Douglas Engelbart

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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

To understand the answers to these questions, and with them, the origins of personal computing, it is necessary to begin by understanding the contribu- tions of Douglas Engelbart and the concerns that motivated them. Famous and revered among his peers, Engelbart is one of the most misunderstood and per- haps least-known computer pioneers. This book proposes to remedy this, and not only for the sake of a case study or to claim a spot for Douglas Engelbart in the pantheon of the computer revolution, but also because such an enter- prise teaches us many lessons in the development, diffusion, and effect of the defining technology of the twentieth century: the computer.

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The linkIng and relinking of objects by the Brain IS actually a language, but not a language like ours (since It IS addressIng Itself and not someone or some- thIng outsIde Itself). - PHI LIP K. ole K , Val,s Very few people outside the computer industry know Douglas Engelbart, the leading figure of the Augmentation of Human Intellect project, and among those people, many still credit him only with technological innovations like the mouse, the outline processor, the electronic-mail system, or, sometimes, the windowed user interface. These indeed are major innovations, and today they have become pervasive in the environments in which people work and play. But Douglas Engelbart never really gets credit for the larger contribution that he worked to create: an integrative and comprehensive framework that ties to- gether the technological and social aspects of personal computing technology.

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I The story of the personal interface thus is twofold. It is the story of a technological innovation. At the same time, it is the story of how Douglas Engelbart and the other designers of that technology conceived of the people who would use it. That part of the story involves how they understood humans to live and work, to think and act. It also involves more than that: how they believed humans could do better at living and working, thinking and acting. Both aspects of the story meet in what Douglas Engelbart always called his "crusade. " In the I 9 50'S, computing technology was still in its early stages, character- ized by massive machines devoted to number crunching.

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

See also Steven Levy, Insanely Great (Viking, 1994), 36. 30. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 31. Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” prepared for the director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oct. 1962. 32. Douglas Engelbart to Vannevar Bush, May 24, 1962, MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium, archives, http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium.html. 33. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 2, Jan. 14, 1987. 34. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. 35. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987. 36.

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This section also draws on Douglas Engelbart oral history (four sessions), conducted by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood, Stanford, http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/start1.html; Douglas Engelbart oral history, conducted by Jon Eklund, the Smithsonian Institution, May 4, 1994; Christina Engelbart, “A Lifetime Pursuit,” a biographical sketch written in 1986 by his daughter, http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html#10a; “Tribute to Doug Engelbart,” a series of reminiscences by colleagues and friends, http://tribute2doug.wordpress.com/; Douglas Engelbart interviews, in Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (Next Press, 2009) and http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/; The Doug Engelbart Archives (includes many videos and interviews), http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html; Susan Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July 1997; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 417; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 110; Bardini, Bootstrapping, 138. 23. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986. 24. The Life excerpt, Sept. 10, 1945, was heavily illustrated with drawings of the proposed memex. (The issue also had aerial photographs of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb.) 25. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Smithsonian, 1994. 26. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986. 27. Landau and Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis. 28. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986. 29. The quote is from Nilo Lindgren, “Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop,” Innovation, Sept. 1971, quoted in Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT, 2000), 178.

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Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, http://www.wholeearth.com/. 21. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein. 22. The best account of Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Co-evolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000). This section also draws on Douglas Engelbart oral history (four sessions), conducted by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood, Stanford, http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/start1.html; Douglas Engelbart oral history, conducted by Jon Eklund, the Smithsonian Institution, May 4, 1994; Christina Engelbart, “A Lifetime Pursuit,” a biographical sketch written in 1986 by his daughter, http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html#10a; “Tribute to Doug Engelbart,” a series of reminiscences by colleagues and friends, http://tribute2doug.wordpress.com/; Douglas Engelbart interviews, in Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (Next Press, 2009) and http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/; The Doug Engelbart Archives (includes many videos and interviews), http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html; Susan Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July 1997; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 417; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 110; Bardini, Bootstrapping, 138. 23.

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

Mindful Press, Sausalito 10. Nelson TH (2010) Possiplex: movies, intellect, creative control, my computer life and the fight for civilization. n.p., available at Lulu: http://​www.​lulu.​com/​shop/​ted-nelson/​possiplex/​paperback/​product-14925222.​html 11. Nelson TH (2013) Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Speech at Technology legend: honoring Douglas Engelbart, computer history museum, mountain view California, December 9th 2013. http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​FNCCkhADpiw 12. Smith LC (1991) Memex as an image of potentiality revisited. In: Nyce J, Kahn P (eds) From memex to hypertext: vannevar bush and the mind’s machine.

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Likewise, it is, perhaps, more accurate to claim that we in PARC were less original in the 1970s than we had been in the 1960s when many of the ideas were invented and explored for the first time (Fig. 3.6). Fig. 3.6Some of the precursors of the work at Xerox PARC In the early 1960s, there was an enormous wealth of ways to think about personal computing and networks, including Sketchpad, the very image of personal computing. Some of the personal computing explorers included Douglas Engelbart, of course, and Ted Nelson and Andy van Dam. The Grail Gesture Recognition System on a tablet that was invented the same year as the mouse—1964—and the conventions of making arrows, windows, and so on, including moving and resizing them. All of this was happening at that time: Seymour Papert with his Logo programming language and Turtle graphics; Simula; and some of our own stuff as well, such as the Arpanet, the Flex Machine and its first object-oriented operating system, the idea of Dynabook, and much, much more.

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But learning to see is a chore, so most, especially marketing people, are not interested. This is too bad, especially when we consider the efforts the two-eyed people like Ted have to go through to even have a glimpse happen. One of the keys is for the two-eyed people to turn into evangelists. Both Ted and our mutual hero, Douglas Engelbart, worked tirelessly over their lifetimes to point out that, in this dial-tone world, the emperor not only has no clothes but his cell phone can’t transmit real music. Yes, I’ve mixed a metaphor or two. Another key is to make a working system of the future. This was ARPA’s and especially PARC’s main mission.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

If our failure has become epically ludic, then perhaps it is no longer the dire outcome our forebears fretted over: that failure to survive, as civilization or species, that seemed to hang over the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s worth remembering, as this book reminds us, that this particular fear of ending was the spectre that haunted Douglas Engelbart, sitting in his radio shack somewhere in the South Pacific in 1945. Reading news of the bomb, he came (after any GI’s understandable euphoria) to the recognition that the world must fundamentally change if it wanted to escape burning. The science of industrial destruction would have to yield (and yield to) augmentations of communication and cognition.

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But are we to understand this lineage from a sociological, an archaeological or a zoological perspective? And what is a technical artefact? I need to address these questions here for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend, augment or ‘boost’ our capacity as a species, is integral to the history of hypertext and the NLS system in particular. Traditionally, history has ignored the material dimension of technical artefacts.

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(Duvall 2011) This book investigates both technical vision and technical prototypes, but more important, it investigates the relationship between them. Technical visions are not simply ‘translated’ into artefacts. The process of development is much more tangled than that, and presents its own material and technical limits. We investigate this in more detail in Chapter 3, when discussing Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system. NLS was the computing world’s most influential prototype, yet it was inspired by Vannevar Bush’s vision of Memex. Engelbart updated this design with digital computing technologies. Chapter 4 is on Nelson’s Xanadu, which has never been built in its entirety, yet it has inspired dozens of prototypes.

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

They had a kind of erotics of simulation in mind—the pleasure of doing something and then doing everything with these machines. The possibilities seemed endless. I call the next generation the Aquarians, and they were like painters eyeing a blank canvas or sculptors circling a block of marble. The Aquarians: Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world. —Douglas Engelbart It’s not the technology that lives. It’s the dream that lives. —Alan Kay Doug Engelbart worked in the world that the Plutocrats ruled, but made the world in which we live. He drew inspiration from the visions of the Patriarchs, and they funded his campaign against the culture of the Plutocrats.

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And selling to the masses is one way to be remembered, at least in the United States. Selling to the masses is what Hustlers were born to do. The Hustlers: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? —Bill Gates, 1976 Real artists ship. —Steve Jobs, 1983 162 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE If J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart are obscure talismans even among the best-informed computer users, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are iconic, triumphal nerds.20 Jobs at his height was perhaps the most intriguing businessperson in the world, and one of the few people to have built multibillion-dollar companies in two different industries, with Apple computers and Pixar animated films.

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Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.” 14 . See Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 15 . See John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking, 2005). For a broader sense of the California spiritual landscape, see Erik Davis, Visionary State (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006). 16 .

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

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. 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.

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And Engelbart controlled it all with an extraordinary device called a mouse that had an apparently telepathic link with a dot (they called it a “bug”) that moved around the screen, specifying where instructions would take effect. By using the “mouse,” Engelbart could click on a word and jump to another location in the document or to another document. * * * Figure 71. The first mouse Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1964 as an input device. This first one was carved from a block of wood. (Courtesy of Doug Engelbart) The demonstration got even more interesting when Engelbart introduced one of his team members via a video/audio link. This man also sat in front of a device like Engelbart’s, and wore a microphone and headphones.

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It included collapsible and expandable outline lists, text with embedded links to other documents as in web browsers today, a mouse, a one-handed chording keyboard that left one hand free for the mouse, and live video and audio conferencing with a user in another city. And this was in 1968. * * * Figure 72. 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.

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

Before the arrival of the Xerox scientists and the Homebrew hobbyists, the technologies underlying personal computing were being pursued at two government-funded research laboratories located on opposite sides of Stanford University. The two labs had been founded during the sixties, based on fundamentally different philosophies: Douglas Engelbart’s Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford Research Institute was dedicated to the concept that powerful computing machines would be able to substantially increase the power of the human mind. In contrast, John McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory began with the goal of creating a simulated human intelligence.

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Science fiction writer William Gibson has said, “The future’s already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”5 That observation is particularly true of a tiny microcosm that was as localized but has become as influential in the world as fifteenth-century Florence was when it gave the world the Renaissance half a millennium ago. This book grew out of a spirited dinner held several years ago on a Sausalito, California, houseboat. The evening was an informal reunion of a computer-industry pioneer—Douglas Engelbart—with a small group of people who had once worked for him: Bill and Roberta English and Bill and Ann Duvall. Also present was Ted Nelson, an itinerant writer, inventor, and social scientist who can best be described as the Don Quixote of computing. Nelson was a contemporary of Engelbart in the sixties, and the two men had pursued many of the same innovations.

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In the winter of 1960, Crane’s group was working on a magnetic shift register, one of the key components of a computer. The previous year, he had introduced the idea of an all-magnetic computer at an industry technical conference and now was planning to deliver a report on the group’s work at the Philadelphia meeting. His traveling companion, Douglas Engelbart, was a member of Crane’s small team of engineers that was exploring magnetic storage and magnetic computing systems. The two men frequently socialized and were both devotees of Greek folk dancing, which they performed in their homes on the Midpeninsula. Yet Engelbart presented special managerial headaches for Crane.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

Xerographic reproduction and the versioning of digital objects thus offered contexts for one another, even apart from the idea of digital copying. In this early era of minimal networking, digital copying remained encumbered by the necessity of transporting programs and data on magnetic tape or other hard media. Even the networked contexts of the day prove this point. In 1967 Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute were challenged to provide documentation for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (better known as arpanet ) as it came online. There were a few things they knew for sure: they wanted users to be able to access documentation remotely across the network; they were certain that the distribution of hardcopy documents was also necessary, possibly in the form of microfiche; and they would obviously need a system of documentation that would allow frequent updating.

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A much more direct line of descent— though across a longer span of time—might be drawn between Sketchpad and pdf , in the very least since John Warnock studied at the University of Utah after Sutherland joined the faculty there. What happened between these early page images and the development of pdf was the storied development of personal computers, and there is no need to rehearse that story here, since so many of its features are by now familiar: Douglas Engelbart and the demo; Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and the Alto; Microbrew, Macintosh, and Microsoft.31 N E A R P R I N T A N D B E YO N D PA P E R 121 pdf technology would become both thinkable and desirable in the context of personal computing in the 1980s, and its conception would stem in particular from the emergence of desktop publishing as an application for personal computers toward the middle of that decade.

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Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976 (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003), 64, 65. 26. Ibid., 326. 27. Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad, A Man-­Machine Graphical Communication System,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963. 28. Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 84. See also Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 90–91. 29. Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad, A Man-­Machine Graphical Communication System,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963, 70–71. 30.

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

In April 1963, Kemeny delivered a speech to the board of trustees in which he argued that computing would be a necessary skill for all of Dartmouth’s gradu­ates, regardless of their professional paths.68 He underscored that their immediate access to computing resources was a worthy goal for the college. Kemeny’s conviction on this point set him apart from many other scholars and computing enthusiasts at the time. Better-­k nown computer visionaries such as J. C. R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart envisioned ­futures of computers in the hands of individuals, but they pursued their ideas through small research labs. They worked to improve the technology itself, rather than figuring out a way to bring existing technology to as many p ­ eople as pos­si­ble.69 In contrast, Kemeny displayed a passion for widespread computing born from witnessing the creativity and enthusiasm of a handful of engaged students.

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We even had touch screens installed ­later that year, which as an 11-­year-­old I’m sure I thought ­were the coolest.”96 Meller’s feast-­for-­the-­senses handbook and Fahey’s gaming enthusiasm undermine the most familiar story about where personal computers came from. That story usually features Douglas Engelbart, Xerox PARC, and Steve Jobs—­Silicon Valley characters all. The very short version of that story is that Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of personal computing ­shaped the Alto personal computer built by PARC in the 1970s, and Steve Jobs stole the fire of the Alto—­ namely, the menus and win­dows on its screen and its mouse—­and gave it to the ­people in the form of the Apple Macintosh.

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The commitment to GE equipment was also expressed in Kurtz, Rieser, and Meck, “Application to the National Science Foundation.” 68. Kemeny, Random Essays. 69. M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Co­evolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 70. Kemeny, Random Essays. 71. Kurtz, “BASIC Session,” 519–520. 72. Kurtz, “BASIC Session.” 73. Kemeny, “A Computing Center at a Liberal Arts College.” 74. Kurtz, oral history interview, 25. 75.

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

Stolaroff and Harman had built the institute in order to explore the psychological effects of LSD; by 1962 they were charging subjects like Brand five hundred dollars for a daylong trip guided by one of several local psychologists. The man in charge of Brand’s procedure was Jim Fadiman, who later served for several months at Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center—the division that in 1963 sponsored Douglas Engelbart’s research on networked computing. According to Brand’s journals, he received two doses of LSD, one in a “goblet” and the other, an hour later, by injection. Fadiman and others then had Brand look at a mural, a yin-yang mandala, and a series of other images, including pictures of his family. They played classical music.

…

As journalist John Markoff has shown, industry engineers and hobbyists lived and worked side-by-side in this period, and both were surrounded by countercultural activities and institutions.7 Two of the most influential of these groups in the region maintained offices within a few square blocks of each other and of the offices of the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park. One of the groups consisted of the researchers associated with Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and later Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and the other was made up of computer hobbyists affiliated with the People’s Computer Company and, later, the Homebrew Computer Club. Stewart Brand moved back and forth between these communities, and the Whole Earth Catalog served as inspiration to members of both.

…

In the Bay area in this period, the dynamic of personalization that had long been at work within some parts of the computer industry and the ideals of information sharing, individual empowerment, and collective growth that were alive within the counterculture and the hobbyist community did not so much compete with as complement each other. In Douglas Engelbart’s ARC group, computers had long seemed to be natural tools with which to expand the intellectual capacity of individuals and their ability to share knowledge. This vision had grown out of the research cultures of World War II and the early cold war. In 1946, for instance, while stationed in the Philippines as a Navy radar technician, Engelbart had read Vannevar Bush’s now-legendary Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think.”

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

It is hardwired into an enormous generator of business development and technological innovation, a machine fueled by money, ambition, idealism, and the iron laws of physics. That machine was created, beginning in the crucial period following World War II, to search for old, expensive institutions and burn them to the ground. And in the last several years it has turned its gaze toward the cathedrals of learning. — DOUGLAS ENGELBART grew up during the Great Depression on a farm outside Portland and studied at the nearby land-grant university, Oregon State. He was drafted into the Navy and found himself working as a radar technician on a small island in the Philippines, where he came across an article that had recently been published in the Atlantic: “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush.

…

After the war, Engelbart returned to the West Coast, completed his degree, and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he finished a PhD in electrical engineering with a specialization in computers in 1955. Berkeley hired him as an assistant professor the following year. He was on track to have the paradigmatic research university career, comfortably writing and thinking and teaching for as long as his mind and spirit could sustain him. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Douglas Engelbart walked away from academia, into a life that was similar in some respects and profoundly different in others. In 1957 he went to work at a company that shared the name and purpose of the Cold War university but not its nineteenth-century peculiarities: the Stanford Research Institute. The United States government acted on Vannevar Bush’s recommendations for scientific investment on a gargantuan scale.

…

Moving the box back and forth on a table made the cursor on the screen move in the same direction. Bernard had never seen such a thing before and thought this was a nifty way to interact with computers, much better than doing everything with a keyboard. SRI’s oNLine system would run the new world of networked computers. The wooden box was called a “mouse.” — DOUGLAS ENGELBART never made much money from his inventions. The oNLine system migrated to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which didn’t quite know what to do with it. But two other people did: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who used windows, word processing, and the mouse, among other things, to become the defining IT businessmen of their time.

Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

I have had a number of spiritual brothers, who form a part of this story for the inspirational effects they have had on me. TIM AND DOUG AND STAN Timothy Leary and Douglas Engelbart and Stan Dale have all spontaneously called me ‘brother’. I accept this with honor and pride. (That term of praise triangulates the coordinates of my soul, and almost makes the rest worthwhile.) DOUG ENGELBART ESPECIALLY Doug and I, Marlene and Karen have gotten like family. We have hung out in California, Japan and England. ST. DOUG ! The author and Douglas Engelbart on the patio of Doug's home, August 2010. Unretouched frame selected from video by Marlene Mallicoat; halo is optically authentic.

…

The last slides said CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE—to indicate that users would have ever-changing projects that needed deep support software. Bob Taylor came up and introduced himself. He was a little older than I, with a crew haircut and dark suit; he said he was with ARPA. (I knew that ARPA was funding a lot of basic stuff.) Taylor asked me if I’d heard of Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart, he said, was also working on interactive text systems with screens. (I had thought I was the first; only now did I know there were two of us.) Taylor did not tell me that he himself was Engelbart’s principal sponsor. What would Steven Furth have said? 1965 What would Bob Taylor have said?

…

(So corny! Couldn't put that in a movie.) Suddenly I was a commuter. === Fall 1966 (I was 29) Doug Senses My Hope: Mouse and Skateboard at SRI, 1966 Jovanovich and I flew out separately to California. He wanted to meet someone at Stanford about computer-assisted instruction. I wanted to meet Douglas Engelbart and see a real screen-based text system, which I had so far only imagined. I think I went out a day early, giving me a free day to see Engelbart before the Stanford meeting. I had been in the Bay area once before, but never before with a car, and it was an amazing experience. I think I stayed in Palo Alto, at a wacky motel shaped like a castle.

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

Even so, brilliant people imagined a world where small computers optimized for productivity would be connected on powerful networks. In the sixties, J. C. R. Licklider conceived the network that would become the internet, and he persuaded the government to finance its development. At the same time, Douglas Engelbart invented the field of human-computer interaction, which led to him to create the first computer mouse and to conceive the first graphical interface. It would take nearly two decades before Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law could deliver enough performance to enable their vision of personal computing and an additional decade before the internet took off.

…

(Massive server farms based on PC technology now attract any new application that needs mainframe-class processing; it is a much cheaper solution because you can use commodity hardware instead of proprietary mainframes.) ARPANET, the predecessor to today’s internet, began as a Department of Defense research project in 1969 under the leadership of Bob Taylor, a computer scientist who continued to influence the design of systems and networks until the late nineties. Douglas Engelbart’s lab was one of the first nodes on ARPANET. The goal was to create a nationwide network to protect the country’s command and control infrastructure in the event of a nuclear attack. The first application of computer technology to the consumer market came in 1972, when Al Alcorn created the game Pong as a training exercise for his boss at Atari, Nolan Bushnell.

…

Through the lens of this book, you will get a clear view of the culture and internal practices of Facebook and other platforms. Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, by Adam Fisher (New York: Twelve, 2018), is a collection of interviews and quotes from participants at nearly every stage of Silicon Valley’s development. The book begins in the sixties, with Douglas Engelbart, and marches steadily to the present. The interview with Facebook founders and early employees is essential reading. There are also illuminating interviews with the early people at Google and Twitter. There are two works of fiction that prepared me to recognize the disturbing signals I picked up from Facebook in 2016.

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing by Rachel Plotnick

augmented reality, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, invisible hand, means of production, Milgram experiment, Oculus Rift, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, software studies, Steve Jobs

Jack Geyer, “The Pillow Pilots of the Push-Button Age,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1952: A5. 22. John H. Averill, “Underexercised Nation,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1961: C1. 23. “Even Crossing Street Can Be Big Problem in Push-Button World,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1961: WS5. 24. Douglas Engelbart, quoted in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 99. 25. Engelbart in Bardini, Bootstrapping, 101. 26. Logitech, “Introducing the Most Agile Mouse Ever to Set Foot on a Desktop,” Byte (1998): 1. 27. Soren Pold, “Button,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed.

…

To consider how push-button mechanisms have achieved such an entrenched position in the practices of everyday life, it is critical to consider how designers began to think about buttons as part of computer technologies beginning in the late 1960s. Although this book has treated “digital” operation as a function of the digit—the finger—such a term inevitably recalls the digitalness (consisting of binary 1s and 0s) of computers. Buttons and computation were first significantly linked together in 1968 when Douglas Engelbart created the first prototype for a computer mouse. After eliminating other possible designs to manipulate digital items on computer screens like light pens and light guns, Engelbart settled on the mouse as a suitable concept. He commented about the invention that, “You didn’t have to pick it up and you could put buttons on it, which helped.”24 It is notable that the inventor viewed the mouse, according to one author, as “part of an effort to optimize basic human capabilities in synergy with ergonomically and cognitively more efficiently designed artifacts.”25 Like his predecessors thinking about automobile steering wheels with buttons and electricians considering the placement of push-button light switches, Engelbart concerned himself with how humans could more naturally and strategically engage with computers through their hands as well as their whole bodies as part of systems for communication and control.

…

“President Ballard Addresses Baltimore Section.” N.E.L.A. Bulletin 7, no. 2 (1920): 135–136. Baker, Ray Stannard. “The Automobile in Common Use.” McClure’s Magazine 13, no. 3 (1899): 4. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Barnard, Charles. “Some Queer Houses.” Youth’s Companion 65, no. 51 (1892): 2. Batchelder, Charles Clarence. “The Grain of Truth in the Bushel of Christian Science Chaff.” Popular Science 72, no. 13 (1908): 211–223.

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Notes Essinger: ‘Ever since the late 1950s, this has tended to be the pattern for breakthroughs in computing: they have been the result of collaborative and joint effort by large teams composed of often anonymous people ‌rather than by individual pioneers.’4 Some individual pioneers do stand out, most notably Douglas Engelbart, a visionary engineer driven by a desire to develop computers to help solve the urgent problems facing humanity, rather than just as commercial tools enabling people to work faster. With funding from the US Air Force in the early 1960s, Engelbart, along with engineer Bill English, invented some of the key features that we associate with personal computers ‌today, such as the mouse.5 Up until this point, computers, though immensely powerful, were essentially inaccessible to humans, except to a few initiates possessing sophisticated programming skills.

…

So if we were to present the story of the development of the personal computer as a stage play, it would be a rich and complex drama with a long list of characters. From early scenes featuring Joseph Marie Jacquard and his punched-card technology, the play would go on to include starring roles for Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Thomas John Watson, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Douglas Engelbart and Bill English, with a host of other largely unidentified characters playing crucial supporting roles onstage and off. Toward the end of this rather long drama, there’d be an intriguing subplot about how technological innovator Gary Kildall thought he had a deal with IBM, only to discover his friend Bill Gates had sold IBM an adaptation of Kildall’s own operating system for the first mass-market personal computer.

…

.), The Montreal Protocol. ‌14 Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription (Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998), pp. 76–7. 5 Why Bill Gates Doesn’t Deserve His Fortune ‌1 The story of IBM’s early dealings with Gary Kildall and Bill Gates is recounted in Harold Evans, They Made America (New York: Little Brown, 2004), pp. 402–19. See also Steve Hamm & Jay Greene, ‘The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates’, BusinessWeek, 25 October 2004. ‌2 Evans, They Made America, pp. 402–19. ‌3 James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 37. ‌4 Ibid., p. 249. ‌5 Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 81–102. ‌6 Gar Alperovitz & Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts (New York: The New Press, 2008), p. 58. ‌7 Ibid., pp. 59–61. ‌8 Ibid., p. 60. ‌9 Cited in ibid., p. 63. ‌10 Robert M. Solow, ‘Growth Theory and After’, Nobel lecture, 8 December 1987, http://www.nobelprize.org. ‌11 Herbert A.

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

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.

…

.: Bootstrapping, Thierry Bardini (Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 198–200. Engelbart was treating his people like ‘laboratory animals’: ‘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, at p. 206. who raced back to his company, Apple Computer: Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson (Abacus, 2015), pp. 96–7. Engelbart recalled meeting Jobs in the 1980s: ‘Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy’, Tia O’Brien, Mercury News, 3 March 2013. Fred Turner, would archly note that: ‘Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world’, Carole Cadwalladr, Guardian, 5 May 2013.

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

Classification: LCC T40.B64 M37 2022 (print) | LCC T40.B64 (ebook) | DDC 609.2 [B]—dc23/eng/20211208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039442 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039443 Cover design: Evan Gaffney Cover images: Stewart Brand, (earth) S.E.A. Photo / Alamy Stock Photo Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi pid_prh_6.0_139580513_c0_r0 In memory of Douglas Engelbart, whose ideas, like many things, Stewart Brand discovered early on Contents Prologue 1. Shoppenagon 2. On the Golden Shore 3. Acid 4. American Indian 5. Multimedia 6. Access to Tools 7. CoEvolution 8. Anonymity 9. Learning 10. Float Upstream Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments Author’s Note Brandisms Notes Illustration Credits Index “Throw a Brand in the river and they will float upstream.”

…

The fee was just $140, but it put Brand over the moon. “Dick Raymond for Knighthood,” he wrote in a thank-you note. His Stanford assignment also paid off in a more subtle but ultimately more dramatic way. At the same time that Mike Murphy was concocting Esalen, two Stanford computer scientists, Douglas Engelbart and John McCarthy, were embarking on pioneering technologies that would completely transform the world during the next half century. While McCarthy, who had coined the term artificial intelligence, was trying to build a thinking machine at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), Engelbart was attempting to create a system that extended the human intellect—intelligence augmentation—on the other side of campus.

…

Albrecht, their most experienced computer industry contact, told them they could expect to attract roughly a hundred equipment makers, each willing to spend $50 and $300 for booth space. It would also spotlight the ideas of two men in particular. One was Buckminster Fuller, whom Brand and Nixon approached at Esalen about the idea and who agreed to become a featured speaker. The other was Douglas Engelbart, the idealistic computer scientist who in 1962 had embarked on a plan to give humans powerful new intellectual tools by developing a system that would “augment” the human mind. Engelbart had assembled a small group of young computer hackers just across the railroad tracks from the institute’s offices at the Stanford Research Institute.

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

Realizing she was more interested in information itself than in chemistry, she took a job at Stanford helping scholars with technical research—gathering reprints and running around to different libraries before summarizing her findings on index cards, much as a search engine works today. At Stanford, Jake worked in a basement lab. It wasn’t long before an upstairs neighbor, Douglas Engelbart, began popping down to her office for organizational advice. 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.

…

Whatever it was, it made technical research look boring. One day, when Engelbart came down to visit her office, Jake asked him for a job. He told her he didn’t have one, but he kept her in mind and, six months later, he came back. “I have a job now,” he announced. It had nothing to do with index cards; instead, Douglas Engelbart introduced Jake Feinler to the wild new world of networked computing. Her life would never be the same. In the fall of 1969, one of Engelbart’s machines had been on the receiving end of the first transmission between two host computers on the ARPANET. The connection crashed halfway through, truncating that very first Internet message from LOGIN to the somewhat more prophetic LO.

…

While she was out pitching, she was introduced to Marleen McDaniel, a thirty-year industry veteran, one of the few women at the top of the Silicon Valley food chain. Marleen was a technology industry Zelig: she cut her teeth as a computer girl, a systems analyst and programmer, in the 1960s and spent the 1970s hanging around with the Xerox PARC beanbag crowd. She worked, for a time, with Douglas Engelbart, Jake Feinler’s Stanford mentor, on a failed attempt to commercialize his system. In the go-go years of the 1980s, she joined Sun Microsystems as employee number forty and rode it all the way to the top, “like working on a rocket ship,” she says. By the time she met Ellen, she’d participated in the successful launches of several high-profile startups and was well respected in the valley.

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

The conventional history of the Internet traces its roots through an Anglo-American lineage of early computer scientists like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing; networking visionaries like Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn; as well as hypertext seers like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and of course Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, who in 1991 released their first version of the World Wide Web. The dominant influence of the modern computer industry has placed computer science at the center of this story. Nonetheless Otlet’s work, grounded in an age before microchips and semiconductors, opened the door to an alternative stream of thought, one undergirding our present-day information age even though it has little to do with the history of digital computing.

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Ultimately, that network came to consist of a small group of computing centers 248 T he I ntergalactic N etwor k located at several leading research centers, including MIT, CarnegieMellon, the University of Utah, the Rand Corporation, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. While working with the SRI team, Licklider championed the work of a researcher named Douglas Engelbart, who spent much of the 1960s working on this early proto-hypertext tool known as the oN-Line System (which I will discuss further later). With the financial backing of the U.S. military, Licklider launched a series of landmark projects that would also pave the way for, among other things, the modern UNIX operating system, which provided a template for solving a larger problem: how to engineer a network that allowed a number of far-flung computers—running on different systems and with different operating capacities—to communicate with each other.

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But Bush’s ideas percolated in the background for years, until a new generation of information scientists would build on his vision with the first computer-based hypertext experiments of the 1960s. Years later, Licklider would dedicate his report, Libraries of the Future, to Vannevar Bush. On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart took the stage before a packed house at Brooks Hall Auditorium in San Francisco to give his first public demonstration of the oN-Line System (NLS). Dressed in the white shirt of a working engineer, the soft-spoken former Navy telegraph operator demonstrated a working model of a system that struck many of the idealistic San Francisco counterculture types in attendance as representing nothing short of a revolution in human consciousness.

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

Brand is talking about “Moore’s Law”, a now long-term trend in computer hardware that means computer processing power doubles roughly every two years. Moore’s Law was first identified by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965, who thought at the time that the trend was likely to continue until the min-1970s. In fact, Moore’s law is now expected to hold true until at least 2015. Douglas Engelbart, an electrical engineer who would later catch Brand’s attention, had intuitively understood Moore’s Law many years before it had been put into words, and in the late fifties and early sixties had set about designing the prototypes for components of the personal computers Engelbart was sure would result from this massive scaling of computer power.

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On occasion, the film shows only a flat blinking cursor, awaiting commands while a second green-on-black dot flits around the screen, controlled by Engelbart’s mechanical mouse, which he directs with his right hand. Thus Engelbart methodically demonstrates his cut-and-paste text editing, his hyperlinking, and his hierarchical file systems. The historic demonstration is celebrated among computer engineers to this day. What inspired Douglas Engelbart’s genius was as far away from the hippy culture in which Brand was ensconced as it is possible to get. In 1945, about a month before Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima, Vannevar Bush – the primary organiser of the Manhattan Project – published an essay in Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think”.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

COURTESY OF CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA. The Osborne 1, announced spring 1981, was one of the first attempts at a portable personal computer. Although the machine would fit under an airplane seat, it was inconveniently heavy and was sometimes described as “luggable” rather than “portable.” COURTESY OF COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM. Douglas Engelbart established the Human Factors Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute in 1963. In the era before personal computers, he helped shape the way computers would be used for office work. This photograph, taken about 1968, shows him with his best-known invention, the point-and-click mouse, which subsequently became universal on desktop computers.

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Licklider, the head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, for one, was working as early as 1962 on a project he called the Libraries of the Future, and he dedicated the book he published with that title: “however unworthy it may be, to Dr. Bush.” In the mid-1960s, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext and Douglas Engelbart was working on the practical realization of similar ideas at the Stanford Research Institute. Both Nelson and Engelbart claim to have been directly influenced by Bush. Engelbart later recalled that, as a lowly electronics technician in the Philippines during World War II, he “found this article in Life magazine about his [Bush’s] memex, and it just thrilled the hell out of me that people were thinking about something like that. . . .

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The inside story of Xerox PARC is told in Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (1999) and in Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander’s earlier Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (1988). Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (2000) does justice to a once-unsung hero of the personal-computer revolution. Books focusing on the Macintosh development include John Sculley’s insider account Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple (1987) and Steven Levy’s external view Insanely Great (1994).

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Bob Gibbons provided extensive comments on the comparisons of different species of superminds in chapter 11; Randy Davis gave me detailed comments on technical (and many other) issues in numerous chapters; and all of the following provided other useful comments: Rob Laubacher, Patrick Winston, Erik Duhaime, Jeff Cooper, Ian Straus, Vint Cerf, Judy Olson, Mel Blake, Mark Klein, Anita Woolley, David Engel, and Laur Fisher. I am also grateful to four people whose work influenced this book more than is reflected in citations alone. First, Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013), who invented the computer mouse and did other pioneering work on interactive computing environments, is perhaps more than any other single person responsible for the idea that groups of people and computers—together—can be more intelligent than either can alone. Second, I was very inspired by the history of life on earth and the provocative speculations about its future in Robert Wright’s book Nonzero.

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Pierre Levy defines it as “a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills.” See Levy, L’intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1994). Translated by Robert Bononno as Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1997). And Douglas Engelbart defines the closely related term collective IQ as a community’s “capability for dealing with complex, urgent problems.” See Engelbart, “Augmenting Society’s Collective IQ,” presented at the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Santa Cruz, CA, August 2004, doi:10.1145/1012807.1012809.

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Bridging the Specificity Frontier,” in Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000), 279–88. 10. An early example of the idea of cyber-human learning loops is Doug Engelbart’s concept of “bootstrapping” collective intelligence. See Douglas Engelbart and Jeff Rulifson, “Bootstrapping Our Collective Intelligence,” ACM Computing Surveys 31, issue 4es (December 1999), doi:10.1145/345966.346040. Unlike the concept of business process reengineering, which was popular in the 1990s, cyber-human learning loops assume that change is continuous rather than the result of occasional large redesign projects.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

In a 1945 essay titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush, who oversaw the U.S. government’s World War II research program, unveiled his blueprint for the Memex, a desk console with tape recorders in its guts that would give a researcher ready access to a personal trove of knowledge. Bush’s Memex provided the nascent field of computing with its very own grail. For decades it would inspire visionary inventors to devise balky new technologies in an effort to deliver an upgrade to the human brain. By far the most ambitious and influential acolyte of the Memex dream was Douglas Engelbart, best known today as the father of the computer mouse. Engelbart, a former radar technician and student of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, woke up one day in 1950 with an epiphany: The world had so many problems, of such accelerating complexity, that humankind’s only hope of mastering them was to find ways to get smarter faster.

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“At PARC, our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment.” In other words, as users learn new things from the computer, they can change it themselves to take advantage of what they’ve learned. Like Douglas Engelbart, Kay hoped that computers and their users would together form a positive feedback loop, a bootstrapping of the human brain. Kay is the kind of maverick who has been honored by many in his field but only selectively followed. Yet other central figures in the development of modern software share his complaint that the software profession has taken a fundamental wrong turn.

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“In science the whole system builds”: Linus Torvalds, quoted in Business Week, August 18, 2004, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content /aug2004/tc20040818_1593.htm. Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” first appeared in the Atlantic in July 1945. It is available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush. My account of Douglas Engelbart’s work draws on readings from his work collected at the Bootstrap Institute Web site at http://www.bootstrap.org/, as well as the accounts in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005).

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

It was not clear that anyone ever would. This is where Bitzer and PLATO began poking around. Through their research they found patents filed in the late 1950s that were focused on gas plasma devices. In retrospect, the work is remarkable if for no other reason than that it was undertaken by none other than Douglas Engelbart, who, by the time Bitzer and company came across his patents, had already abandoned the research and moved over to a project that would lead to inventing the mouse and that inspired—perhaps launched—the Silicon Valley personal computing revolution. But back in the 1950s Engelbart was trying to make a name for himself with gas plasma matrices for display and memory use.

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We already had the idea that somehow the novice programmer should be able to program on it and it had an object-oriented language on the first one that I designed but not terribly well-integrated into the user interface.” Kay was influenced by the work of Ivan Sutherland, also at the University of Utah, who was a pioneer in computer graphics, as well as Douglas Engelbart, who had long ago abandoned his plasma storage device research to embark on research into user interfaces and online software for “human augmentation,” resulting in, among other things, the invention of the mouse. Kay also stumbled upon Wallace Feurzieg’s and Seymour Papert’s LOGO work under way in Massachusetts.

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Somewhere around in there I realized that what Seymour had shown is that the computer is more than just a tool, it could be like a medium and extend into the world. 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.

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

Listening carefully to Brand’s description of the fair, Fuller advised him to clarify its intentions, and he expressed concerns that it would become overly political. When Brand asked if a photo of the whole earth might change the world’s perspective, Fuller said, “You’re right. I’ll take back what I said in my letter.” On January 3, 1968, Brand wrote to Fuller about research being conducted in Menlo Park by an engineer named Douglas Engelbart. “The program is operational now using constant on-line intense interaction with computer-driven cathode ray tube displays of text, graphs, and link-node arrays,” Brand explained. “A number of persons at remote consoles can work in interactive concert on a mutually generated display, with mutual access to the computer memory.”

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Unlike the student activists of the New Left, who emphasized politics and protest, its fans—described by one of Brand’s colleagues as “baling wire hippies”—were drawn to technology, and they would advance far beyond Fuller’s sense of what computers could be. 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

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If his ideas were uniquely vulnerable to this kind of assimilation, it was a precessional effect of ephemeralization itself, which produced strategies that could be repurposed at minimal cost. In this case, Fuller was content to receive public credit, along with a grant to cover his expenses from Erhard, who personally introduced him to Douglas Engelbart, a member of the est board. Fuller himself would speak to any organization willing to pay. He claimed to never use an agent or promoter, but he was represented by Speakers Unlimited—an agency that advertised his availability alongside its other clients, such as astronomer Carl Sagan and an Austrian body builder named Arnold Schwarzenegger—and he hired a second firm to book lectures on campuses.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Collective intelligence: The idea of using computers to amplify individual and collective human intelligence has a long history. Influential early works include Vannevar Bush’s celebrated article “As We May Think” [31], which described his imagined memex system, and inspired the seminal work of both Douglas Engelbart [63] and Ted Nelson [145]. Although these works are many decades old, they lay out much of what we see in today’s internet, and reveal vistas beyond. Aside from these foundational works, my ideas about collective intelligence have been strongly influenced by economic ideas. Herbert Simon [197] seems to have been the first person to have pointed out the crucial role of attention as a scarce resource in an information-rich world.

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And, finally, Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities [98] is a superb account of how very large groups tackle a core human problem: how to make a place to live. Networked science, in general: The potential of computers and the network to change the way science is done has been discussed by many people, and over a long period of time. Such discussion can be found in many of the works describd above, in particular the work of Vannevar Bush [31] and Douglas Engelbart [63]. Other notable works include those of Eric Drexler [57], Jon Udell [227], Christine Borgman [23], and Jim Gray [83]. See also Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the world wide web, reprinted in [14]. A stimulating and enjoyable fictional depiction of networked science is Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End [231].

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Along the way, moreover, its re- mote terminals would plant the notion of a "home information center," an idea that would circulate in the technological community's collective consciousness until the 1970s, when it would inspire a slew of young hobbyists with names such as Jobs and Wozniak to market something called a microcomputer. Meanwhile, Tracy's dad was also gambling on a soft-spoken, rather lonely guy who had approached him on practically his first day at the Pentagon, and whose ideas on "augmenting the human intellect" had proved to be identical to his own notion of human-computer symbiosis. Douglas Engelbart had been a voice in the wilderness until then; his own bosses at SRI International, in what would soon become Silicon Valley, thought he was an absolute flake. But once Tracy's father had given him his first real funding-and vigorously defended him to his higher-ups-Engelbart, with his group, would go on to invent the mouse, on- screen windows, hypertext, full-screen word processing, and a host of other in- novations.

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But then once you got to know him a bit, you saw that much of this man's quietness came from his habit of listening-deeply, profoundly listening to every- thing that was happening around him, and trying to work out its most funda- mental meaning. And then when he did talk, his soft, diffident baritone somehow managed to be hypnotic in its intensity. His name was Douglas Engelbart. It was in December 1950, says Doug Engelbart, thinking back to the morning when it all changed for him. He was twenty-five years old, and by every objec- tive measure, life was good. A decade earlier he'd been a semipoor teenager in the semirural outskirts of Portland, Oregon, still getting up every morning to milk the family cow.

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In those days, the fall and spring joint conferences were the only real computer meetings going. And the word was already out: the audi- torium was standing-room-only for the afternoon session. People were craning to get a glimpse through the doorways. This, everyone could tell, was not going to be your standard presentation. Down on the right-hand side of the stage, all alone, sat Douglas Engelbart. He was wearing a fresh white shirt and tie for the occasion, plus a set of head- phones that made him look for all the world like a NASA launch-control officer. Across his lap-pivoting from the arm of his chair, actually-he had a kind of console that featured a built-in keyboard in the middle, a tray on the right for holding an odd little box with some buttons on top and a cord coming out the end, and an identical tray on the left for holding an equally odd gadget with five metal keys.

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

There is no term for this radical form of re-engineering, so we may use re-ontologizing as a neologism to refer to a very radical form of re-engineering, one that not only designs, constructs, or structures a system (e.g. a company, a machine, or some artefact) anew, but that fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature, that is, its ontology. In this sense, ICTs are not merely re-engineering but actually re-ontologizing our world. Looking at the history of the mouse (http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/), for example, one discovers that our technology has not only adapted to, but also educated, us as users. Douglas Engelbart (born 1925) once told me that, when he was refining his most famous invention, the mouse, he even experimented with placing it under the desk, to be operated with one's leg, in order to leave the user's hands free. Human-Computer Interaction is a symmetric relation. To return to our distinction, while a dishwasher interface is a panel through which the machine enters into the user's world, a digital interface is a gate through which a user can be present in cyberspace.

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

In 1964 John McCarthy, a mathematician and computer scientist who had coined the term “artificial intelligence,” began designing a set of technologies that were intended to simulate human capabilities, a project he believed could be completed in just a decade. At the same time, on the other side of campus, Douglas Engelbart, who was a dreamer intent on using his expertise to improve the world, believed that computers should be used to “augment” or extend human capabilities, rather than to mimic or replace them. He set out to create a system to permit small groups of knowledge workers to quickly amplify their intellectual powers and work collaboratively.

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Shakey was not only the touchstone for much of modern AI research as well as projects leading to the modern augmentation community—it was also the original forerunner of the military drones that now patrol the skies over Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Shakey exemplified the westward migration of computing and early artificial intelligence research during the 1960s. Although Douglas Engelbart, whose project was just down the hall, was a West Coast native, many others were migrants. Artificial intelligence as a field of study was originally rooted in a 1956 Dartmouth College summer workshop where John McCarthy was a young mathematics professor. McCarthy had been born in 1927 in Boston of an Irish Catholic father and Lithuanian Jewish mother, both active members of the U.S.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Eratosthenes, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Louis Daguerre, millennium bug, Multics, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

One of the first people to envision a new era of interactive computing was Ivan Sutherland (born 1938), who in 1963 demonstrated a revolutionary graphics program he had developed for the SAGE computers named Sketchpad. Sketchpad could store image descriptions in memory and display the images on the video display. In addition, you could use the light pen to draw images on the display and change them, and the computer would keep track of it all. Another early visionary of interactive computing was Douglas Engelbart (born 1925), who read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think" when it was published in 1945 and five years later began a lifetime of work developing new ideas in computer interfaces. In the mid-1960s, while at the Sanford Research Institute, Engelbart completely rethought input devices and came up with a five-pronged keyboard for entering commands (which never caught on) and a smaller device with wheels and a button that he called a mouse.

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The mouse was used for selecting windows or triggering the graphical objects to perform program functions. This was software that went beyond the user interface into user intimacy, software that facilitated the extension of the computer into realms beyond those of simple number crunching. This was software that was designed—to quote the title of a legendary paper written by Douglas Engelbart in 1963—"for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." What PARC developed in the Alto was the beginnings of the graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounced gooey). But Xerox didn't sell the Alto (one would have cost over $30,000 if they had), and over a decade passed before the ideas in the Alto would be embodied in a successful consumer product.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

Sarah Handler and the author (London: Han-Shan Tang, 1986), 14–16, 19–21; Sarah Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 9–24. 6. K. H. E. Kroemer, H. B. Kroemer, and K. E. Kroemer-Elbert, Ergonomics: How to Design for Ease and Efficiency (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 365–69; Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), illustration section, n.p. 7. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), plate 12. 8. See Lorenz Homberger and Piet Meyer, “Concerning African Objects,” and Roy Sieber, “African Furniture Between Tradition and Colonization,” in Sandro Bocola, ed., African Seats (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 22–29 and 30–37, respectively. 9.

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Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988), now reprinted as The Design of Everyday Things, emphasizes the mental side of physical objects. The most important recent study of the body in today’s workplace is Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988). For the history of the visionary side of technology, mind, and body, there is Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). In cyborg anthropology, the starting point is Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Taking the theme into the Web era are Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York: Routledge, 2001), and N.

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

The effect of psychedelic drugs on society, to Rossman, could just as well be expressed in the language of engineering: “In the cybernetic description of process,” he wrote, “the corresponding passage is to a higher order of control—one that makes possible heterarchical rather than hierarchical control systems.”40 What he meant was simple: counterculture was changing established power structures. 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.

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Slippery (fictional character), 266, 293 “Music in Cyberspace” (Barlow), 232 mutation, 117, 150 MVD (Ministry of the Interior, Russia), 330, 331 mythologies, form of, xiv–xv myths, cybernetic, See cybernetic myths NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), 11, 12 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and cyberspace, 220 cyborgs and space travel, 127–28 and data gloves, 215 Engineering Man for Space: The Cyborg Study, 127–28 founding of, 123 Philco and, 140 and Whole Earth Catalog, 168 NASw-512 project, 127–28 Natick Laboratories, Massachusetts Hardiman exoskeleton, 137 National Academy of Sciences, 25 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), 11, 12 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, See NASA National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) Division C, 25 Division T, 28 establishment of, 12 fire control division, 29 microwave research, 19 radar, 17 Rad Lab, 21 VT fuse, 35 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 274 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 320 National Research Council, 12 National Science Foundation, 253 national security, cybernetic myths and, xv National Security Agency, See NSA National Technical Information Service, 324 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 208 NAVSEA (Naval Sea Systems Command), 316 NDRC, See National Defense Research Committee negative feedback defined, 49 and enchantment of the machine, 351 for Headsight, 139 and homeostat, 56 in Psycho-Cybernetics, 164 and Whole Earth Catalog, 171–72 nervous system, as machine, 63 Netscape, 244 networked machines, 122, 147–48, 251 networks, 2–3, 180, 222 Neuromancer (Gibson), ix–x, 189, 210–12, 242 neuroses, 58 New Age movement, 165–66 “New Directions in Cryptography,” 251 New Economy, 246–47 Newsweek magazine, 73 New York Times Hap Arnold article, 74 and cybernation, 102 and cybernetics, 53 Cybernetics reviews, 51–52 NSA encryption story, 271 and VR, 219 New York Yankees, 164–65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 140, 291 Nigh, Ron, 171 Nike missile, 78 9/11 terrorist attacks, 338–39 NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), 274 NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 320 nonexistent systems, 69 no-notice interoperability exercises, 311 non-secret encryption, 248, 250; See also public-key encryption NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), 77, 99 NSA (National Security Agency) and the Clipper Chip, 274 cyber-related work, x and cypherpunks, 269–71 and “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 245 and Eligible Receiver, 311–13 and Moonlight Maze, 327, 328, 337 and public-key encryption, 253, 254, 258 and VR, 243 nuclear-powered aircraft, 128–31, 135–36 nuclear war, 208 nuclear weapons, 45, 73–76 “Numbers Can Be a Better Form of Cash Than Paper” (Chaum), 257 Nunn, Sam, 310 Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 280 Office of Naval Research, 136–37, 253 Omni magazine, 149, 243, 294–98, 301–2 OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop, 300 Operation Desert Storm, 302 Operation Sundevil, 238–40 Optik, Phiber (Mark Abele), 237, 238 Orenstein, Peggy, 240–41, 243 organic chemistry, 119 organic machines, 113–14 organism-environment interaction, 57–61, 64–67 organisms, 113–55 computers as thinking machines, 120–22 cyborg research, 123–27 cyborgs, feminism, and postmodernism, 151–54 and man-machine interaction, 143–48 military research on cyborgs, 128–40 and participant evolution, 140–41 radio-controlled cyborg, 138–40 self-reproducing machines as plants, 118–19 ultraintelligent machines, 148–49 viruses as, 115 originality, machine’s potential for, 120–21 Other Plane, 207, 208, 266, 288 Owens, William, 306 PACOM (US Pacific Command), 311–13 Palo Alto, California, 177, 181, 259, 264 Palomilla (tricycle cart), 83–84 Paradise Lost (Milton), 91 Parkinson, David, 23–24 Parkinson’s disease, robotic modeling of, 83–84 Parsons, Talcott, 52 participant evolution, 140–41 Partridge, Earle, 77 patriarchy, 152, 153 Patrick, Robert, 154 Patton, George, 28 Paul Proteus (fictional character), 86 Pavlov, Ivan, 62 PDP-10 mainframe computer, 181–82 Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 20, 32 Pedipulator, 132–34 Pentagon, See Defense, US Department of Pentagon Papers, 254 Persian Gulf War (1990-1991), 246, 302, 305 personal computer and Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad, 187–88 Douglas Engelbart and, 173 William Gibson and, 211–12 Timothy Leary and, 187–89 and second wave of hackers, 184 pessimism, See dystopia peyote, 185 PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), 261, 272–73 Philco Corporation, 137–40 Phreak, Acid (Elias Ladopoulos), 237–39 physico-chemical system, nervous system as, 64 physics, nonexistent systems and, 69 PicoSpan software, 191, 193 Pile, Sir Frederick, 38–41 pip (radar image), 17 pipology, 18 plants, self-reproducing machines as, 118–19 Playboy magazine, 121–22 Player Piano (Vonnegut), 86–87 political activists, 341 political myths, xiv, xv Popular Mechanics, 132–33, 205–6 Post, Jonathan, 294–98 postmodernism, 151–54 Powell, Colin, 302, 303 Powell Doctrine, 302 power grid, 313 prime numbers, 250, 252 Princeton University, 29, 114, 115, 117 Principality of Sealand, 287–91 printing, as predecessor to crypto anarchy, 268 privacy anonymity and, 272 encryption and, 247, 256–61 programming languages, 213 progress, thinking machines and, 4 Project 2, 25 Prometheus, 343 prostheses, 50–51 proximity fuse, 26–27, 40, 41, 67 pseudonyms, 277, 281–82 pseudoscience, 160–62 psychedelic drugs, 172–73 Gregory Bateson and, 179 and computers, 189 High Frontiers magazine, 185–87 and human bio-computer, 188 and Spacewar, 182 Psycho-Cybernetics (Maltz), 162–65, 169, 345 psychopharmacology, 123 public-key encryption, 247, 248–55, 278 punk, 246 “Push-Button Warfare” (Newsweek article), 73 “Putting Humans into Virtual Space” (Furness and Kocian), 205 Queen Mu (Alison Bailey Kennedy), 263 R2-D2, 204 radar, 17–21, 80–81 radar stations, 77, 99 radio-controlled cyborg, 138–40 radio shell, 27–28, 40 Rad Lab, See MIT Radiation Laboratory RAF (Royal Air Force) Fighter Command, 8, 30 Rand, Ayn, 258 Rand Corporation, 111, 303–5, 309–10 Randolph Air Force Base (San Antonio, Texas), 122–24 range computer, 24 Rather, Dan, 203 read-only memory (ROM), 23 Reality Hackers magazine, 218–19 Rees-Mogg, Lord William, 285 relationships, technology and, 2–3 religion and cybernetic myth, 348 God and Golem, Inc., 89–92 and spiritual aspects of cybernetics, 348 remailers, 272–73, 291 reproduction, See self-replicating machines Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 302–3, 306 Rheingold, Howard, 232, 235–37, 242 Riley, Frank, 87–88 Rivest, Ron, 251–54 RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), 302–3, 306 robot (term), 83 robot bomb, 40–41; See also V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe 1) flying bomb Rockland State Hospital (Orangeburg, New York), 123–24 Roger Pollack (fictional character), 207 Rolling Stone, 181 ROM (read-only memory), 23 Ronfelt, David, 303–5, 309 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 12 Rorvik, David, 141–42 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 46, 52, 56 Rossman, Michael, 172–73 Roughs Tower, 287 Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command, 8, 30 rue, Larry, 9 R.U.R.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

.…” The idea is one we take for granted now: computers would be used by humans in the process of thinking, as analytic aids rather than as calculators (the status quo) or as surrogates (the stuff of fantasy).4 The idea wasn’t Licklider’s alone. As with other conceptual leaps we’ve described, several individuals also made it at about the same time. Ten years before Licklider wrote his paper, for instance, a young engineer named Douglas Engelbart was pondering what he might do with his life. He was recently married yet felt himself lost, an idealist in search of a meaningful contribution. One evening in 1950 he was struck with a powerful vision: a general purpose machine that might augment human intelligence and help humans negotiate life’s complexities.

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As Wozniak told me, the Macintosh, launched in 1984, marked a departure from many of his ideas as realized in the Apple II. To be sure, the Macintosh was radically innovative in its own right, being the first important mass-produced computer to feature a “mouse” and a “desktop”—ideas born in the mind of Douglas Engelbart in the 1950s, ideas that had persisted without fructifying in computer science labs ever since.* Nevertheless the Mac represented an unconditional surrender of Wozniak’s openness, as was obvious from the first glance: gone was the concept of the hood. You could no longer easily open the computer and get at its innards.

Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

HLR http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html Introduction Chapter One: The Heart of the WELL Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net Chapter Four: Grassroots Groupminds Chapter Five: Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net Chapter Eight: Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy Bibliography Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net While driving to work one day in 1950, Douglas Engelbart started thinking about how complicated civilization had become. What were humans going to do about managing this complex new world that technology had helped us create? Engelbart asked himself what kinds of tools we use to help us think. "Symbols" was the answer that came to him, the answer he had been taught as an engineer.

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As big government and big business line up to argue about which information infrastructure would be better for citizens, it is the right of the citizens to remind elected policymakers that these technologies were created by people who believed that the power of computer technology can and should be made available to the entire population, not just to a priesthood. The future of the Net 26-04-2012 21:43 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 7 de 43 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html cannot be intelligently designed without paying attention to the intentions of those who originated it. From ARPANET to NREN: The Toolbuilders' Quest Douglas Engelbart might have remained a voice in the wilderness, one of the myriad inventors with world-changing devices, or at least the plans for them, gathering dust in their garages. And you might still be required to wear a lab coat and speak FORTRAN in order to gain access to a computer. But Engelbart got a job in the early 1960s doing some respectably orthodox computer research at a new think tank in Menlo Park, California, the Stanford Research Institute.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

To start, you could turn to a group of your peers, preferably those with some diversity in their thinking. Ask them to join you on this exciting journey. PRINCIPLE 1 TECHNOLOGY From Physical to Digital The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even printing. —Douglas Engelbart, internet pioneer PEOPLE OFTEN HAVE TROUBLE IDENTIFYING WHAT THEY REALLY VALUE, but priorities emerge during times of crisis. In the summer of 2015, waves of Syrians fled the civil war in their homeland. Although the refugees carried food, water, and money in their backpacks, for most of them, the most important survival asset was their smartphone.1 When these refugees enter a new country, the first to-do item is to get a new SIM card and get online.

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

In Taylor’s own day, indeed within a few miles of the Xerox PARC office, there were two. In the 1970s, Ted Nelson, who coined the word “hypertext,” wrote about a complex information architecture called Project Xanadu that never came to fruition, despite anticipating and in some ways exceeding the World Wide Web. Likewise, many of Douglas Engelbart’s ideas were not realized until they were refined at PARC, in the computer science and systems science labs. Taylor was different. He could recruit to PARC an outstanding group of researchers—selected based on his belief that “a very good researcher was worth two dozen good researchers”—and keep them working together for years.18 He also had the support of his boss, Jerry Elkind, who handled much of the lab’s administrative work.

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He liked to quote a Japanese proverb: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”25 It is a fitting epitaph for Taylor and a message for innovators everywhere. * * * I. Those systems were precursors to today’s Internet of Things. In the Internet of Things, items ranging from household thermostats and lights to industrial robots are connected to both a network and computing power to be more useful or valuable. Courtesy: SRI International Douglas Engelbart presenting during the “Mother of All Demos” in San Francisco, December 1968. © Stephen Shames/Polaris Protests at People’s Park in Berkeley turn violent, May 1969. Honeywell’s $10,600 kitchen computer in the 1969 Neiman-Marcus Christmas Catalog. Courtesy: Benj Edwards Al Alcorn’s original Atari badge.

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

Chapter Three: Tech’s Counterculture Roots Although I never got to meet Doug Engelbart, I was fortunate enough to have spent time with some of the founders of the Internet, including Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and most especially John Seely Brown, who has been a mentor to me for the past seven years. Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000). Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005), are both wonderful resources around the story of the early Internet.

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

A series of links would result in an information pathway that hearkened back to the dreams of Vannevar Bush, whose influential gedanken experiment, memex, was characterized by the data "trails" that would be cleared by the scientists and researchers using it. As it turns out, Atkinson was not the only one at work on realizing Bush's vision. The memex vision, of course, had originally ignited Douglas Engelbart, who in turn triggered the series of innovations that would lead to Macintosh. But the most vocal proponent of Bush's ideas was Ted Nelson. For years Nelson had been a peripatic if somewhat cranky figure in the clubby personal computer underground; he was known mainly for the iconoclastic populism in his self-published 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in which he made a strident and at times hilarious case for truly personal computers.

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

Licklider’s analysis is still relevant today, more than sixty years after its publication, especially in his emphasis that “relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of ‘programming themselves contingently’ on the basis of newly received information.” The second proponent of this alternative vision, Douglas Engelbart, also articulated ideas that are precursors to our notion of machine usefulness. 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.”

…

A reconstruction of the Bombe, designed by Alan Turing to speed up the decryption of German signals during World War II. 24. 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.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Many others have followed in Wiener’s footsteps. In 1960 J. C. R. Licklider, an early theorist and researcher of computer networks, wrote about what he called the “man-machine symbiosis.” Marshall McLuhan also claimed that technology itself is nothing but an extension of man’s nervous system. Computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart considered technology to be simply an augmentation of the human faculties. For relevant texts by Licklider and Engelbart, see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: Norton, 2001). Other theorists such as Donna Haraway have quite literally fused human and Chapter 3 106 Wiener’s prose is tinged by anxiety over what he considered to be the vast potential for his scientific work to contribute to the “concentration of power . . . in the hands of the most unscrupulous.”85 Writing in the shadow of World War II and the atomic bomb, Wiener exhibits a grave concern, not only with the bomb but also with more general social exploitation, be it in the form of a recently defeated Nazism or a once more bullish American capitalism (he does not tell readers which).

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The appearance of the first integrated circuits in turn allowed him to create video display units from old televisions, until he had all the components of an actual computer – which never quite worked, but never mind. And by this time, he was at university, studying physics; after that, he worked on typesetting for digital printers, before joining CERN, where he developed the idea for hypertext – previously expounded by Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and others. And because of where he was working and the need of researchers to share interlinked information, he tied this invention to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the domain name systems that underpin the emerging internet and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web just happened, as naturally and obviously as if it were meant to be.

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

, 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.

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

But, even more than that, the new narratives they embraced about the power of technology to promote economic growth and market-based innovation downplayed the role of government in enabling the development of most of the technologies that they profited from in the first place, and even how many of the businesses that now dominate the Valley received public support. 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.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

In his book The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti reports disengagement with the political process, but shortly after his book’s publication, a wave of political entrepreneurs around the world provided disengaged voters with something that appealed to them: populism, often combined with promises of bringing back a social and economic world that had been lost.15 We might hope that technology will rescue us from this double bind of rich-but-strangled cities and decaying, disaffected towns and that the COVID-19 home-working revolution might accelerate this change. In 1968, computer scientist Douglas Engelbart demonstrated videoconferencing and simultaneous collaborative document editing.16 Three decades later, the journalist Frances Cairncross coined the term “the death of distance” to describe a world in which these technologies would free the economy from the vulgar constraints of place.17 At the beginning of 2020, place remained at least as important as ever: to the extent that people invoked the death of distance, they did so as an example of the naive optimism of yesteryear, alongside flying cars, the paperless office, and the end of history.

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.

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.

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff. Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Steve Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” (In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn’t deny having dosed as a young man.) Markoff writes that Jobs told him that his own LSD experience was “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.”

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Between 1973 and 1975 Xerox Corporation designed and built a personal computer called the Alto at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Alto’s interface was originally called WIMP, an acronym for Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pull-down menus. At the center of its graphical user interface was the mouse, a device that had been invented in 1965 by Douglas Engelbart, head of the Human Factors Research Center, a work group that studied the Man and computer interface (or Mac) at the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart based his invention on an obsolete engineering tool called the planimeter, an antiquated device once as common as a slide rule. When an engineer moved the planimeter over the surface of a curve, it calculated the underlying area.

America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

At a time when the world had only begun to consider the possibilities of huge computers—much less smaller ones—Bush was anticipating a new era of information technology accessible to the public.5 As Walter Isaacson explained in his book The Innovators, a number of the revolutionary creators of personal computers traced their inspiration to Bush and his article. In 1945, Douglas Engelbart shipped out to the Philippines as a young navy radar technician as the war was ending. He recalled rummaging through a Red Cross library in a thatched hut on stilts on Leyte Island, where Engelbart discovered an illustrated Life magazine reprint of Bush’s article. “The whole concept of helping people work and think that way just excited me,” Engelbart remembered years later.

…

He imagined a desktop information, memory, processing, and interconnecting machine that empowered individuals. Bush never made the transition from the analog to digital worlds. He preferred wrenches and machines with gears to code and devices with software. The inventors of personal computers—people such as Douglas Engelbart, J. C. Licklider, and Theodore Nelson—embraced Bush anyway. They increased the acceptability of their radical ideas by tracing a provenance to Bush, the elder statesman of science. Fred Terman, a doctoral student of Bush’s who became Stanford’s dean of engineering and then provost, created an industrial park that later became known as Silicon Valley.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

This attitude was especially pronounced among researchers from the East Coast universities, who saw no reason to link up with campuses in the West. They were like the upper-crust woman on Beacon Hill who, when told that long-distance telephone service to Texas was available, echoed Thoreau’s famous line: “But what would I possibly have to say to anyone in Texas?” Douglas Engelbart, a computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1967, remembered the meeting clearly. “One of the first reactions was, ‘Oh hell, here I’ve got this time-sharing computer, and my resources are scarce as it is.’ Another reaction was, ‘Why would I let my graduate students get sucked off into something like this?’”

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The current period of integration is revolutionary in that a larger set of changes have occurred with a pervasively wider influence than over any comparably short time in previous phases of globalization.3 We consider, in turn, two additional examples of global connectivity that we feel are unique and have significantly lowered the transaction costs of economic integration. The first is innovation and technological progress, particularly with respect to computing power and information technologies. In the late 1960s Douglas Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, gave a demonstration of the new technological opportunities emerging with the advent of personal computing. His ideas on the user experience constituted a milestone in personal computer usage and inspired many of the breakthroughs that have gone on to transform the world.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

I overwhelmingly felt that the software I wanted to write was held up for want of a critical hardware breakthrough. Later I discovered that the device I desperately needed, but wasn't clever enough to imagine, had in fact been invented much earlier. That device was, of course, the mouse. The mouse was a hardware advance, conceived in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart who foresaw that it would make possible a new kind of software. This software innovation we now know, in its developed form, as the Graphical User Interface, or GUI, developed in the 1970s by the brilliantly creative team at Xerox PARC, that Athens of the modern world. It was cultivated into commercial success by Apple in 1983, then copied by other companies under names like VisiOn, GEM and—the most commercially successful today—Windows.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

When I started out as a freelance writer in the 1970s, my most important tools were a library card, a typewriter, a notebook, and a telephone. In the early 1980s, I became interested in the people at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) who were using computers to edit text without physically cutting, pasting, and retyping pages. Through PARC, I discovered Douglas Engelbart, who had spent the first decade of his career trying to convince somebody, anybody, that using computers to augment human intellect was not a crazy idea. Engelbart set out in the early 1960s to demonstrate that computers could be used to automate low-level cognitive support tasks, such as cutting, pasting, and revising text, and also to enable intellectual tools, such as the hyperlink, that weren’t possible with Gutenberg-era technology.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Licklider was put in charge of ARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office in the early 1960s, where he sponsored the creation of blue sky technologies that conventional computer manufacturers weren’t interested in—the graphical interface, the personal computer, and computer networks.82 The problems to be overcome in achieving such a partnership between computers and humans were only partially a matter of building better computers and only partially a matter of learning how minds interact with information. The most important questions were not about either the brain or the technology, but about the organizational restructuring that would inevitably occur when a new way to think was introduced. As it turned out, another maverick thinker in California, Douglas Engelbart, had been pursuing exactly this problem for years. Engelbart, a twenty-five-year-old veteran, had been a radar operator in World War II. When he read “As We May Think,” while awaiting a ship home from the Pacific, he realized that the postwar world would be dominated by problems of unprecedented complexity.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Bell is in the history books only because, in 1874, Meucci let the statement lapse because he could not afford the $10 renewal fee.15 It’s not just that Bill Gates was lucky. His success depended greatly on the work of others, starting with Charles Babbage. Similarly, while Apple were lauded and rewarded for introducing a computer mouse to accompany their Mac desktop in 1984, it was Douglas Engelbart and Bill English who, with funding from the US Air Force, had invented the computer mouse back in the early 1960s.fn1 When, in popular mythology, a single individual is strongly associated with a new product, invention or breakthrough, it is exactly that – a myth. Trying to tease out one person’s contributions is a hopeless task.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

‘Ultimately we will need to change the operating system at the heart of major corporations,’ Kelly acknowledges. ‘But if we begin there, we will fail. The place to begin is with what’s doable, what’s enlivening – and what points toward bigger wins in the future.’69 Who will own the robots? ‘The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,’ said Douglas Engelbart, the acclaimed American innovator in human–computer interaction. He may well turn out to be right. But the significance of this revolution for work, wages and wealth hinges on how digital technologies are owned and used. So far, they have generated two opposing trends whose implications are only just beginning to unfold.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

In his book What the Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff argues that it was inevitable that the PC would emerge on the West Coast. “The East Coast computing industry didn’t get it,” Markoff wrote. “The old computing world was hierarchical and conservative.” Markoff documents how computer engineers in the Bay Area—such as Douglas Engelbart, who would invent the computer mouse— experimented with LSD, believing that the drug could spur their creativity. Others pathbreaking technologists, such as Larry Tesler— who worked with early versions of the PC at Xerox’s Palo Alto research lab—were committed political radicals.19 Steve Jobs exemplified the link between the PC revolution and the counterculture.

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

The group at Utah, described in chapter 5, was co-led by a former DARPA program manager, Ivan Sutherland. 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.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

This is precisely why it’s still a good idea, even today, to step away from your laptop and work out a problem on paper: cognitive diversity, again. But adding the speed and flexibility of the word processor to our tool kit has been a huge boon to thought. In his visionary 1962 essay “Augmenting Human Intellect,” Douglas Engelbart—a pioneer of the computer mouse and the files-and-folders graphical desktop—dreamed of the way cutting and pasting would one day transform our thinking. Writers equipped with electronic word processors, he prophesied, would become superior brainstormers, able to jot down ideas as rapidly as they came, then slowly hone them at leisure.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan

AltaVista, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, dark matter, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, HyperCard, hypertext link, information retrieval, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, search engine result page, side project, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, web application

This is a case where a general-purpose search engine failed to find the desired end result, but was indispensable in helping Wally locate the “front door” of the Invisible Web database that ultimately provided what he was looking for. This is why both general-purpose search engines and Invisible Web databases should be integral parts of your own Web search toolkit. Incidentally, U.S. Patent 3541541 is one of the early patents for what evolved into the computer mouse. When the patent was issued to inventor Douglas Engelbart in 1970, he called it an “X and Y Position Indicator.” And what about Patent Number 5187468, which turned up in all of the search engine results? That was awarded to the Microsoft Corporation in 1993 for a “Pointing device with adjustable clamp attachable to a keyboard”—essentially a mouse that attaches directly to a computer keyboard.

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

Engelbart had tested into the training program to become a radar technician, scanning for pips on a glowing green screen. But as his ship left dock in San Francisco, with the sailors waving goodbye to their loved ones from the deck, the crowd suddenly started to roar.2 A message came crackling over the ship’s PA: Japan had surrendered. It was V-J Day. A month more passed, and young Douglas Engelbart arrived on Samar, an island in the Philippines, late to the action. He spent a slow year doing odd jobs, daydreaming for hours at a time on the towering clouds that bloomed above the Pacific. He was later racked by the specter of all those men who had died before him. Their unmet potential would inspire his life’s work.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

There was so much military work going on in Silicon Valley that, throughout the 1960s, Lockheed was the biggest employer in the Bay Area. ARPA had a huge presence on campus, too. The Stanford Research Institute did counterinsurgency and chemical warfare work for the agency as part of William Godel’s Project Agile. It also housed the Augmentation Research Center, an ARPANET site run by the acid-dropping Douglas Engelbart. Indeed, the ARPANET was part-born at Stanford.18 Into the 1990s, Stanford University hadn’t changed all that much. It was still home to cutting-edge computer and networking research and still awash in military cash and cybernetic utopianism. Perhaps the biggest change occurred in the suburbs surrounding the university—Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose—which became thick with investors and Internet start-ups: eBay, Yahoo!

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Assassinations, riots, defeat in Vietnam, and the disgraced resignation of Richard Nixon stirred up a deep hostility to centralized authority as well as a counterculture whose wild-eyed extravagances seemed appropriate for the times. But although marketers would later rewrite the computer era into one of iconoclastic dreamers, it actually began with people like Douglas Engelbart, a Naval research engineer. Through the 1960s, Engelbart, backed by grants from NASA and the Pentagon, toiled on a machine that used semiconductors to store and display information. But unlike IBM-style punch-card behemoths, it would be easy enough for nonexperts to use. The device that Engelbart finally showed off in a 1968 public demonstration displayed the first graphical interface.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The web’s pedigree could be traced back to a 1945 paper by the American scientist Vannevar Bush. Entitled “As We May Think,” it outlined a vast storage system called a “memex,” where documents would be connected, and could be recalled, by information breadcrumbs called “trails of association.” The timeline continued to the work of Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the Stanford Research Institute devised a linked document system that lived behind a dazzling interface that introduced the metaphors of windows and files to the digital desktop. Then came a detour to the brilliant but erratic work of an autodidact named Ted Nelson, whose ambitious Xanadu Project (though never completed) was a vision of disparate information linked by “hypertext” connections.

The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

It was only years later, plotting the future of a new company, eBay, with its two co-founders, that I finally understood what the internet could be. Too late for The Big Score. I am also haunted by my other omissions. The greatest businessman of the age, Andy Grove, has only a walk-on in The Big Score. Douglas Engelbart visited me in the Mercury-News newsroom, and because he struck me only as an eccentric entrepreneur who had never gotten credit for his achievements, he doesn’t even appear in this book. Another story I got wrong, at least in part, was the invention of the integrated circuit at Fairchild. Later historians would use the internet, and all of the newly created tech history archives, to build their narratives, but I was there.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

In the twenties FTC continued to defy the radio trust, recruiting radio amateurs to assist in circumventing patent restrictions while winking at local emulators of its own technology. A Palo Alto industry dedicated to advanced technologies developed alongside it that was antithetical to patent pools. The cluster of research institutions that subsequently emerged in the area drew on this tradition. The three principal sites – Douglas Engelbart’s Augmented Human Intellect Research Center, exMIT professor John McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and, a little later, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center – embraced an understanding of the computer as another key to a liberating democratization of thinking and acting. The commitment to openness therefore shifted from a technocratic maxim to a democratic one.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

The first two floors of this big convention center are set up for all the big computer guys. It’s a dog-and-pony show with IBM limousines and all that s**t.” The very first National Computer Conference was four years earlier, in New York City. The conference regularly attracted such distinguished speakers as Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. Normally the conference was the domain of the larger computer companies. The industry commonly referred to the big eight computer companies as “IBM and the seven dwarfs,” which included Univac, Burroughs, Scientific Data Systems, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Behind the development of the Internet there was the scientific, institutional, and personal networks cutting across the Defense Department, National Science Foundation, major research universities (particularly MIT, UCLA, Stanford, University of Southern California, Harvard, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of California at Berkeley), and specialized technological think-tanks, such as MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute), Palo Alto Research Corporation (funded by Xerox), ATT’s Bell Laboratories, Rand Corporation, and BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman). Key technological players in the 1960s–1970s were, among others, J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse), Robert Taylor, Ivan Sutherland, Lawrence Roberts, Alex McKenzie, Robert Kahn, Alan Kay, Robert Thomas, Robert Metcalfe, and a brilliant computer science theoretician Leonard Kleinrock, and his cohort of outstanding graduate students at UCLA, who would become some of the key minds behind the design and development of the Internet: Vinton Cerf, Stephen Crocker, Jon Postel, among others.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

The world is still full of pre-Copernicans, across the political spectrum, and disturbances to human privilege will continue to invite violent pushback. The status of the User as a political and technological creature will stage much of this conflict to come, and it will draw both our deepest intelligence and stupidity to the surface. An early work by Douglas Engelbart from 1960 is “Special Considerations of the Individual as User, Generator, and Retriever of Information.” Among the considerable effects for “the individual” of Engelbart's later work, as one of the key designers of many of the interfacial systems we today take for granted (he was key contributor to the design of the mouse, pointer, and pull-down menu, among other techniques), has been the conflation of the use, generation, and retrieval of information under a single actor, the User.