Alto’s Descendents

— Apple Macintosh – the first successful personal computer with graphical user interface and mouse, $3,000 each (1984)

Concepts, circa 1985

— Computers as intellectual tools in business, research and education

— Portable personal computers connected to the Network

— Software to support direct manipulation of text, graphics, video, sound

— Intuitive user interface with icons, menus, and multiple windows

— Collections of documents available on the Network

— Creating and following navigational links between selections in documents

— No integration with telephony

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Intermedia (1985-1990) at Brown University

— Apple User Interface running on Unix

— Network Hypertext environment with text, graphics, timeline, animation, video

— Anchors and Links collected in Webs

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Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web at CERN (from

1989)

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World Wide Web at CERN (from 1989)

— Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP)

— Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

— First browser implemented on the NeXT computer

— All software in public domain

Early Web browsers: Mosaic and Netscape

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Fast-forward 25 years

— All newly created music, books, photographs, film/video are digital

— Over 70% have network access in North America and EU countries

— Over 90% have a mobile device: a mobile phone

— Over 25-50% have a “Smartphone”

— The Internet is becoming the “Cloud”

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Imagining Mobile Telephone/Television, circa 1947

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Dream of the Digital Library

— Wikipedia collectively written in many languages

— Digital National Libraries and Archives today: collections of bibliographical records, images, audio-visual archives and scanned pages

— Private digital libraries by subscription: news, business, science, law, finance

Dream of the Digital Library

— Most “free” digital content supported by advertisements

— Most people view content on journalism sites, blogs, social networks, tweets and video clips

— Google Books (books.google.com)Nearly every book I have written is in Google Books, but the author does not have the right to see most of them (snippet view)

— Complex digital rights issues and payment schemes unresolved

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Contact Information

Paul Kahn

Experience Design Director

pkahn@madpow.com

Mad*Pow

Portsmouth | Boston | Louisville

www.madpow.com