The Innovators
Page 31
Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, and a troop of weird girls in leotards, leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles.
The final night celebrated technology even more enthusiastically. “Since the common element of all shows is ELECTRICITY, this evening will be programmed live from stimuli provided by a PINBALL MACHINE,” the program exulted. “The audience is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS & bring their own GADGETS (a.c. outlets will be provided).”16
Yes, the Trip Festival’s conjunction of drugs, rock, and technology—acid and a.c. outlets!—was jarring. But it turned out to be, significantly, a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art, and engineering. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury. “The Trips Festival marked Stewart Brand’s emergence as a countercultural entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold,” wrote the cultural historian Fred Turner.17
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A month after the Trips Festival, in February 1966, Brand was sitting on his gravelly rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach enjoying the effects of 100 micrograms of LSD. Staring at the skyline, he ruminated on something that Buckminster Fuller had said: our perception that the world is flat and stretches indefinitely, rather than round and small, is because we have never seen it from outer space. Abetted by the acid, he began to grok the smallness of the earth and the importance of other people appreciating that as well. “It had to be broadcast, this fundamental point of leverage on the world’s ills,” he recalled. “A photograph would do it—a color photograph from space of the earth. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”18 It would, he believed, promote big-picture thinking, empathy for all the earth’s inhabitants, and a sense of connectedness.
He resolved to convince NASA to take such a picture. So, with the offbeat wisdom that comes from acid, he decided to produce hundreds of buttons so that people in the pre-Twitter age could spread the word. “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” they read. His plan was goofy-simple: “I prepared a Day-Glo sandwich board with a little sales shelf on the front, decked myself out in a white jump suit, boots and costume top hat with crystal heart and flower, and went to make my debut at the Sather Gate of the University of California in Berkeley, selling my buttons for twenty-five cents.” University officials did him the favor of throwing him off campus, which prompted a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, thus helping publicize his one-man crusade. He took it on the road to other colleges across the country, ending at Harvard and MIT. “Who the hell’s that?” asked an MIT dean as he watched Brand give an impromptu lecture while selling his buttons. “That’s my brother,” said Peter Brand, an MIT instructor.19
In November 1967 NASA complied. Its ATS-3 satellite took a picture of Earth from twenty-one thousand miles up, which served as the cover image and title inspiration for Brand’s next venture, the Whole Earth Catalog. As its name implied, it was (or at least dressed itself in the guise of) a catalogue, one that cleverly blurred the distinction between consumerism and communalism. Its subtitle was “Access to Tools,” and it combined the sensibilities of the back-to-the-land counterculture with the goal of technological empowerment. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” The first edition featured such items as Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics and a programmable HP calculator, along with buckskin jackets and beads. The underlying premise was that a love of the earth and a love of technology could coexist, that hippies should make common cause with engineers, and that the future should be a festival where a.c. outlets would be provided.20
Brand’s approach was not New Left political. Nor was it even antimaterialist, given his celebration of games and gadgets you could buy. But he did pull together, better than anyone, many of the cultural strands of that period, from acid-dropping hippies to engineers to communal idealists who sought to resist the centralized control of technology. “Brand did the marketing work for the concept of the personal computer through the Whole Earth Catalog,” said his friend Lee Felsenstein.21
DOUGLAS ENGELBART
Shortly after the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out, Brand helped to produce a happening that was an odd echo of his techno-choreography of the January 1966 Trips Festival. Dubbed “the Mother of All Demos,” the December 1968 extravaganza became the seminal event of the personal computer culture, just as the Trips Festival had been for the hippie culture. It happened because, like a magnet, Brand naturally attracted and attached himself to interesting people. This time it was an engineer named Douglas Engelbart, who had taken on as his life’s passion inventing ways that computers could augment human intelligence.
Engelbart’s father, an electrical engineer, had a shop in Portland, Oregon, where he sold and repaired radios; his grandfather, who operated hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest, liked to take the family inside the goliath plants to see how the turbines and generators worked. So it was natural that Engelbart developed a passion for electronics. In high school he heard that the Navy had a program, cloaked in secrecy, to train technicians in a mysterious new technology called radar, and he studied hard to make sure he could get in it, which he did.22
His great awakening came while serving in the Navy. He was loaded onto a ship that set sail from just south of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, and as they were waving good-bye, an announcement came on the public address system that the Japanese had surrendered and World War II was over. “We all shouted,” Engelbart recounted, “ ‘Turn around! Let us go back and celebrate!’ ” But the ship kept sailing, “right out into the fog, into the seasickness,” on to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.23 On Leyte Island, Engelbart secluded himself whenever possible in a Red Cross library in a thatched hut on stilts, and there he became enthralled by a heavily illustrated Life magazine reprint of Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article “As We May Think,” the one that envisioned the memex personal information system.24 “The whole concept of helping people work and think that way just excited me,” he recalled.25
After his Navy service, he got an engineering degree from Oregon State and then worked at the forerunner to NASA at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Painfully shy, he joined an intermediate Greek folk-dancing class at the Palo Alto Community Center in order to meet a woman he could marry, which he did. On the day after his engagement, as he was driving to work, he felt a frightening, life-altering apprehension: “By the time I got to work, I had this realization that I didn’t have any more goals.”26
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.
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 turn
ed 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 protégés, 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