Dealers of Lightning (17 page)

His
essay dealt chiefly with technology's ability to manage informa­tion. Bush discerned the birth of what would come to be called the
"information glut" and projected it forward
to
a cacophonous posterity.
"Publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
real
use of the record," he wrote. "The summation of human experi­ence is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means
we
use for
threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important
item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

Himself
the inventor of a successful analog computer, Bush under­stood that computer technology might help society draw sense out of
the chaos. He sketched out something called the "memex," which he
described as "a device in which an individual stores all his books,
records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may
be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." The mechanism of
consultation would be "associative indexing .
. .
whereby any item may
be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This
is the essential feature of the memex."

Doug Engelbart first encountered Bush's memex in a magazine arti­cle he found in an a Red Cross library in Manila, where he was await­ing transport home from his World War II service. He succumbed to
the author's vision of a world of interlinked data as though to a sor­cerer's spell. By the time he left Berkeley a few years later with a Ph.D.
in engineering, he had decided that his mission in life would be, in
effect, to turn the memex into reality.

In the event, he went far beyond anything Bush himself had imagined.
At SRI he propagated from Bush's rough blueprint a full-blown system of
interactive hardware and software aimed at managing, manipulating, and
communicating text and video images. The achievement was all the more
remarkable given that it involved an uphill battle against nearly universal
skepticism. More than once Engelbart's thinly financed project narrowly
eluded extermination. Gradually, however, he acquired a sizable coterie
of young engineers and scientists who felt their lives altered by their first
meetings with the charismatic Doug Engelbart and who regarded his
vision with an almost religious awe. "He not only made sense," recalled
Bill Duvall, one of the early disciples. "It was like someone turning on a
light. Love at first sight is perhaps the wrong term to use, but it was as
close to that as you can get."

One other individual entranced by Engelbart's work was Bob Taylor.
At NASA in 1963 Taylor had saved Engelbart's lab by scrounging
enough money to overcome a budget crisis. After moving on to ARPA
he turned the trickle of funding into a flood. By the end of the decade
the Augmentation Research Center, fueled by ARPA's half-million-
dollar annual grant and occupying one entire wing of SRI's Menlo Park
headquarters, reigned as the think tank's dominant research program.

What it produced was nothing short of astonishing. Obsessed with
developing new ways for man and computer to interact, Engelbart linked
video terminals to mainframes by cable and communicated with the
machines via televised images. To allow the user to move the insertion
point, or cursor, from place to place in a block of text instantaneously, he
outfitted a hollowed-out block of wood with two small wheels fixed at
right angles so it could be rolled smoothly over a flat surface. The wheels
communicated their motion to potentiometers whose signals in turn
were translated by the computer into the placement of the cursor on the
screen. From this crude device would spring an entire culture. "No one
is quite sure why it got named a 'mouse,'" Engelbart said years later.
"None of us thought that the name would have stayed with it, out in the
world." The entire interactive system—mouse, screen, computer, soft­ware, and underlying philosophy—was known by the acronym "NLS,"
for "oNLine System."

Until 1968 Engelbart and his aides labored in relative obscurity, their
work known only within the insular fraternity of government grant-
makers and computer theorists. That year he requested ninety minutes
to demonstrate NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference of two lead­ing engineering societies, scheduled for San Francisco in December. The
result was one of the most famous events in computing history.

The mouse, making its first public appearance, was the least of it.
Engelbart and his sixteen assistants stretched existing electronic tech­nology nearly to the breaking point. He recalled later: "We built special
electronics that picked up the control inputs from my mouse, keyset,
and keyboard and piped them down to SRI [that is, Stanford Research
Institute] over a telephone hookup. We leased two microwave lines up
from our laboratory, roughly thirty miles. It took two additional antennas
on the roof at SRI, four more on a truck on Skyline Boulevard, and two
on the roof of the conference center. It cost money
. . .
The nice people
at ARPA and NASA, who were funding us, effectively had to say, 'Don't
tell me!'"

The effort was worth every penny. The audience was riveted, as
Engelbart in his subdued drone described and demonstrated a fully
operational system of interactive video conferencing, multimedia dis­plays, and split-screen technology.

At one point half of a twenty-foot-tall projection screen was occupied
by a live video image of Engelbart on stage, the other half by text trans­mitted live from Menlo Park (it was a shopping list including apples,
oranges, bean soup, and French bread). Minutes later the screen carried
a live video image of a hand rolling the unusual "mouse" around a desk­top while a superimposed computer display showed how the cursor
simultaneously and obediently followed its path.

The
piece de resistance
was Engelbart s implementation of the memex.
The screen showed how a user could select a single word in a text docu­ment and be instantly transported to the relevant portion of a second
document—the essence of hypertext, found today, some thirty years later,
on every World Wide Web page and countless word-processed docu­ments. At the conclusion of the bravura performance Doug Engelbart,
previously a prophet without honor, was rewarded with a standing ovation.

In 1971 Taylor, whose ARPA funds had helped pay for that demo, was
intent on somehow importing Engelbarts interactive vision into PARC.
The only question was how to do it without also importing Doug Engel­bart. The problem was that the master’s inspirational dreams were insep­arable from his inflexible and self-righteous disposition. One admirer
called him "a prophet of biblical dimensions," a role he fit down to his
physical appearance. Tall and craggy, with deep-set eyes and a hawk-like
nose, he might have been carved from a slab of antediluvian granite. Soft-
spoken but intransigent, his years of battling unbelievers had convinced
him that he was fated to remain the solitary leader of a devoted cadre.

By the time Taylor was poised to strike, that cadre was showing signs
of serious discontent. As the novelty of his ideas wore off (to be fair,
this was a process that could take several years), some disciples started
to discern the drawbacks of working for so uncompromising a boss
—
particularly one whose tendency to oracular pronouncements required
a stratum of top assistants to periodically sit the rest of the staff down
and explain what Doug had in mind.

Engelbart's self-defined mission was not to produce a product, or
even a prototype; it was an open-ended search for knowledge. Conse­quently, no project in his lab ever seemed to come to an end. Whenever
one approached a milestone he would abruptly redefine it, condemning
the
lab to months or years of
further
work. The finish line
was
con­
stantly
receding, like the oasis
in a
desert mirage. Said one long-term
member
of his lab:
"We
were
like rats
running in his maze."

The
first to defect was William
K.
English, a brilliant engineer who had
been
with Engelbart almost
from
the start, joining him in 1962 as his
hardware ace and all-around major-domo. Wiry and deliberative, Bill
English had been the invisible
guiding hand
behind the
1968
demo.
He
was
ferociously loyal to his boss
but bridled at
the lab s perpetual lack of
closure. Some also believed
he was fed
up with Engelbarts
way
of
monopolizing credit for the lab
s accomplishments.

Taylor offered English a solution to
bodi
complaints: reproduce
NLS,
or
something like it, at
PARC.
English
could
thus fulfill his treasured goal
of bringing the system to commercial
fruition
and
be in charge of his own
lab, out from under the shadow
of the
implacable Engelbart. Whether
English hesitated leaving the
leader he had
followed for nearly a decade
is hard to say, but he continued
the raid where
Taylor left off, eventually
recruiting a dozen of Engelbarts
most important
followers.

As
a team they infused
Engelbart’s principles
into
PARC
like apos­
tles
spreading religion. Thanks to them,
the
Augmentation Research
Center
left its indelible stamp on
almost
every major innovation to
emerge
from
PARC
in the next decade.
Yet
this triumph was not with­
out
its painful ironies. English's reworked version of
NLS,
the direct
descendant of Vannevar Bush's vision and Engelbart s work, would be
remembered chiefly as
PARC's
biggest failure.