PALO ALTO, California – A day-long tribute at Stanford University to computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart became a soul-searching session about the ethical dimensions of technology in society.
Wednesday's symposium, "Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution," brought together luminaries from many wings of the industry that Engelbart helped create, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, IBM research director Paul Horn, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, Stewart Brand of the Global Business Network, and nanotechnologist Eric Drexler.
Engelbart is often called the father of the mouse, having debuted the now-ubiquitous device in 1968 at the most celebrated demo in Bay Area history: a standing-room-only demonstration in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium that was, in itself, a high-tech tour de force. The Stanford conference, organized by forecaster Paul Saffo, marked the 30th anniversary of that event.
Employing video images beamed by microwave from Palo Alto, Engelbart's explanation of his work at the Stanford Research Institute was the first public glimpse of many of the innovations that became the cornerstones of the information age – interactive computing, word processing, hyperlinks, document sharing, videoconferencing, and navigation in virtual space.
Footage of the original demo was shown at Wednesday's tribute. As a primitive cursor pirouetted across a gray screen, Engelbart told the 1968 audience, "I don't know why we called it a mouse. It started that way, and we never did change it."
For those who heard it, Engelbart's soft-spoken presentation hit with the force of a revelation that computers – then used almost exclusively for brute-force number crunching – could be used to augment human intelligence and collaborative problem solving.
Engelbart's lab at SRI was called the Augmentation Research Center, and many silver-haired "Augment" (as the lab became known) alums were in attendance in Stanford's Memorial Hall on Wednesday.
While Engelbart's name may be forever associated with a chunk of hardware, the panelists at the event made it clear that the scope of Engelbart's vision went beyond the mouse. His true legacy, said Stanford history professor Tim Lenoir, was in perceiving computers as facilitators for communication, rather than mere computation. Lenoir quoted from a note that Engelbart had written to himself in 1964 after a brainstorming session for the ARPAnet – the government-funded precursor to the Internet – that enthused that the advent of network computing was going to signify "a revolution like the development of writing and the printing press" combined.
Under Engelbart's aegis, a computer at Stanford became the second machine patched into the embryonic Net.
The key to Engelbart's vision was the notion of bootstrapping: using computers and computer-assisted communication to "boost the collective IQ" and "get better at getting better," as he puts it.
In an afternoon session, Engelbart described the Bootstrap Institute, a foundation he launched with his daughter Christina, as working to "upgrade the human system" – the language, procedures, customs, and habits of thought that have more impact on our efforts and organizations than the hardware we use.
Significant social paradigm shifts, however, require the development of new kinds of trust and reformed notions of authorship, as several panelists pointed out – which are apt to take longer than the adoption of a tool for pointing and clicking on a screen.
The day was an unabashed love-fest for the self-effacing Engelbart, who was moved to tears by the first standing ovation of the afternoon.
"There was a generosity manifest in the demo in '68, and that generosity is alive here," observed Stewart Brand, who operated one of the cameras in the Augment lab for the original demo.
Brand – whose own presentation elucidated his work with the Long Now Foundation in constructing a 10,000-year clock ("the first Y10K-compliant computer") – embodies the kind of bold, socially conscious imagination Engelbart still inspires in his fellow researchers.
Like most collaborative efforts, however, "Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution" did not come together without disagreements.
Andreessen's declaration that technology was "value-neutral, a blank slate" drew passionate dissenting opinions from the author Howard Rheingold and New York Times columnist Denise Caruso.
Several attendees noted that despite the fact that there were female Augment alums in the room, Caruso was the only woman onstage, and she wasn't even listed in the event brochure.
Bill Gates and Microsoft were predictably cast as heavies by presenters who set forth open-source software as one of the most promising employments of the kinds of collaborative process that Engelbart championed, but when someone in the audience asked why Windows wasn't an example of software "evolution," Saffo, who acted as moderator for the event, flatly refused to answer the question.
Hypertext visionary Ted Nelson's stint at the podium furnished comic relief, as he railed against Gates, windows-based interfaces, and the Web (which incorporates some, but not all, of the hypertextual elements Nelson conceived in 1960 for his Project Xanadu.)
"Why are video games so much better designed than office software? Because they are designed by people who love video games. Office software is designed by people who want to do something else on the weekend," Nelson said.
Backstage, Engelbart said that while the Web was "a sterling example of real progress" in developing technology that could assist cooperative problem solving, he was still stung by the fact that even though many researchers "glimpsed the real potential" as far back as the ARPAnet, some of the best ideas developed by the Augment team had still not found widespread acceptance.
While Engelbart has been adopted by mouse-maker Logitech as its poster boy and éminence grise, Rheingold made the observation that the day's celebration of his work cast light on "a great big blind spot that neither government, not academic institutions, nor the marketplace seem to be equipped to fill."
He added, "The things that came from Doug's research – it wasn't about an exit strategy or a tenure track, and it wasn't about the boxes. All anybody talks about in the Valley is who's made a jillion bucks."
