Mother of all demos

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The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Landau and Clegg, “Engelbart on the Mouse and Keyset,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; William English, Douglas Engelbart, and Melvyn Berman, “Display Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation,” IEEE Transactions on Human-Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1967. 37. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 38. Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis. 39. The video of the “Mother of All Demos” can be viewed at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete. This section also draws from Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis. 40. Rheingold, Tools for Thought, 190. 41. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; video of the Mother of All Demos. 42. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2734. John Markoff found the reports of the Les Earnest demonstration in the Stanford microfilm archives.

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.

Donald Davies coins the term packet switching. 1967 ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and Gatlinburg. 1968 Larry Roberts sends out request for bids to build the ARPANET’s IMPs. Noyce and Moore form Intel, hire Andy Grove. Brand publishes first Whole Earth Catalog. Engelbart stages the Mother of All Demos with Brand’s help. 1969 First nodes of ARPANET installed. 1971 Don Hoefler begins column for Electronic News called “Silicon Valley USA.” Demise party for Whole Earth Catalog. Intel 4004 microprocessor unveiled. Ray Tomlinson invents email. 1972 Nolan Bushnell creates Pong at Atari with Al Alcorn. 1973 1973 Alan Kay helps to create the Alto at Xerox PARC.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Is the average user idealized in a template, like Joe and Josephine? Or is there something to be found in the lives of people at the edges, whose very difference might allow them to sense something that the rest of us cannot? OXO ice-cream scoop and peeler (1990) 7 Humanity What would later be called the Mother of All Demos—the most consequential tech demonstration of all time—happened on December 9, 1968, a chilly and gray San Francisco morning. Inside a darkened Brooks Hall auditorium, Doug Engelbart sat beneath a twenty-two-foot screen nervously waiting to begin a presentation that would predict nearly every major computing development of the next fifty years.

Or you might instead seek out the fringes, the so-called edge cases where the future might currently exist as a rare mutation, ready to take over the world. In 2010, Steve Jobs learned of an oddball app languishing in the depths of the App Store, called Siri—a play on its birthplace, SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, which also happened to be the incubator for Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. Thanks to startling advances in machine learning and voice recognition that for years had been quietly bubbling in the lab, the app let you speak commands, to ask about the weather, or set reminders, or get movie times. Just a year later, Siri became a built-in feature of the iPhone’s operating system, and a race was on.

NASA would later follow with the Anthropometric Source Book, which would become a standard reference for product designers. 1960s: ELIZA CONVERSATIONAL BOT, Joseph Weizenbaum Developed at MIT, Eliza was the first chatbot—a language program meant to behave like a therapist, asking questions of users simply based on what they’d typed. To Weizenbaum’s surprise, participants at times chatted with Eliza for hours—showing that people readily lend emotional weight to their interactions with machines. 1968: “THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS”—HYPERTEXT, CURSOR, MOUSE, INTERNET, Doug Engelbart This live demonstration introduced many of the core design concepts that would shape personal computing. Engelbart developed the demo while at Stanford Research Institute, which would later license its mouse patent to Apple for approximately $40,000. 1970s: TEN PRINCIPLES OF GOOD DESIGN, Dieter Rams Over a thirty-four-year career as the chief design officer of Braun, Rams created a host of iconic appliances and consumer electronics based on his belief in simplicity (as opposed to decoration) as a core value of user-friendly design.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

noredirect=on&utm_term=.e7adba67bfe6 3https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42745853 1 THE ARCHITECTS 1US broadband speed taken from http://fortune.com/2017/06/02/internet-speed-akamai-survey/ 2The narrative of the first internet message is taken from this (charming and very readable) transcript: https://archive.icann.org/meetings/losangeles2014/en/schedule/mon-crocker-kleinrock/transcript-crocker-kleinrock-13oct14-en.pdf 3https://www.internethalloffame.org//inductees/steve-crocker 4https://ai.google/research/people/author32412 5Wired have a great feature with much more detail on ‘the mother of all demos’ here: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/1209computer-mouse-mother-of-all-demos/ 6This was the recollection of Bob Taylor, who secured the funding (https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2011/03/man2011030004/13rRUxly9fL), but was disputed by Charles Herzfeld, who said he had agreed the funding, but had taken more than twenty minutes’ persuasion (https://www.wired.com/2012/08/herzfeld/). 7Full video and transcript: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/steve-crocker-internet-hall-fame-2012-profile/ 8This is also from Kleinrock’s 2014 transcript: https://archive.icann.org/meetings/losangeles2014/en/schedule/mon-crocker-kleinrock/transcript-crocker-kleinrock-13oct14-en.pdf 9https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0675.txt 10ARPANET had operated as a packet switching network from its inception – TCP is just a specific implantation of the concept, and the one which came to be the standard. 11This paragraph borrows key dates from https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/ 12Everything from Steve Lukasik comes from his paper ‘Why the ARPANET Was Built’, published online here: https://www.academia.edu/34728504/WHY_THE_ARPANET_WAS_BUILT 13This is from the Crocker/Kleinrock discussion. 14https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/ 15These are sourced to the Internet Services Consortium, but most easily viewed on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage 16https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32884867 17https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/ 18This stat comes from TeleGeography (https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions) – their map of the main undersea internet cables is well worth a look: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ 2 THE CABLE GUYS 1http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702359.html?

Multiple people could have access to a computer at once, via multiple keyboards, and it would process each instruction in sequence. People would still have to wait, but for less time, and it wouldn’t matter if each person wasn’t constantly requiring it to work at 100 per cent. This idea became part of computer history lore – at least among hardcore nerds – thanks to ‘the mother of all demos’, which had taken place almost fifty years to the day before Crocker and I had our conversation. It happened on 9 December 1968 in San Francisco, and it became the model for every dramatic product reveal demonstration that has followed ever since. ‘This was Doug Engelbart’s laboratory at SRI, where he introduced the mouse, hypertext and graphics to a major meeting,’ says Crocker.

This is the bit of the internet’s story that is familiar to many of us: that of the British technologist Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at the European CERN institute, who came up with a document, submitted to his supervisor on 12 March 1989: ‘Information Management: A Proposal’.15 The proposal, which was marked by Berners-Lee’s supervisor as ‘vague, but exciting’, did not immediately set the world on fire, but in practice united many of the elements of ‘the mother of all demos’ with the architecture of the internet. The paper became the basis for what we now know as the World Wide Web – the internet as seen through your web browser – with its web addresses (formally known as URLs or URIs), HTML (the language used to format and style web pages) and HTTP (the protocol used to receive information on the web).


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Using computers to connect people to build a more powerful computer, to “harness collective intellect”,10 became his life’s mission. By early 1968, he showed off several of his inventions at a demonstration subsequently known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Many facets of the modern personal computer were present at this demonstration in nascent form: the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, hyperlinks, videoconferencing. Unfortunately, “The Mother of All Demos” did not turn Engelbart into an instant celebrity outside nerd circles. Even inside nerd circles, most of his colleagues regarded Engelbart as something of a crank. The idea that you could sit in front of a computer and actually work at it seemed lunatic in this age of massive institutional computers that worked for days to solve your complex problem while you did something else.

, the small computer side has birthed a range of technologies culminating in your current Droid or iPhone. There is a particular hero to this strand of American nerd-ocity, one whose story begins to elucidate the political ideology behind the personal computer, and he is the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart. “The Mother of All Demos” A product of the greatest generation that fought World War II, Engelbart had a sense of the United States’ grandeur and majesty when dedicated to a great challenge, and during the 1950s and 60s he was looking for the next great challenge. Inspired by Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think,” which championed the wider dissemination of knowledge as a national peacetime challenge, Engelbart imagined people sitting at “working stations”9 and coming together in powerful ways thanks to modern computing.

They called their protest Smash ILLIAC IV and included a cartoon of the mainframe computer with screens tracking things like a “kill-die factor” and a gaping mouth labeled “Feed $$$$$$ here!” 12. Stewart Brand is a particularly interesting figure because he bridged these two branches of nerd culture. He was the camera operator at Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos,” but he was also one of the Merry Pranksters running around on Ken Kesey’s bus. The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995. 13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html 14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php 15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html 16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html 17.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

He helped in other ways, as well. When Engelbart’s lead engineer, Bill English, determined that the only projector that could give the right effect belonged to NASA, Taylor vouched for the lab. Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference has come to be known as the Mother of All Demos. Even the world’s most advanced computer scientists had never encountered anything like his system. What a show it was. The San Francisco auditorium seated two thousand, and Engelbart’s presentation had been given the full ninety-minute slot typically split among a panel of presenters. Engelbart sat on the right side of the stage, facing the audience, his headset resting on the silvering hair at his left temple, his hands hovering above an unusual workstation that housed a standard keyboard, a special five-key chord key set, and the mouse that Taylor had seen at the invitation-only event.

NIELS REIMERS Some three hundred people, most of them Stanford students, had shown up by 7:30 on that May morning in 1969, determined to shut down a satellite office of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) a day after the People’s Park protests had rocked Berkeley. SRI’s much larger headquarters facility, where Doug Engelbart had done the work unveiled six months earlier in the Mother of All Demos, was four miles north, in Menlo Park. This satellite office, located only a few blocks from the southern edge of the Stanford campus, housed a computer that protesters claimed was analyzing activities of Communist insurgents in Southeast Asia. The protesters, many from a radical Stanford student organization called the April Third Movement, wanted that analysis—and any other work associated with the war in Vietnam—stopped.1 The group dragged signs, sawhorses, and a steel crane boom from a nearby construction site onto Oregon Expressway, a major east–west thoroughfare.

The team also included the expert system designer Peter Deutsch; the top design engineer Richard Shoup, who would go on to win an Emmy for his work in color graphics; the elite programmer Jim Mitchell; and Charles Simonyi, who is best known for writing Microsoft Word after he left PARC. Taylor would call the Berkeley contingent “the cadre of my computer science lab” at PARC.22 Back near the PARC offices, Taylor paid a call to Engelbart’s lab at SRI and tapped Bill English, who had built the prototype of the first mouse and organized the technical production of the 1968 Mother of All Demos. English, in turn, recruited other members of Engelbart’s lab; fifteen would join PARC, most in the systems science lab. Taylor never considered wooing Engelbart because Taylor wanted what he called “hands-on engineers,” and Engelbart was anything but. “He was a visionary, and if there was anything this group didn’t need, that was another visionary,” Taylor says.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Engelbart, an angular man who spoke quietly and efficiently, took the stage decked out in microphone and headphones, and seated himself in front of a bizarre device that featured a keyboard and other odd implements. Behind him was a screen, on which much of the demonstration would play out. * * * Figure 70. The mother of all demos The input devices used by Douglas Engelbart at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference when he put on “the mother of all demos” (Courtesy of Doug Engelbart) The demo was like opening a window into the future. It showed how a computer could deal with common chores like planning one’s tasks for the day. Engelbart kept all this information in an electronic document he could organize and examine in many different ways.

—Steve Jobs The Apple II had taken the nascent personal-computer industry to a new level of product marketing and design. Designed by one genius engineer, it was also technically impressive. But the whole notion of how people interacted with computers was about to undergo a fundamental change. And it would be Apple that would introduce this new vision of the personal computer to the world. The Mother of All Demos It was, by all accounts, one of the most impressive technology demonstrations since the atomic-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. In December 1968, the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) took place in San Francisco, and it included a presentation by Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues from what was then called the Stanford Research Institute, later SRI, in Menlo Park, a few miles up the peninsula from Cupertino.

Douglas Engelbart Tech visionary Engelbart holds his original wood-block mouse alongside a more modern descendant. (Courtesy of Doug Engelbart) Engelbart presented more innovation that day than most acknowledged greats of the field achieved in a lifetime, and he was still a young man. When he finished, the audience gave him a standing ovation. It was later called “the mother of all demos,” and the National Museum of American History (at the Smithsonian) has preserved elements of it. That’s appropriate. It was historic. Computer scientist Alan Kay had seen Engelbart’s technology before the demo. “I knew everything that they were going to show. I had seen it. And yet it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

A year before the ARPANET came online, on 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart, the ultimate unsung conceptual, philosophical and practical pioneer of modern computing, addressed a crowd of 1,000 programmers at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was an event that was to become known as the Mother of All Demos, and during it Engelbart displayed publicly, in one gargantuan techno-splurge, many of the concepts of computing that are so ubiquitous today: the mouse (‘I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,’ Engelbart said that day), video conferencing, hypertext, teleconferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing.

It was the beginning of the modern age.1 Engelbart, in common with many intellectuals and technologists of the era, had attended LSD-assisted creativity sessions in the 1960s at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a California psychedelic research group founded by a friend of Alexander Shulgin’s, Mylon Stolaroff. The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2 Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech.

., 1 Lamere, Timothy, 1 Lancet, The, 1 Latvia, 1 Leary, Timothy, 1, 2 Legalhighguides, 1 Leonhart, Michele, 1 Lewman, Andrew, 1, 2 Liberty Gold, 1 Life magazine, 1 lignocaine, 1 Lilly, John, 1 Linder, David, 1 Linnaeus, Carl, 1 Llewellyn, Max, 1 Lloyd, Daniel, 1 London Toxicology Group (LTG), 1, 2 Loomis, Katrina, 1 lotus leaves, 1 Louwagie, Pam, 1 LSD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and bizarre behaviour, 1 and drug myths, 1 online sales, 1, 2, 3, 4 LSD: The Beyond Within, 1 magic mushrooms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and drug laws, 1 Mail on Sunday, 1, 2, 3 Makriyannis, Alexandros, 1 Manchin, Joe, 1 Mancuso, David, 1 Manson, Alasdair, 1 marijuana (cannabis), 1, 2, 3 American policy on, 1 and decriminalization debate, 1, 2 droughts, 1 as gateway drug, 1 ‘grit weed’, 1 and Mexican drugs war, 1 online sales, 1, 2, 3 popularity, 1 reclassification controversy, 1 replacements, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Markoff, John, 1 Marquis reagent, 1 Mathewson, Nick, 1 May, Theresa, 1 Mayhew, Christopher, 1, 2 MBZP, 1 MDA, 1, 2, 3 MDAI, 1, 2, 3 MDMA (Ecstasy), 1 and bingeing, 1 and Bluelight community, 1 brain effects, 1 compared with mephedrone, 1, 2 compared with methylone, 1 deaths, 1, 2, 3 decline in quality, 1, 2, 3 and decriminalization debate, 1, 2 global drought, 1, 2, 3, 4 increase in supply, 1 interaction with MAOIs, 1 and internet, 1, 2, 3 introduction to Britain, 1 and mass culture, 1, 2 MDA variant, 1, 2 and mephedrone substitution, 1 ‘molly’, 1 online sales, 1, 2, 3 popularity, 1, 2 popularity in China, 1 prices, 1 and safrole synthesis, 1 synthesis, 1 testing, 1, 2, 3 TMA derivative, 1 use in psychotherapy, 1 MDP-2-P, 1 MDPV, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Measham, Fiona, 1 Mendez, Eva, 1 mephedrone (Meow), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 deaths, 1 and decriminalization debate, 1, 2, 3 increased use, 1, 2, 3 marketing and legislation, 1, 2 popularity, 1 replacements, 1, 2, 3, 4 mescaline, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and MDMA, 1, 2, 3 methadone, 1 methamphetamine, see crystal meth methcathinone, 1, 2 methiopropamine, 1, 2 methoxetamine (MXE; 3-MeO-2-Oxo-PCE), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 methylone, see BK-MDMA methylsafrylamin, 1 Mexican drugs war, 1, 2 Miami zombie cannibal case, 1 Milne, Hugh, 1 MixMag survey, 1, 2, 3 mod culture, 1 monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), 1 Moore, Demi, 1 morning glory seeds, 1 morphine, 1, 2 Morris, Hamilton, 1 Morse, Samuel, 1 Mother of All Demos, 1 mreah prew phnom tree, 1 MtGox, 1 Mulholland, John, 1 MySpace, 1 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 1 naphyrone, see NRG-1 Nasmyth, Peter, 1 National Security Agency (NSA), 1 Native Americans, 1 NatWest, 1 NBC Dateline, 1 needle exchange programmes, 1 Negron, Senator Joe, 1 NeoDoves, 1, 2, 3, 4 Netherlands (Holland), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and magic mushrooms, 1 and PMK-glycidate, 1 N-ethyl ketamine, 1 neurotransmitters, 1, 2 see also dopamine; serotonin New Orleans Times Picayune, 1 New York Times, 1, 2 New Yorker, 1 New Zealand, 1 Nichols, David E., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Niemoller, Mark, 1 nitrous oxide, 1 Nixon, Richard, 1, 2 non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), 1 nootropics, 1 norephrenine, 1 norketamine, 1, 2 Norris, Charles, 1 NRG-1 and NRG-2, 1 nuclear magnetic resonance, 1, 2, 3 nutmeg, 1 Nutt, David, 1 Obama, Barack, 1, 2, 3, 4 Operation Adam Bomb, 1 Operation Ismene, 1, 2, 3 Operation Kitley, 1 Operation Pipe Dream, 1 Operation Web Tryp, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 opium, 1 O’Reilly, Tim, 1 organized crime, 1, 2, 3 Orthopedics, 1 Osmond, Humphrey Fortescue, 1, 2, 3 Otwell, Clayton, 1 Oxycodone, 1 packet-switching, 1, 2 Panorama, 1 paracetamol, 1 Parkinson’s, 1 Parry, Simon, 1 party pills, 1 PayPal, 1, 2, 3, 4 Payza, 1 Pecunix, 1 pentylone, 1, 2 pesticides/herbicides, 1, 2 peyote, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pharmacokinetics, 1 phenazepam, 1 phenethylamines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Pillreports.com, 1 Pink Floyd, 1 piperazines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 piperidines, 1 piperonal, 1 piracetam, 1 Platt, Lord, 1 PMA, 1, 2 PMK, 1 Poland, 1, 2 Poppo, Ronald, 1 Portugal, 1 potassium permanganate, 1 Preisler, Steve (Uncle Fester), 1, 2 Price, Gabrielle, 1 Princess Bride, The, 1 Project MKultra, 1 Prozac, 1, 2 psilocin, 1, 2 Psilocybe cubensis, 1 Psilocybe semilanceata (liberty caps), 1 psilocybin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 see also magic mushrooms psychiatric patients, treated with LSD, 1 Punch, 1 punks, 1 Pursat, 1 QR codes, 1 Quick Kill, 1 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 1, 2 Ramsey, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Reding, Viviane, 1 Register, The, 1 Reid, Brian, 1 Reid, Fergal, 1 Research Chemical Mailing List (RCML), 1 research chemicals, 1 arrival of legal highs, 1 custom syntheses, 1, 2 growth in availability, 1 and law enforcement, 1 new compounds statistics, 1 online sales, 1 overdoses and mislabelling, 1, 2, 3 and retail market, 1 and substance displacement, 1 users, 1 Reynolds, Simon, 1 ring substitution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Ritalin, 1 Robbins, Joshua, 1 Robinson-Davis, Trevor, 1 Rolling Stone, 1 Russia, 1 Ryan, Mark, 1 Sabag, Doron, 1 Sabet, Kevin, 1 safrole, 1, 2, 3, 4 salmonella, 1 Saltoun, Lord, 1 Salvia divinorum, 1, 2 Sandison, Ronald, 1 sannyasin, 1 Santos, Juan Manuel, 1 sapo, 1 sarin, 1 Saunders, Nicholas, 1, 2 Saunders, Rene, 1 Schumer, Senator Charles, 1 sclerotia (truffles), 1 scopolamine, 1 Scroggins, Justin Steven, 1 Second World War, 1 Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), 1, 2, 3 serotonin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 serotonin syndrome, 1, 2 Shafer, Jack, 1 Shamen, the, 1 Shanghai, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Shen-Nung, Emperor, 1 Shepton Mallet, 1, 2 Shulgin, Alexander creation of MDMA, 1, 2, 3, 4 creation of methylone, 1 and drug legislation, 1 internet presence, 1 PIHKAL and TIHKAL, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and sex, 1, 2 The Shulgin Index, 1 Shulgin, Ann, 1 Shultes, Richard Evans, 1 Silk Road, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 SKUNK!


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

So for the same reason I was paying attention to Ken Kesey, I was paying attention to Doug Engelbart.” In December 1968, Engelbart demonstrated a number of his experimental ideas to a conference of computer scientists in the San Francisco Convention Center. The event was later dubbed “The Mother of all Demos”, thanks to the fact that it was the world’s first sighting of a number of computing technologies, including the mouse, email and hypertext. According to Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, “Engelbarts support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert” and that support staff included Stewart Brand, who volunteered a lot of time to set up the networked video links and cameras that made Engelbart’s demonstration go off with such a bang.

Newsweek, August 6. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/06/needles-in-a-haystack.html#. Doctorow, Cory. 2008. Little Brother. USA: Tor Teen. Elmer-Dewitt, Philip, David S. Jackson, and Wendy King. 1993. “First Nation in Cyberspace.” Time, December 6. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979768-1,00.html. Engelbart, Douglas. 1968. The Mother of All Demos presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, December 6, San Francisco. http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html. Florin, Fabrice. 1984. Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age. United States. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_1OybdteY. Garreau, Joel. 1994. “Conspiracy of Heretics.”


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

a freeform information organizer that used triples to record relationships between entities. That was a little step toward loosening up people’s thinking in the direction Ted was and is advocating. I am especially grateful to Ted for introducing me to Douglas Engelbart, another amazing visionary, the man who gave “the mother of all demos.” Engelbart showed creative ways of organizing work and ideas, and of collaborating online. An attorney customer of ours created a program to organize legal arguments. His program let a user connect evidence to arguments and arguments to evidence. Primitive personal computer languages made it difficult to store text strings longer than 256 characters, but even with those limitations, the program worked well. 8.6 “Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled” The quotation that serves as the heading for this section appeared on page D2 in the Dream Machines half of Ted’s book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines [1].

It may have been growing on Nelson in 1967, but as I’ve said, the computing world really wasn’t about to swallow the idea of a global hypertext publishing system. Work had not even started on the ARPANET (though Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor had been thinking about it for some time). The computing establishment was still trying to grapple with the concept of a person sitting in front of a screen and exploring information in real-time after Doug’s mother of all demos in 1968. That demo took years—over 20 years—to filter through properly. There was, however, an attempt to build part of Nelson’s vision at Brown University in 1967, and that resulted in a unique and historically important stand-alone system called the Hypertext Editing System. I’m not going to go into that here, however—this is Nelson’s party and I don’t want to poop it.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Engelbart set himself the grandest simulation objective of all: not simply simulating a single mind, but instead trying to simulate the best of group thinking and action, leading to the twined memes of symbiotic participation. Of course, many people, both within and outside of computer science, have been concerned with wicked problems, but few of them ever had the kind of immediate, public impact that Engelbart did in 1968. For that was the year that he gave the “mother of all demos,” a public display of his innovations and vision to an audience of his peers along with a younger generation that he would inspire. At SRI, Engelbart had developed a system featuring scaling windows, graphical user interfaces, live video teleconferencing, and hypertext. A new input device of his invention—an odd-looking thing that could control elements anywhere on the screen—directed all of these windows and operations.

What the Aquarians felt was missing in the Plutocratic era was the sense that humans had invented a new ally, not just for the battlefield, lab, or office, but in making a better, more creative life. 159 GENERATIONS When people talk about Engelbart’s presentation of the NLS (“oN-Line System”) as the “mother of all demos” what they mean is that something about the reality of the thing—the realtime manipulation, the new input device, and the sheer totality of it all—changed the culture of computing right then and there, at least in the heads of those who could understand its implications. One of those best and brightest was the young Alan Kay.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The book you are holding in your bare hands is a compendium of the most told, retold, and talked-about stories in the Valley. They’re all true, of course, but structurally speaking, most of the stories have the logic of myth. The oldest of them have acquired the sheen of legend. Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of his new computer system is known as the Mother of All Demos. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have become archetypes: the Genius Entrepreneur and the Genius Engineer. Collectively, these tales serve as the Valley’s distinctive folklore. They are the stories that Silicon Valley tells itself. To capture them, I went back to the source. I tracked down and interviewed the real people who were there at these magic moments: the heroes and heroines, the players on the stage and the witnesses who saw the stories unfold.

Alan Kay: In that whole area—University Avenue in Palo Alto and then El Camino going all the way into Menlo Park—the counterculture was going on. The NLS debuted at the national computer conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center in December 1968. When the lights came up, Engelbart sat onstage with a giant video screen projected behind him, and a mouse at his fingertips. Then, in what has become known as “the Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart showed off what his computer could do. Stewart Brand: I participated in the demo part of the show itself. Bill Paxton: Stew was behind the camera, and one of the first things he did was focus it on a monitor and zoom in so that the image filled up the entire screen. He was getting this great feedback loop going.

Mike Markkula: But Woz had designed a really wonderful computer. Al Alcorn: That was the trouble with starting a company when you’re under twenty-one. You’re underage. You can’t drink—but you can start a company. The fledgling company made its first big splash in 1977 at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire which—like the Mother of All Demos a decade before—was held at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center. The confab was a coming-out party for the talented hackers of the Homebrew Computer Club, and Apple was just one company out of perhaps a half-dozen Homebrew hopefuls. Jim Warren: I didn’t know anything about producing a computer convention.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

When you look closely, there’s always a logical predecessor and a team of people who worked on the idea for months or years. Jobs paid for a tour of Xerox PARC, saw the idea of a GUI, and licensed it. The Xerox PARC mouse-and-GUI computer was a derivative of an earlier idea, the oN-Line System (NLS), demonstrated by Doug Engelbart in the “mother of all demos” at the 1968 Association for Computing Machinery conference. We’ll look at this intricate history in chapter 6. The next layer to think about is another software layer: a program that runs on top of an operating system. A web browser (like Safari or Firefox or Chrome or Internet Explorer) is a program that allows you to view web pages.

The foundation’s multi-million-dollar trust is designed to keep the power on for decades.)15 Reading about Silicon Valley billionaires’ desires to live to age two hundred or talk with little green men, it’s tempting to ask: Were you high when you thought of that? Often, the answer is yes. Steve Jobs dropped acid in the early 1970s after he dropped out of Reed College. Doug Engelbart, the NASA- and ARPA-funded researcher who performed the 1968 “mother of all demos” that showed for the first time all the hardware and software elements of modern computing, dropped acid at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the legal home for academic inquiry into LSD that lasted until 1967. Operating the camera for Engelbart’s demo was Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog founder who helped organize LSD guru Ken Kesey’s infamous acid tests, massive drug-fueled cross-country bacchanals that were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Engelbart had invented a computer system called NLS (oNLine System) in the late 1960s, a predecessor to the modern personal computer in both form and philosophy, and the first system to incorporate a mouse and a keyboard into its design. NLS was so visionary that the first time Engelbart presented it in public is generally known in tech history as “the Mother of all Demos.” At the Augmentation Research Center, the lab above Jake’s Stanford office, Engelbart’s team of engineers and computer science researchers were busy imagining the future. “He would come down and say, ‘What are you doing?’” Jake remembers. “And I’d say, ‘What are all those people doing upstairs, staring at television sets?’”

“looking kind of like unmade beds”: Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, “Oral History of Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler: Interviewed by Marc Weber,” September 10, 2009, Computer History Museum, 4, www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories. While doing graduate work: Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler, “Interview by Janet Abbate,” IEEE History Center, July 8, 2002, http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Elizabeth_%22Jake%22_Feinler. Realizing she was more interested: Ibid. “Mother of all Demos”: It also ran on an SDS-940—and according to some accounts, the very same machine that eventually made its way to Resource One. “He would come down and say”: Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017. The connection crashed halfway through: Leonard Kleinrock, “An Early History of the Internet [History of Communications],” IEEE Communications Magazine 48, no. 8 (August 2010).


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Engelbart strove to make computers more usable and easier to operate for nonprogrammers, based on his belief that they would be most transformative when they were “boosting mankind’s capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” Engelbart’s most important innovations were revealed in spectacular fashion in a show that was later christened as the “Mother of All Demos.” At a conference organized by the Association for Computer Machinery, jointly with the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers on December 9, 1968, Engelbart introduced the prototypical computer mouse. This contraption, consisting of a big roller, a wooden-carved frame, and a single button, looked nothing like the computer mouse we are used to today, but with wires sticking from its back, it did look enough like a rodent to get the name.

This contraption, consisting of a big roller, a wooden-carved frame, and a single button, looked nothing like the computer mouse we are used to today, but with wires sticking from its back, it did look enough like a rodent to get the name. It transformed what most users could do with computers at one fell swoop. It was also the innovation that propelled Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s Macintosh computers ahead of PCs and operating systems based on Microsoft. Other Engelbart innovations, some of them also showcased at the Mother of All Demos, include hypertext (which now powers the internet), bitmapped screens (which made various other interfaces feasible), and early forms of the graphical user interface. Engelbart’s ideas continued to generate several other advances, especially under the auspices of the Xerox company (and many of these ideas were again critical for Macintosh and other computers).

MIT math professor Norbert Wiener brilliantly warned in 1949 about a new “industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.” 25. An imaginative drawing of Jacques de Vaucanson’s digesting duck. 26. Human-complementary technology: Douglas Engelbart’s mouse to control a computer, introduced at the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968. 27. So-so automation: customers trying to do the work, and sometimes failing, at self-checkout kiosks. 28. Facebook deciding what is and what is not fit for people to see. 29. Monitoring workflow inside an Amazon fulfillment center. 30. Digital surveillance with Chinese characteristics: a machine for checking social credit scores in China. 31.


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Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Sutherland supervised the computer graphics PhD thesis of Ed Catmull, the Pixar founder, who has said he was “profoundly influenced” by the DARPA model of nurturing creativity. DARPA funded another engineer, named Douglas Engelbart, who built the first computer mouse, the first bitmapped screens (early graphical interfaces), the first hypertext links, and demonstrated them in 1968 at what computer scientists now refer to as the “Mother of All Demos.” In 1970, much of Engelbart’s team left and joined a newly created research group, led by another former DARPA program manager, Bob Taylor. That was Xerox PARC—the birth center of much of the early personal computer industry. Taylor said he modeled that legendary research group on “the management principles developed at DARPA.”

NY Times, Nov. 25, 1957. Dugan, Regina E., and Kaigham J. Gabriel. “‘Special Forces’ Innovation.” Harv. Bus. Rev., Oct. 1, 2013. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. Macmillan, 1994. Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late. 1998. Touchstone, 1996. Hern, Daniela. “The Mother of All Demos, 1968.” WIRED, Dec. 13, 2013. Hill, Linda A., et al. “Collective Genius.” Harv. Bus. Rev., June 2014. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning. HarperCollins, 1999. Jacobsen, Annie. The Pentagon’s Brain. Little, Brown, 2015. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

The technology journalist Steve Levy cemented the trajectory from Engelbart to PARC to Apple with his 1994 book Insanely ­Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer PLATO Builds a Plasma Screen 191 That Changed Every­thing. Levy characterized Engelbart’s 1968 per­ for­mance as “the ­mother of all demos,” and wrote that “the next leap ­toward Macintosh would originate only a few miles from Engelbart’s lab . . . ​k nown to computer-­heads everywhere as PARC. It would become famous, but not quite in the way its parent com­pany intended.”100 Apple strug­gled during the mid-1990s, only to stage a dramatic comeback with the return of Steve Jobs in 1997, the release of the iMac in 1998, and the introduction of the iPod in 2001.

Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999); Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the ­Future: How Xerox In­ven­ted, and Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (New York: W. Morrow, 1988). 100. Steven Levy, Insanely ­G reat: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Every­thing (New York: Penguin, 2000), “­mother of all demos” on 42, PARC quote on 51. 101. Malcolm Gladwell, “Creation Myth: Xerox PARC , Apple, and the Truth about Innovation,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011, http://­w ww​.­newyorker​.­com​ /­magazine​/­2011​/­05​/­16​/­creation​-­myth. 102. Alex Soojung-­K im Pang, Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley, online proj­ect documenting the history of the Macintosh, http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu​/­dept​/­SUL​/­library​/­mac​/­index​.­html; Jobs’s visit to PARC addressed in “The Xerox PARC Visit,” http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu ​/­dept ​/­SUL​ /­library​/­mac​/­parc​.­html, archived at perma.cc/48DZ-­Z8ZE. 103.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

He edited a grocery list. He jumped his cursor from place to place on the screen by moving a square wooden box that fit under his palm, with wheels on its bottom and a cord trailing from its rear. Engelbart called it a “mouse.” The presentation went down in Silicon Valley history as “the mother of all demos.” The inventions unveiled by Engelbart were a preview of a world still two and three decades in the future: the mouse, interactive computing, hyperlinks, networked video and audio. But for all its envelope-pushing vision, the demo also was important in showing how these futuristic devices could work in an ordinary office or household.

Only three months after “Spacewar” appeared in print, the PARC team produced a prototype desktop computer. Called the Alto, the machine featured a keyboard and screen. It had a mouse. It had a graphical interface instead of text. Documents appeared on the screen looking just like they would when printed on paper. The machine even had electronic mail. Unveiled less than five years after the mother of all demos, it took Engelbart’s tools of the far-out future and put them in a machine that could fit on an office desk. It was unlike nearly every other computer in existence, in that you did not need to be a software programmer to use it.8 BEING TOM SWIFT Beyond the leafy surroundings of Xerox’s dream factory, Lee Felsenstein’s quest for people-powered computing continued.

At age twelve, he’d run out of parts for an electronics project. So he cold-called HP, requested to be put through to Bill Hewlett, and proceeded to ask the tech titan if he had any parts to spare. He got them, and Hewlett offered the cocky middle-school kid a summer job. As Doug Engelbart was putting on the mother of all demos and prototyping the first computer mouse, Jobs was a floppy-haired regular of the Homestead High School Computer Club. While Xerox was establishing PARC and developing graphical user interfaces, Jobs was phone phreaking and fixing broken stereos for his classmates. In appearance and worldview, he was miles away from the clean-cut engineers who’d peopled the electronics industry for decades.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Balance that against the 3.8 million people who earned a living by driving commercially in the United States in 2012.10 Driverless cars and trucks would potentially displace many if not most of those jobs as they emerge during the next two decades. Indeed, the question is more nuanced than one narrowly posed as a choice of saving lives or jobs. When Doug Engelbart gave what would later be billed as “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968—a demonstration of the technologies that would lead to personal computing and the Internet—he implicitly adopted the metaphor of driving. He sat at a keyboard and a display and showed how graphical interactive computing could be used to control computing and “drive” through what would become known as cyberspace.

., 240–241 DARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency as precursor to, 30, 110, 111–112, 164, 171 ARPAnet, 164, 196 autonomous cars and Grand Challenge, 24, 26, 27–36, 40 CALO and, 31, 297, 302–304, 310, 311 Dugan and, 236 Engelbart and, 6 Licklider and, 11 LRASM, 26–27 Moravec and, 119 Pratt and, 235–236 Robotics Challenge, 227–230, 234, 236–238, 244–254, 249, 333–334 Rosen and, 102 Taylor and, 160 Darrach, Brad, 103–105 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 105, 107–109, 114, 143 DataLand, 307 Davis, Ruth, 102–103 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A” (Barlow), 173 DeepMind Technologies, 91, 337–338 Defense Science Board, 27 de Forest, Lee, 98 “demons,” 190 Dendral, 113–114, 127 Diebold, John, 98 Diffie, Whitfield, 8, 112 Digital Equipment Corporation, 112, 285 direct manipulation, 187 Djerassi, Carl, 113 Doerr, John, 7 Dompier, Steve, 211–212 Dreyfus, Hubert, 177–178, 179 drone delivery research, 247–248 Dubinsky, Donna, 154 Duda, Richard, 128, 129 Dugan, Regina, 236 Duvall, Bill, 1–7 Earnest, Les, 120, 199 Earth Institute, 59 Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (EG&G), 127 e-discovery software, 78 E-Groups, 259 elastic actuation, 236–237 electronic commerce, advent of, 289, 301–302 electronic stability control (ESC), 46 Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer (EPAM), 283 “Elephants Don’t Play Chess” (Brooks), 201 Eliza, 14, 113, 172–174, 221 email, advent of, 290, 310 End of Work, The (Rifkin), 76–77 Engelbart, Doug. see also SRI International on exponential power of computers, 118–119 IA versus AI debate and, 165–167 on intelligence augmentation (IA), xii, 5–7, 31 Minsky and, 17 “Mother of All Demos” (1968) by, 62 NLS, 5–7, 172, 197 Rosen and, 102 Siri and, 301, 316–317 Engineers and the Price System, The (Veblen), 343 Enterprise Integration Technologies, 289, 291 ethical issues, 324–344. see also intelligence augmentation (IA) versus AI; labor force of autonomous cars, 26–27, 60–61 decision making and control, 341–342 Google on, 91 human-in-the-loop debates, 158–165, 167–169, 335 of labor force, 68–73, 325–332 scientists’ responsibility and, 332–341, 342–344 “techno-religious” issues, 116–117 expert systems, defined, 134–141, 285 Facebook, 83, 156–158, 266–267 Fast-SLAM, 37 Feigenbaum, Ed, 113, 133–136, 167–169, 283, 287–288 Felsenstein, Lee, 208–215 Fernstedt, Anders, 71 “field robotics,” 233–234 Fishman, Charles, 81 Flextronics, 68 Flores, Fernando, 179–180, 188 Foot, Philippa, 60 Ford, Martin, 79 Ford Motor Company, 70 Forstall, Scott, 322 Foxconn, 93, 208, 248 Friedland, Peter, 292 Galaxy Zoo, 219–220 Gates, Bill, 305, 329–330 General Electric (GE), 68–69 General Magic, 240, 315 General Motors (GM), 32–35, 48–50, 52, 53, 60 Genetic Finance, 304 Genghis (robot), 202 Geometrics, 127 George, Dileep, 154 Geraci, Robert, 85, 116–117 Gerald (digital light field), 271 Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (Berkeley), 231 Gibson, William, 23–24 Go Corp., 141 God & Golem, Inc.


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Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Not only had Engelbart introduced the world to the notion of the computer as a personal assistant controlled by a mouse, keyboard and cursor, he’d shown them a graphical user interface which formed the basis of the ‘windows’ he’d been manipulating, hyperlinks and the concept of the networked online realm we know today as the Web. It would become known, in Silicon Valley, as ‘the mother of all demos’. Up on that screen, Engelbart the crackpot had, in the memorable phrase of one observer, been ‘dealing lightning with both hands’. It wasn’t just that the technology was new, the foundational concept behind it was revolutionary. Here, for the first time, was computing that had been designed to be personal.

Book Six: The Digital Self A man, Doug Engelbart, appearing in a headset: My account of the story of Doug Engelbart, ARC, EST and Stewart Brand was mostly sourced from: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005); From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006); The Network Revolution, Jacques Vallee (Penguin, 1982); Bootstrapping, Thierry Bardini (Stanford University Press, 2000); ‘Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the Knowledge Workshop’, Thierry Bardini and Michael Friedewald, History of Technology (2003), 23, pp. 191–212; ‘Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy’, Tia O’Brien, Mercury News, 3 March 2013. A video of Engelbart’s presentation is widely available online. The account I’ve given in the text has been lightly edited for sense and concision. audience considered Engelbart a ‘crackpot’: ‘The Mother of All Demos – 150 years ahead of its time’, Cade Metz, Register, 11 December 2008. John Markoff has called ‘a complete vision of the information age’: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005), p. 9. In 1968, the year of the demo, the Institute’s co-founder Michael Murphy had written: ‘Esalen: Where Man Confronts Himself’, Michael Murphy, Stanford Alumni Almanac, May 1968.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

In 1968, an idealistic computer scientist named Doug Engelbart brought together hundreds of interested industry onlookers at the San Francisco Civic Center—the same civic center where the iPhone 7 demo was made nearly forty years later—and introduced a handful of technologies that would form the foundational DNA of modern personal computing. Not only did Engelbart show off publicly a number of inventions like the mouse, keypads, keyboards, word processors, hypertext, videoconferencing, and windows, he showed them off by using them in real time. The tech journalist Steven Levy would call it “the mother of all demos,” and the name stuck. A video feed shared the programs and technologies being demoed onscreen. It was a far cry from the more polished product launches Jobs would become famous for decades later; Engelbart broadcast his own head in the frame as, over the course of an hour and a half, he displayed new feats of computing and made delightfully odd quips and self-interruptions.

He imagined people logging on to the same system to share information to improve their understanding of the world and its increasingly complex problems. He advocated something a lot like the modern internet, social networking, and a mode of computing that, through the smartphone, has indeed begun the supplanting of the PC as the primary way we most often trade information. Though Engelbart’s mother of all demos became legendary among the computer crowd, it was an outsider, it seems, who would turn Steve on to the format he later became famous for. Apple expert Leander Kahney says that Jobs’s keynotes were the product of CEO John Sculley: “A marketing expert, he envisioned the product announcements as ‘news theater,’ a show put on for the press.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

LINKING: An NLS "link" was a character string in a statement indicating a cross-reference to another statement, whether in the same file or not. The text of the link was readable by both the user and the machine. The command "Jump to Link," followed by the selection of the link, displayed the reference statement. The use of interfile links allowed NLS users to construct large linked structures made of many files: hypertext. THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS By 1968, with the combination of the chord keyset, mouse, CRT display, and hypertext, Engelbart and his crew at SRI had concrete results to show the world. "By 1968 we had a marvelous system," Engelbart later recalled. "A few people would come and visit us, but we didn't seem to be getting the type of general interest that I expected."

As a result, "I was looking for a better way to show people, so we took an immense risk and applied for a special session at the ACM/IEEE-Computer Society Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968"-the conference of the Association for Com- puting Machinery and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Every book devoted to personal computing at some point reports this fa- mous presentation, which Douglas Engelbart and his staff offered at the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference on December 9, 1968, later dubbed "the SRI and the oN-LIne System 139 mother of all demos" by Andries van Dam, as indeed it was, with the likes of Microsoft and Apple eventually building on the basis of innovations first in- troduced there. Reiterating such a pervasive generic formula in accounts of the history of the personal computer seems obligatory. In place of yet another reci- tation of one of the computer community's foundational tribal tales, however, here is Engelbart's own account of the first time that the personal interface was publicly presented to the world outside of the laboratory, assembled from rec- ollections published in 1988 (Engelbart 1988, 202- 6) 21 and an oral history interview that Henry Lowood and Judy Adams conducted in 1987 (Engelbart 199 6 ).22 What do you do to get people going on augmentation kinds of things?


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Engelbart was a dreamer who envisioned a style of computing that was instantly responsive to a user who would interact with the machine through a mouse, a keyboard, and a screen. It would be almost two decades until this became the standard way that personal computers were used by the general public. But Brand was one of the few humans on the planet given an inkling of what was around the corner. In December, at an event that would later be called the Mother of All Demos,[17] Engelbart sat onstage at the conference in front of a giant video screen and introduced this new style of computing to the world. Even computer scientists had not seen computer mice and interactive displays before, nor had they learned about the hypertext concept for linking documents that would decades later become the basis of the World Wide Web.

., 215, 228 Curwen, Darcy, 22, 23 cybernetics, 2, 4, 169, 208, 213, 216–17, 226, 273 Cybernetics (Wiener), 169, 226 cyberspace, 54, 84, 212, 240, 254–55, 258, 261, 279, 298–99 anonymity and pseudonymity in, 266 dangers of, 293, 315 dystopian aspects of, 308, 310–11 gold rush mentality and, 293, 323 impact of, 295–96 SB and, 4, 251–52, 282, 293 see also internet D Dalton, Richard, 261 Daumal, René, 186 Deadheads, 265–66 Defense Department, US, 315, 338 de Geus, Arie, 274, 285, 289 Delattre, Pierre, 47, 74 deserts, SB’s attraction to, 108–10, 114 Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 181 desktop publishing, 164–65 Detroit Free Press, 10, 172–73 Dick Cavett Show, SB’s appearance on, 192 Diehl, Digby, 200 Diggers, 206 Direct Medical Knowledge, 326, 333, 342 DiRuscio, Jim, 324–25 Divine Right’s Trip (Norman), 193, 223 DNA Direct, 343 Dome Cookbook (Baer), 162, 180 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 28 dot-com bubble, 296, 326, 333–34, 348 Doubleday, 253, 256, 257 Drop City (commune), 154, 162 “Drugs and the Arts” panel (SUNY Buffalo), 177 Duffy, Frank, 319 Durkee, Aurora, 180 Durkee, Barbara and Stephen, 61, 105, 119–20, 137, 139, 162, 177, 179, 180, 186, 229 Garnerville studio of, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7 SB’s friendship with, 51–52, 59–60, 66, 67, 133 in USCO, 106–7 Dvorak, John, 259, 260 Dymax, 147–48 Dynabook, 212 Dyson, Esther, 315, 325 E Eames, Charles, 44–45, 96, 113 Earth, viewed from space: SB’s campaign for photograph of, 134–35, 164 SB’s revelatory vision of, 1, 6, 362 Earth Day (1970), 182, 190, 364 Edson, Joanna, 75–76 Edson, John, 14, 18–20, 38–39, 75 education: intersection of technology and, 144, 145 see also alternative education movement; learning, act of Education Automation (Fuller), 169 Education Innovations Faire, 149 Ehrlich, Paul, 46, 177, 341, 360–61, 364 SB as influenced by, 28, 45, 47, 187, 188, 206, 222–23 EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), 240, 251–52, 264, 266 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 5, 88, 111, 121, 125, 170, 181 “Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant, The” (Fortune profile of SB), 297 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 325 endangered species, 2, 360–61 Engelbart, Douglas, 83, 138, 146, 151–53, 158, 186–87, 230, 292, 361 “Mother of All Demos” by, 171–72 oNLine System of, 151, 156, 197, 212 SB influenced by, 150, 153, 185, 364 English, Bill, 160, 171, 185, 203, 211 English, Roberta, 160 Eno, Brian, 305, 306, 314, 319, 320, 325, 327, 336, 342, 353, 354 “Environmental Heresies” (Brand), 341–42 environmental movement, 2, 71, 159, 204 activist approach to, 181–82, 187, 188, 201–2, 297, 347 conservation vs. preservation in, 340 SB’s break with, 246, 336, 341, 347 SB’s role in, 4, 9–10, 180, 181–82, 201, 202, 204–7, 284, 347 Esalen Institute, 71–72, 84, 138, 176, 185 Esquire, 88, 146, 183, 247, 250 Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 286 Evans, Dave, 146, 156, 180, 185–87, 212 Exploratorium, 194–98 extinct species, revival of, 359–60 F Fadiman, Jeff, 38, 44, 59, 62–63, 64 Fadiman, Jim, 72–73, 77–78, 80, 84, 89, 97, 98, 101 Fall Joint Computer Conference (San Francisco; 1968), 171–72 Fano, Robert, 46, 273 Fariña, Mimi, 141, 237 Farm (commune), 257 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 50, 71 Field, Eric, 44, 53 Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco), 125–26, 128, 130 filter bubbles, 279, 308 Fluegelman, Andrew, 220, 221–22, 269 Foer, Franklin, 5 Foreign Policy, 356 Fort Benning, SB at, 53–58 Fort Dix, SB at, 58–63, 64, 65–68 Fortune, 297, 339 “Four Changes” (Snyder), 187 Francis, Sharon, 105, 112 Frank, Delbert, 86–87 Frank, Robert, 179, 188, 199–200, 218 Fraunhofer, Joseph Ritter von, 108 Free Speech Movement, 135, 175 From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), 304–5 “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise” (Brand; unpublished), 45–46, 208 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 355–58 Fuller, Buckminster, 134, 147, 162, 169, 175, 176, 217 SB influenced by, 132, 138, 146, 150, 168–69, 222, 243–44, 363–64 Fulton, Katherine, 318 futurists, 262, 273 SB as, 258–59, 280, 323 G Gaia hypothesis, 230, 349 games, SB’s interest in, 84, 120, 129–30, 149, 210, 211, 217, 219–21, 236–37 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 53 Garcia, Jerry, 128, 158 Garnerville, N.Y., Durkee/USCO studio at, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7, 136, 154 Gaskin, Stephen, 257 Gause, Gregory, 46 GBN, see Global Business Network genetic engineering, 341, 344, 360–61 geodesic domes, 176, 217 Georgia-Pacific, 9, 29 Gerbode Valley, Calif., 219–21, 236–37 Getty Museum, 329 Gibbons, Euell, 138 Gibson, William, 262, 294, 315 Gilman, Nils, 297–98 Gilmore, John, 325, 352 Ginsberg, Allen, 33–34, 50, 69, 77, 94, 177, 237 Global Business Network (GBN), 291, 295–300, 311, 313, 335, 340 Brand and Schwartz as co-founders of, 291–92 climate change scenario of, 338–39 SB consulting position at, 296, 298, 305, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 343, 354 globalization, 295–96, 346 global warming, see climate change GMO foods, 2, 344, 347, 357 Godwin, Mike, 308 Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 237, 360 Gone (Kirkland), 359 Gottlieb, Lou, 140 government, SB’s evolving view of, 166, 227, 348 Graham, Bill, 124, 125, 128, 130–31, 143 Grand Canyon, SB’s visit to, 19–20 Grateful Dead, 24, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 141, 158, 160, 189, 265–66 Great Basin National Park, 329–30 “Great Bus Race, The,” SB at, 181 Gregorian, Vartan, 27 Griffin, Susan, 295, 297 Griffith, Saul, 349–50 Gross, Cathleen, 286, 289 Grossman, Henry, 63 H hackers, hacker culture, 25, 84, 147–48, 150, 261, 267, 268–69, 273, 293, 294 SB’s Rolling Stone article on, 46, 211–13, 217, 250 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy), 266–67, 268, 270 Hackers Conference, 266–70, 326 Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco neighborhood), 74, 75, 128 Halpern, Sue, 241–42 Harman, Willis, 41, 42, 72, 73, 77, 273 Harner, Michael, 101, 118, 129 Harper’s Magazine, 46, 213, 228 SB’s Bateson profile in, 216–17 Whole Earth Epilog proposal of, 218, 219, 222 Harris, David, 149, 162, 299 Harvey, Brian, 268–69 Hawken, Paul, 247–48, 250, 281, 286, 290, 299, 332, 333, 334 Hayden Planetarium, 91, 92, 105 Hayes, Denis, 351 Healy, Mary Jean, 205, 206, 207 Heard, Gerald, 41–42, 84 Hells Angels, 120 Herbert, Anne, 230–31, 241, 255 Hershey, Hal, 183 Hertsgaard, Mark, 357 Hertzfeld, Andy, 267 Hewlett, William, 156 Hewlett-Packard, 147 Hickel, Walter, 206 Higgins Lake, Mich., Brand family camp at, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 30, 209, 289–90, 326, 327 Hillis, Danny, 289, 301, 305, 315, 336 Long Now Clock and, 313–14, 316–17, 325–26, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 362, 363 Thinking Machines founded by, 279–80, 288 Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Smith), 118 Hoagland, Edward, 201 Hoffer, Eric, 32 Hoffman, Abbie, 177–78, 214, 299 Hog Farm commune, 159, 181, 186, 188, 202, 205, 206, 220 Homebrew Computer Club, 147, 158, 198, 230, 266–67 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 220 Hopcroft, David, 275 Hopi Indians, 100, 139, 205 Horvitz, Robert, 6 House Committee on Education and Labor, SB at hearing of, 190–91 Household Earth, see Life Forum How Buildings Learn (SB’s UC Berkeley seminar), 302 How Buildings Learn (BBC documentary), 320 How Buildings Learn (Brand), 291, 300–301, 304–7, 310, 312, 317–19, 323, 324, 331 How to Be Rich Well (SB book proposal), 344–46 Hubbard, Al, 42, 77, 273 Huerfano Valley, Colo., 139–40 Huizinga, Johan, 220 human potential movement, 71, 73, 84 humans: freedom of choice of, 42–43 as morally responsible for care of natural world, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361 SB’s speculations about fate of, 38–39 Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), 160 Hunger Show (Life-Raft Earth), 187–88, 189, 203, 263 Huxley, Aldous, 28, 33, 41, 72, 144, 226 hypertext, concept of, 172, 230, 292, 293 I IBM, 91, 92, 96, 108, 211 I Ching, 89–90, 117, 153, 197, 253 Idaho, University of, 21 identity, fake, cyberspace and, 266 II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand), 46, 213, 217, 221 Iktomi (Ivan Drift), 96–97 Illich, Ivan, 196 Independent, 353 information, personalization of, 279 information sharing, 180 information technology, 299–300, 315 information theory, 273 “Information wants to be free,” 270, 299, 301 information warfare, 315 In Our Time (Hemingway), 11 Institute for International Relations (IIR), 27, 34, 35, 37 Institute for the Future, 315 intelligence augmentation (IA), 83, 185, 187 International Federation of Internal Freedom, 89 International Foundation for Advanced Study, LSD experiments at, 42, 72, 73, 76–82, 273 internet, 146, 151, 279, 293, 314, 316, 326 ARPANET as forerunner of, 212 impact of, 295–96, 323 libertarianism and, 5, 348 see also cyberspace Internet Archive, 330, 332 Internet of Things, 279 Interval Research Corporation, 321–23 “Is Environmentalism Dead?”


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In 1934, Paul Otlet envisioned a scholar’s workstation that turned millions of 3 x 5 index cards into a web of knowledge by using a new kind of relationship known as the “Link.”lxiv In 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined the memex, a machine that enabled its users to share an associative “web of trails.”lxv In the early 60s, Ted Nelson coined “hypertext” and set out to build Xanadu, a non-sequential writing system with visible, clickable, unbreakable, bi-directional hyperlinks. lxvi Figure 3-1. Ted Nelson’s Xanalogical Structure. In 1968, Doug Englebart “real-ized” these dreams by showing hypertext (and most elements of modern computing) in “the mother of all demos.”lxvii Through the 70s and 80s, dozens of protocols and networks were made and merged, and in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web as a public service on the Internet. The rest, as everyone knows, is history. It’s hard to argue with the success of the Internet since, and yet it’s worth reflecting upon what was lost in the translation from idea to implementation.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

AI will help forecast crises like the Zika epidemic and help us focus our time and attention on things that matter most. Quantum computing will give us the computational power to cure cancer and effectively address global warming. The intellectual history of how computers augment the human intellect and build a collective IQ has always fascinated me. Doug Engelbart in the 1960s performed “the mother of all demos,” introducing the mouse, hypertext, and shared-screen teleconferencing. Engelbart’s Law states that the rate of human performance is exponential; that while technology will augment our capabilities, our ability to improve upon improvements is a uniquely human endeavor. He essentially founded the field of human-computer interaction.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Doug called the system he had built the oN-Line System (NLS), and in the 100-minute demonstration that would follow he planned to introduce the world to (in the words of Engelbart’s biographer Thierry Bardini) “windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation, command input, videoconferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.” But for the moment no one was sure that what would later be called the Mother of All Demos would work. Doug had told someone at NASA earlier in the week that he was going to show the system publicly—“Maybe it’s a better idea you don’t tell us, just in case it crashes,” the NASA employee advised him. Doug’s chief engineer, Bill English, had been a theatrical stage manager and knew that the demonstration had to be ready as soon as the audience showed up.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

With his keyboard, his keypad, and his mouse, Engelbart embarked on a journey through information itself. As windows open and shut, and their contents reshuffled, the audience stared into the maw of cyberspace. Engelbart, with a no-hands mike, talked them through, a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos. Engelhart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert. The viewers saw a projection of Doug Engelbart's face, with the text of the screen superimposed on it. At one point, control of the system was passed off, like some digital football, to the Augmentation team at SRI, forty miles down the peninsula.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Felsenstein describes the first time he successfully programmed a computer to type the letter A as a “transcendent experience.” While he was at Ampex, a researcher from Stanford named Doug Engelbart gave a presentation at a conference in San Francisco that would go down in history as “the Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart and McCarthy worked on opposite sides of campus and represented opposite sides of a philosophical divide. While McCarthy wanted to design machines that were powerful enough to replace human intelligence, Engelbart wanted to figure out ways of using computers to augment it. Over the course of ninety minutes, Engelbart set forth the fundamental elements of the modern digital age in a single seamless package: graphical user interfaces, multiple window displays, mouse-driven navigation, word processing, hypertext linking, videoconferencing, and real-time collaboration.

That problem was solved when a programmer at a bustling commune in San Francisco called Project One wangled the long-term lease of an SDS 940 (retail cost: $300,000) from the Transamerica Corporation. This mighty machine—which was twenty-four feet long and required a fleet of air conditioners to stay cool—already had a storied history. It was the first computer designed to support McCarthy’s time-sharing scheme directly. It was also the computer Engelbart had used to power the Mother of All Demos. It was a chunk of hardware with unusually good karma. The hacker subculture incubated at MIT was thriving in places like SAIL, Xerox PARC, and the now legendary garages of Cupertino and San José. Soon Whole Earth Catalog impresario Stewart Brand would unleash this subculture on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Greater Mundania with the ultimate endorsement in Rolling Stone: “Computers are coming to the people.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The internet is a clear example of a technology that originated in the public sector and was consumed by the corporate sector—including the protocols and architecture that make it function. But there is so much more than that. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed off the oN-Line System in what has become known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart and his team had developed a number of technologies at Stanford Research Institute with ARPA funding that went on to define the computing experience: the mouse, the QWERTY keyboard, bitmapped screens, and even the ability of users at multiple sites to edit the same document simultaneously.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

On December 9, 1968, Brand assisted with a talk at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco by Douglas Engelbart, who treated computers as tools for communication and information retrieval, rather than for data processing alone. Along with advising on logistics, Brand operated a camera that provided a live feed from Menlo Park as Engelbart demonstrated windows, hypertext, and the mouse. At first, its impact was limited to a handful of researchers, but the presentation would be known one day as the Mother of All Demos. * * * After the Montreal Expo committee rejected “How to Make the World Work,” Fuller had persistently promoted it elsewhere, and his plan for the World Resources Center was the closest that he ever came to its realization. The name was cumbersome, however, and he wanted something more memorable as he turned seriously to fund-raising.

See also Montreal Expo Dome Montreal Expo, 326, 336, 341, 433 Montreal Expo Dome Coxeter and, 394 design for, 326–328, 336–337 destruction of, 410 Epcot and, 423 Ingber and, 452 Kroto and, 458 photograph of, 341fig reception of, 15, 340–343, 347–348, 358 Sadao and, 353 “moon house,” 320 moon landing, 363 Moore, Don, 316, 349, 570–571n353, 589n415, 595n431 Morgan, Jasper, 161, 164 Morgan, Priscilla, 348, 375 Morley, Christopher amphibious plane and, 213 bathroom project and, 161, 163 “To a Child” and, 79, 151 connections of, 174 death of, 275 geodesic dome and, 226 introduction to, 151 manifesto mailed to, 111 in Midwest, 173 The Proud Shirtfront and, 496n53 relationship with, 156 Morley, Frank, 151 Morris, Delyte, 303–304, 372, 375 Morris, Si, 289 Morton, James Park, 419 Moscow Dome. See American National Exhibition (Moscow) Moscow Palace of Labor, 106 Moses, Robert, 279, 325 Mother Jones, 418 Mother of All Demos, 358 Motherwell, Robert, 402 “Motion Economics” (Fuller and Lacey), 186–187 Mottel, Syeus, 373, 384 Mount Auburn Cemetery, 448 Mount Kisco project, 213 Muller, Franklyn R., 102 Mumford, Lewis, 107, 117, 339–340 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) “Airways to Peace” exhibition at, 213 Allegra and, 214 Bubble House and, 259 Chermayeff and, 220 contemporary architecture show and, 130 DDU and, 175–177 Drexler and, 251 Dymaxion Map and, 188–189 “outside-in” globe from, 227 thirtieth anniversary exhibition and, 304–306 “Music of a New Life, The” (Fuller), 571n355 Musk, Elon, 471, 474 Muskie, Edmund, 359, 381 Myers, Forrest, 334 Myrow, Rachel, 596n432 Naga story, 332, 349–350 Nakagawa, Masato, 238, 239, 239fig nanotechnology, 466 Napier, Susan, 73–74 Narconon, 384 Nation, The, 125, 126, 282, 286–287 National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, 135–136 National Housing Agency, 209 National Institute of Arts and Letters, 355 National Lampoon, 386–387 Nature, 463 Nautilus Motor Inn and Dome Restaurant, 267 Necklace Dome, 235–237, 239–241, 239fig, 248 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 291–292, 324, 597n434 Nelson, George American National Exhibition (Moscow) and, 298 Black Mountain College and, 230 dome design and, 226 Fortune article by, 202 Fuller Research Foundation and, 211 Fuller’s engagement by, 252, 259 Fuller’s resignation and, 207 Fuller’s work with, 219–220, 221–222 “storage wall” system and, 532n202 “waterless” toilet and, 595n431 Nelson, Paul, 112 Nelson, Ted, 484n6 neo-futurism, 468 Nervi, Pier Luigi, 316 Nesmith, Jonathan, 596n432 Nesmith, Michael, 596n432 Neumann, Adam, 471 Neutra, Richard, 126, 127, 161 New Alchemy Institute, 441 New Dimensions, 408 “New Forms vs.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

In fact, as historian Ronald Kline describes, the entire enterprise was a public relations stunt, the construction of the robot financed by Life magazine, which planned to run an article on cybernetics.41 Wiener’s demonstration machine presaged future spectacles of human–machine interaction like early Silicon Valley icon Douglas Engelbart’s “mother of all demos,” which first showcased several aspects of a functional personal computer experience in 1968. Figure 1.2 Norbert Wiener and his “moth” circa 1950. Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images. The theoretical aspirations of cybernetics were always dependent on material implementation, a fact that has challenged generations of artificial intelligence researchers pursuing the platonic ideal of neural networks that effectively model the human mind.42 Kline reports that Life never ran photos of Wiener’s moth because an editor felt the machine “illustrated the analogy between humans and machines by modeling the nervous system, rather than showing the human characteristics of computers, which was Life’s objective.”43 In the end, Wiener had built a bug.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

It seems very likely that at some point people will discover better ways to interact meaningfully with one another at a distance using IT, as new applications develop and the workforce becomes populated by people who grew up with online social lives and hobbies. The question of how people use technology to boost what some call “collective intelligence” has a long history: it lies behind the famous “mother of all demos,” the 1968 presentation in which Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the world’s first instances of videoconferencing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and electronic collaboration. Collective intelligence is intimately entwined with the development of Internet phenomena like Wikipedia, and it continues to evolve in the form of platforms like Slack and GitHub.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

A puckish visionary who generated fun and ideas over many decades, Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in Palo Alto. He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival, appeared in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and worked with Doug Engelbart to create a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies called the Mother of All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called hackers—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.” Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog.

(film), 432–33 Moore, Fred, 59–60, 61 Moore, Gordon, 9–10 Moore, Henry, 151 Moore’s Law, 10 Morgan Stanley, 104 Morita, Akio, 361 Moritz, Michael, 90, 106–7, 139, 140 Morris, Doug, 399–401, 403, 479 Morrison, Van, 411 Mossberg, Walt, 379, 463, 491, 503, 531 MOS Technologies, 60 “Mother” (song), 51 Mother of All Demos, 58 Motorola, 335, 446–47, 465–66 6800 microprocessor of, 60 6809 microprocessor of, 109–10 68000 microprocessor of, 110 Motorola Starmax, 447 Motown, 399 Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot (Restak), 424 MP3 (music format), 383, 385–87 MTV, 166 Mucusless Diet Healing System (Ehret), 36 Müller, Marcel, 38 Mumford, Lewis, 57 Murdoch, James, 504, 508 Murdoch, Rupert, 504, 507–9 Murray, Joyce, 206 Murray, Mike, xv, 139, 152, 195–96, 197, 200, 203–4, 206 Muse (band), 498 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 445 music industry, 394–95, 398, 399–400, 503 MusicMatch, 406 MusicNet, 395, 403, 404 Myth of the Machine, The (Mumford), 57 Napster, 382, 394, 402 Narcissistic Personality Disorder, 265–66 NASDAQ, 379 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 8–9 National Medal of Technology, 192–93 National Press Club, 228 National Security Agency, 241 National Semiconductor, 75, 79, 296, 297 NBC, 400 Negroponte, Nicholas, 185 Nepal, 106 netbook concept, 494 Netflix, 545 Netscape, 291 Neville Brothers, 410 Newman, Randy, 288, 432 News Corp., 507–8 newser.com, 523 Newsweek, 165–66, 218, 236, 290, 323, 355, 393, 445, 494, 495–96 Newton (Apple), 308–9, 338, 385 Newton, Isaac, 69 New York Post, 507 New York Times, 228, 233, 281, 290, 291, 384, 408, 411, 451, 478, 494, 498, 504–5, 516 NeXT, xviii, 166, 245, 246, 259, 268, 297, 363, 374, 445, 447, 458 Apple and, 213–15, 217–18, 221–22, 298–300, 305–6 Apple’s staff “raid” on, 213–15 bundled features of, 224–25, 234 circuit board of, 222, 233–34 design of, 222–23 electronic book of, 234–35 failure of, 293–94 finances of, 226–28 Gates and, 229–30, 236–37 headquarters of, 223–24 IBM and, 231–32 idea behind, 211–12, 214 late release of, 234–36 launch of, 232–35 Lewin and, 212–13, 224 licensing issue and, 231–32 logo of, 219–21 matte finish of, 223 Microsoft and, 236–37 name of, 219 NextStep system of, 231–32, 294 operating system of, 366 optical disk of, 234–35 Perot and, 227–28 price of, 235 reaction to, 236 retreats of, 226 sales of, 237 unseen craftsmanship in, 223 Ng, Stan, 387 Nicks, Stevie, 479 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119 Nine Inch Nails, 397 1984 (Orwell), 162 Nocera, Joe, 223, 451, 478 Noer, Michael, 497–98 No Line on the Horizon (U2) 424 Norton, Jeffrey, 494 Novel (parlor game), 548 Noyce, Robert, 9–10, 121, 537 Obama, Barack, 495, 497, 555 SJ’s dinner for, 545–47 SJ’s meeting with, 544–45 Obama administration, 258 Oh Mercy (Dylan), 412 Omen, The (film), 69 “One Too Many Mornings” (song), 416 Ono, Yoko, 180, 331, 374, 418 OpenMind (mental health network), 265 Oppenheimer, J.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

As New York Times reporter John Markoff puts it, “Every significant aspect of today’s computing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half.”15 Some members of that audience became enthusiastic converts to the digital revolution. Brown University computer science professor and early hypertext pioneer Andy van Dam was there and subsequently dubbed the event “the Mother of all Demos.” Also in attendance were a few key members of the original NLS team, who migrated over to Xerox’s PARC research division under the direction of Alan Kay, with whom they began developing the first true personal computer, the Alto. Stewart Brand, who was of course there, later brought the novelist and ur–Merry Prankster Ken Kesey over to look at the system; Kesey promptly dubbed it “the next thing after acid.”16 By the early 1970s, a “People’s Computer Center” had appeared in Menlo Park, providing access to rudimentary computer tools that would allow customers to play games or learn to program.


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Local newspaper articles that preceded the conference noted that there would be discussions of the privacy implications of the use of computers, and a public forum, “Information, Computers and the Political Process,” would feature broadcaster Edward P. Morgan and Santa Clara County’s member of the House of Representatives, Paul McCloskey Jr. But Engelbart stole the show. In the days afterward, the published accounts of the event described nothing else. Years later, his talk remained “the mother of all demos,” in the words of Andries van Dam, a Brown University computer scientist. In many ways, it is still the most remarkable computer-technology demonstration of all time. “Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s Computer” was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted that Engelbart had said that his group was consciously steering clear of any artificial “brain” or thinking computer.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Mitchell Waldrop (New York: Viking, 2001), explains how the idea of personal computing came to be. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), tells the story of the genius who created the mouse, visualized a networked world of PCs, and gave the Mother of All Demos. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), takes the reader inside the research center in Palo Alto where Steve Jobs saw the future. Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age, by Leslie Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), tells the story of the men and women, some well known, others obscure, who helped to build Silicon Valley.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

There is another contender, which is Doug Engelbart’s famous first demonstration of productivity software in 1968. Doug showed text editing, windows, pointing and selecting things on the screen, collaborative editing, file versions, video conferencing, and many other designs that have become building blocks of our lives. Sometimes Ivan’s demo is called the “best demo ever,” while Doug’s is called “the mother of all demos,” even though Ivan’s was earlier. 6.   Hope it’s okay to include a snarky definition. Snark is one of those qualities that looks better on younger people. As you get older, snark starts to come off as “old fart syndrome” even if you are no more snarky than you used to be. Am in the process of snark quotient self-assessment.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Top down was the past; bottom up was the future. That’s where technology came in. Rossman understood already in 1969 that computers had a key role to play in the future. As the free-speech activist was considering writing a book, the inventor Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as “the mother of all demos,” a now legendary ninety-minute presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Engelbart introduced the prototype of the first mouse and the vision of a personal computer, a computer that could be owned and operated by everybody, not only IBM and the Pentagon. To Rossman, that meant technology wasn’t on the side of authority any longer.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

In this chapter we will look back to some of the first researchers and writers—working in close proximity to one another—who were in a position to glimpse that future, just beneath the surface of the glass. Douglas Englebart’s presentation of his oNLine System (NLS) on December 9, 1968, at a San Francisco computer science conference—known colloquially as “the mother of all demos”—is an obligatory touchstone in this as in so many other computing histories. The NLS demo famously debuted such innovations as the mouse, windows, multimedia, collaborative document editing, and remote videoconferencing. For much of this it relied on software for entering and editing text with a keyboard and rendering that text on what was then a five-inch television screen (for the dramatic public demonstration the screen was projected on a twenty-foot display, itself a notable feat).


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

* During his LSD session, Engelbart invented a “tinkle toy” to toilet train children, or at least boys: a waterwheel floating in a toilet that could be powered by a stream of urine. He went on to considerably more significant accomplishments, including the computer mouse, the graphical computer interface, text editing, hypertext, networked computers, e-mail, and videoconferencing, all of which he demonstrated in a legendary “mother of all demos” in San Francisco in 1968. * Hubbard hated the idea of street acid and the counterculture’s use of it. According to Don Allen, he played a role in at least one bust of an important underground LSD chemist in 1967. Hubbard sent Don Allen to a meeting to pose as a Canadian buyer looking to purchase “pure LSD” from a Bay Area group that included the notorious LSD chemist (and Grateful Dead sound engineer) Owsley Stanley III.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Stewart Brand, who also attended the event, featured it in the January 1970 supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog.14 Even as Brand was helping introduce the members of ARC to the commune-based readership of the Whole Earth Catalog, his connections to the group introduced him to the future of computing. In 1968 Dave Evans recruited Brand to serve as a videographer for an event that would become known as the “mother of all demos.”15 On December 9 of that year, at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)–Computer Society’s Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart and members of the ARC team demonstrated the NLS system to three thousand computer engineers.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Media are things you want to extend into the world of the child.” As 1968 wore on, Kay visited with Papert and the LOGO project in Massachusetts, and then in early December attended a presentation in Palo Alto, California, given by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute on his “NLS” or “oN-Line System.” Known in the history books as “The Mother of All Demos,” the event marked a turning point in thinking about computers, what they could be used for, and how they were best designed. Engelbart walked his rapt audience through a demonstration of a working system that would pave the way for every desktop computer in use today. It was an extraordinary, breathtaking demonstration, and convincingly depicted a future very different from the mainframe-based PLATO IV system, which was still four years away.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Though he later objected to and even tried to obstruct the hippie turn in computing, the pipe-smoking former basketball coach shared the augmentation dream, and in 1968, when Engelbart wanted to show off his first attempt to the public, Taylor awarded the ARC another blank check. The center spent $175,000 in 1968 dollars on the single day’s demo—$1.5 million in 2022 money.9 But Taylor got his money’s worth. The oNLine System (NLS) was a leap forward in computing technology, and if you watch a video of the charismatic Engelbart wielding it at the “Mother of All Demos,” you’ll see that it’s still a somewhat recognizable interface today.10 The mouse moved freely in two dimensions; there were windows and linked hypertext. Engelbart gave the demo on a keyboard-mouse-screen terminal in San Francisco, wirelessly connected to the computer itself at the ARC, in Menlo Park, via microwave transmission.