Engelbart Interviews from 2000
Chapter 1: The epiphany (1951)
Doug Engelbart: Well, let’s see. Some months before, I had this sort of epiphany. Since I didn’t have any strong or clear goals about what my professional career should get to, for some reason I just picked one out of the air: well, why don’t I try maximizing the value my career could have to mankind, and then figure out what I would do. And so I spent the next months trying to learn more about what the world needed so badly. And then one Saturday morning I just realized it was such a complex mess that even if I knew clearly what needed doing to help the world, and even if that would be the most contribution I could make, it was too complex to face. How do you get it organized? I was almost ready to give up. But then I realized, gee, the underlying problem is that these complex things have to be dealt with collectively, and we aren’t collectively smart enough to understand them, to figure out what the solutions could be, and to organize what resources we have towards trying to generate a cure. That seemed to be an underlying, big, complex goal which, if one could make progress on it, would help with all the rest of them.
So bingo, I just said okay. And then I flashed on: how would one do that? Up to that point I had sort of been dismissing engineering, saying, well, who needs more engineering in the world? And then all of a sudden I realized that maybe computers could really help with that issue. Even though I’d read only one book about them, my engineering training told me—and also my training in the Navy, working with radar and sonar, which put signals on a screen. Now we take it for granted that you can put signals on screens and watch them, and that they also respond simultaneously to what the operator is doing. And I thought, well, if a computer can punch cards or print, as they could do even in those very, very primitive times, then it certainly could put signals on a screen electronically—characters that could tell you stuff. And well, gee, yes: the radar and sonar could respond to what an operator was doing, pushing buttons and turning cranks, so the computer certainly could. So you could work interactively with things on the screen—and gee, with people, likewise, with other display systems attached to the same computer complex, you could actually be collaborating.
Oh boy, that was just the thing, right there, that convinced me: all right, there’s my goal. And I’ve been staggering along following that goal ever since. As of last spring it would have been fifty-two years since then. Anyway, I still think there’s terrific opportunity, and there are strategic ways and conceptualizations that would make a clearer way to go. I’m trying to get the world to listen and think about the scale of the issues involved in changing the way we work at knowledge stuff—and indeed, changing the very way in which we can portray symbol structures that represent concept structures to ourselves, which the computer can manage to put together and display in ways that wouldn’t have been practical with books. So the new technology can give us really different ways to do our visualization and our conceptualization and our thinking. Let’s open up and go after that. So that’s the end of the start.
Chapter 2: Doug’s wish list
Frode Hegland: Doug’s wish list, part one.
Doug Engelbart: Is it my wish list, or…?
Frode Hegland: Yeah. What do you want to have happen when something gets communicated? What do you want the effect to be?
Doug Engelbart: I’d like to have them join the crusade. But “crusade” is a word that today is not very nice, right?
Frode Hegland: Good point. But the crusade—in the nice sense of crusade. What does that mean?
Doug Engelbart: Well, this has to become a large movement, and it has to create what I call an improvement infrastructure in the world, of a scope that can really get the changes occurring in the way we think and work together, so that they’ll have more effect, be more effective. I’ve got a lot of concepts in mind about how it might be that the human brain and the human perceptual machinery and the human sensory machinery and all of that can be helped considerably by the new ways to—
Frode Hegland: You’ve gone too far. Go back. Someone puts together a presentation with you, with your slideshows, or us with a video or whatever. The important people in the audience who see this: what would you like their action to be, in concrete terms?
Doug Engelbart: I’d like them to come up and say, “How do we join this collective movement?” And so we have a basic scheme, with a strategy, and it’s getting started with the evolution—because there’s nobody that really knows the answer of what it should be in five or ten years. The best we can do is get on a path that can facilitate the evolution of our ways of thinking and working and getting real help from the computer.
Frode Hegland: What are the first few steps for that?
Doug Engelbart: It’s on several fronts. One is getting a novel set of tools together that can work within the current legacy environments—the web, etc.—and bring a new degree of flexible capability. That also offers a nice evolution from there, and it doesn’t require large, stiff changes to what your organization does.
Frode Hegland: That’s your HyperScope.
Doug Engelbart: Correct.
Frode Hegland: What other components are needed?
Doug Engelbart: Well, then what’s needed is the infrastructure within organizations, and between them, that facilitates the evolution. I have loosely called it an improvement infrastructure.
Frode Hegland: What would that contain? A couple of people sitting around saying how to do stuff, or what would that actually mean?
Doug Engelbart: It would mean that the collaborative processes among the people are actually trying to implement the aggregate kind of knowledge, organized in ways that facilitate your understanding and that can be flexible in their evolution as new understanding accrues—and a way of bringing logical rationale into the ways in which many disparate kinds of assertions and data can be pieced together and structured, until a reasonable, logical conclusion from all these data is such-and-so.
Frode Hegland: So that would basically mean having a specific number of people dedicated full-time to this, in addition to coordinating with other people in the rest of the organization, plus other people in other organizations. Right. If you were to hire them today, what kind of résumés would you be looking for?
Doug Engelbart: A mix. Some people that can work with fairly deep technology things, but also people who can help facilitate training and change inside organizations. And then also people that can start finding ways to measure the effectiveness—the elements of the new effectiveness and collective smarts.
Frode Hegland: Right.
Doug Engelbart: And also people that are interested in finding out how you can push to higher and higher levels of capability for specially equipped and trained teams. The orientation of these specially trained teams would be to be able to approach the aggregate knowledge, integrate it, and say: what are the conclusions you can reasonably make from this, and what are the explanations?
Frode Hegland: Well, if you had—whether you wanted to or not—a bunch of leaders sitting in this room now, listening to you, and they were saying, “Okay, we’re willing to dedicate real organizational effort, plus money, to just getting better at solving problems in our different fields,” what do we actually need to invest in first? What do we need to do? What are the baby steps?
Doug Engelbart: Well, the baby step is to set up that kind of infrastructure within their organization.
Frode Hegland: What would that infrastructure consist of?
Doug Engelbart: You’d have to have a core of people who can coach, guide, and facilitate the evolution of new processes and methods and terminology and uses of equipment, etc. It’s sort of like you need an information-processing specialist who is flexible enough to take what’s coming from the new evolution and work with the people who are saying, “Yes, we need new methodologies.” In fact, it would be more efficient to take some special teams and move them ahead in their capabilities before everybody else. Everybody can start on the path with the HyperScope—that’s the evolution—but the special teams can push ahead, and it’s very, very valuable to have that happen. And then there are some important roles in the organization. We’ve come to call that special role the architect of your knowledge workshop. Knowledge workshop architects are quite a bit more than the IT people. It’s like a materials-handling workshop: you realize what you’re trying to construct, and you realize which kinds of special tools you need, and what kind of training the people have to have on those tools, and how the materials should move from stage to stage and be handled by the different kinds of tools in order to have an effective flow. The same thing with the knowledge and activities—that’s the goal.
Frode Hegland: Okay. When people have heard your presentations, how do you want them to feel, and what do you want them to feel?
Doug Engelbart: Well, how I want them to feel is that they realize there is a frontier that hasn’t been explored: that the new capabilities computers can provide can make a big difference in the way people can conceptualize and portray their concepts, and represent them in a structured way when developing a plan, a design, an understanding. And that people can learn these new skills. Yes, we’ve taken for granted for so long that the page in a book is the way that knowledge is supposed to be portrayed. But I realized that’s old technology, and the new technologies don’t have to just emulate a page in a book.
Frode Hegland: So what do you want these people to feel like they should now run out and do?
Doug Engelbart: That they should start. It depends. They can start saying, “Look, why don’t the people in my circle of workers, professionals, etc., start getting organized to start this kind of revolution, in a way that we can cooperate effectively with others?” It’s sort of like professional societies—people cooperate.
Frode Hegland: Evolution towards what?
Doug Engelbart: It has to be evolution in a wide number of aspects of our working life as knowledge workers: the tools we use, the specialized ways of viewing information and manipulating it and handling it, and cooperating.
Frode Hegland: That’s evolution in different areas. But evolution towards what end?
Doug Engelbart: Evolution towards social groups being able to be much more effective at developing and integrating and applying knowledge, collectively.
Frode Hegland: Very cool. Anything else on your wish list?
Doug Engelbart: Oh, yeah. The early months and years of this have to be an investment that’s based upon long-term return. But there should be important returns within a year or so that people will be able to see differences.
Frode Hegland: Issues. Questions. Look at the camera, please. Okay. Very useful. I’m about to turn the camera off. You have one last chance to say something really meaningful.
Doug Engelbart: That’s right. Upward.
Frode Hegland: Ever upward.
Chapter 3: Facilitated evolution
Doug Engelbart: Important term: “facilitated evolution” is a very important term in the thinking here. Because evolution will happen naturally, and we aren’t smart enough to do a straight design from here to the end. The best we can do is find an effective way of facilitating the evolution of our organizations, of our ways of thinking, of our tools, etc.
Frode Hegland: So “facilitated evolution”—you mean that we put things in place to make evolution go where we want it to.
Doug Engelbart: And practices, and organizational infrastructure.
Frode Hegland: Which is kind of covered by “things.” But yes, okay. I just didn’t want to—okay, good. Very good.
Chapter 4: Paradigms, and the driver of 1903
Doug Engelbart: This business about paradigms became clear to me in the study leading to that 1962 paper. It was strange. You’d try to tell people, “Hey, the computer could be very useful to us,” and all they’d see is: well, you have to punch cards first, and then feed them into the computer, and then wait around. And I’d say, “No, this would be computing resources attending to you personally, responding instantly to whatever you do.” And they’d say, “Well, I don’t know how to program.” And I’d say, “No, you’d program the computer so that it would respond to the different keys you pushed, in ways that were helping you do tasks.” “Well, I still don’t know what the computer could do for me.” And you’d tell them, “Well, what do you do with a typewriter? What if you typed it in and the computer displayed that on the screen?” “Well, that’d be nice, but so what?” “Well, you could just point to a word and say, throw that out.” “Oh, you mean you wouldn’t have to erase and retype the whole thing?” “No. You could say, add something here, change this, move this.” “Oh, that’d be interesting. Oh, I see. But you’d have to be extremely skilled.” And you’d look at it for a little while, and then what I used to wish I could do was switch over to automobile technology. Suppose you were a person in, say, 1903—and that was sixty years earlier, something like that.
So I was trying to tell them then what everybody today knows for sure from experience. Suppose I time-travelled and came back and was telling you, yes, you could drive. “How fast do you think you could drive?” And the 1903 guy says, “Well, I’ve heard tell that thirty miles an hour is just the peak of what a human should be able to take.” “Oh, I see. Well, let’s see.” “And can everybody be okay to drive?” “Well, probably not women, because people think they wouldn’t know how to handle that much.” “Well, let me tell you: men and women both get licenses.” “Licenses? To drive?” “Yeah, you have to pass a test.” “Pass a test? Well, jeez, you just get in and crank it and go.” “No, there’s more than that. There are traffic rules and laws.” “Like what do you mean?” “Well, for instance, you come up to a traffic light.” “What the hell is a traffic light?” “Oh, they’re lights that stand on the corner of some intersections, and they have red, yellow and green to show you.
”And if it’s green, then, right, you can go right on through. And if it’s red, you stop.” And the guy says, “Well, I can see maybe one of those in the middle of town.” And you say, “No, it’s just all over the place.” “What do you mean?” “Well, just all over. In every city there must be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of intersections like that.” “Oh, well, I guess. Let me see. You come up there, and if there are cars coming across and the light’s red, you stop. But if there aren’t any cars, then you just go right ahead, even if it’s red—because it’d be stupid, silly, to stop anyway.” “No. You come up and it’s red, you stop.” “You mean even if there ain’t no cars going across?” “That’s right.” “Who the hell would do that?” “Everybody does that.” “Aw, go on. Well, come on, let’s go to something more practical. You say these cars can go so fast?” “Oh, yeah. Seventy, eighty, whatever.” “Well, when do you ever get to go that fast?” “Well, there are things called freeways that go streaking along, and the cars can go sixty, seventy miles an hour.” “Oh, well, I see. Well, let’s see. Oh, gee, here’s a problem.
”What do you do when a car is going that fast? How the hell do you get on?” And you say, “Well, you have entry ramps where you get on and go parallel to them until you’re going the same speed, and then you merge.” “You mean they’re going to make some room for you?” “Well, yeah.” “Well, geez, how much does a car weigh in those days?” “Say four to five thousand pounds.” “Five thousand pounds! That’s a lot heavier than today.” “Well, yeah, you see, they’ve got big, heavy engines and all kinds of stuff.” “Well, anyway, so they’re going seventy miles an hour and they weigh five thousand pounds, and you get along, going that speed, and then slide in between them. And how do you keep track of that guy behind you—that he’s really behaving?” “Oh, you just look in your rearview mirror and keep track of him.” “Look in your what?” “Well, your rearview mirror.” “What the hell is a rearview mirror?” “Well, it’s a mirror, about six inches wide and two or three inches tall, just up to the right of you, and with that you can look in the mirror straight back through your back window at what’s behind you, so you can check on the guy.”
”You mean there’s five thousand pounds going seventy miles an hour behind you, and you’re verifying it by looking in a goddamn mirror?” “Well, sure, everybody uses that.” And the 1903 guy just would simply not believe you—because mirrors were used to powder your nose or shave, but nobody in the world ever used them to judge things moving way behind them. And that’s a skill we all just take for granted today. Yes, people can do that, and no one would have believed it in that 1903 scene. They wouldn’t have believed that you’d stop at a stoplight and wait for the green, even if there was no one coming. So there are a lot of things that people just aren’t going to anticipate easily about the future, and a lot of changes in their world—particularly changes in their practices and in their skills. People exercise skills today in driving that would have been hard to believe: the way you stay in a lane that’s so narrow, and can judge so carefully with your rearview mirror. Really, the skills are very, very significant. And so if you’re telling them about the future in the knowledge-work thing, and you try to tell them the kind of skills that people will use in everyday work that are alien today—the adult of today would be thought of as helpless as a kid in that future world, unless he had time to get that training and conditioning.
Chapter 5: Perceptual machinery and new symbols
And so how do you get some perspective on that? Well, let’s see. You look around, and somebody tells you something about the processes you’ve got. There are sensory processes. “Oh, yeah, that means you can see all these things out there.” And then there’s perceptual machinery. “What’s that?” Well, that means that when you look over there and there’s a book sitting there, you instantly recognize it as a book. It’s just some machinery that shortcuts all of the details—you don’t look over it and see all the angles; one glance and it’s a book. Well, if you weren’t enculturated like the modern world, you wouldn’t know what all those flabby-looking things were, and they’d all puzzle you. You’d look round the room and there’d be so many things that are totally alien that your eyes just couldn’t look at them and instantly get any perceptual recognition. “Oh, really?” Yeah. Well, hey, look at this page of a book. “All right. It’s this rectangular thing.” Rectangular thing, okay. See these words? “What’s a word?” Well, it’s a string of little blots on the paper. “Oh, some of them are longer and shorter.”
”Oh, I see. Yeah.” So you learn to just look at them and, bingo, their special meaning pops up. And the special meanings are contained in the string of little things we call characters. “Oh, go on.” Well, you speak a language, don’t you? “Yeah, I speak my language, sure. But what about reading one? Maybe I don’t know what reading means.” Well, in speaking, these things come across as sound waves, and they hit your ears, and you don’t spend any time at all piecing together the sounds. It’s just word, word, word, word—meaning, meaning. So what if you could look at strings of characters and do that? “Oh, boy. You’d have to be a genius to learn how to do that.” No, everybody can learn how to do that. Because that basic thing—the skills of perception, of getting to meaning—pretty soon it all gets conditioned, and hey, your eye can sweep across the line and the words just flow right into your head. “Well, well, well, I see.” Okay. I know that sort of troubles you when you’re trying to hear about that, but one of the things I’m trying to do today is get people to realize that those are just symbols that were invented, maybe five thousand years ago, and they’ve gotten implanted in our culture, etc. But they aren’t by any means the only symbols we could bring into practice—things that could mean much more.
But hey, we wouldn’t have had the means to have that many symbols, to create them. And the computer can do them: just put them on the screen, so you can have structures of other things, and relationships shown, etc., that your same perceptual machinery can learn to just—bingo—look at and grok right away. So hey, why don’t we set about exploring that? “Well, what the hell, we already got a vocabulary and an alphabet.” Sure. But suppose that still isn’t what could really harness our perceptual and cognitive processes nearly as well as they could be harnessed. “Well, they developed in the past because that’s the way we’re built.” No, no, no—they developed in the past because that’s the way in which some technology melded with us. But what we’re using—this perceptual machinery and all of that—are things that evolved way before language was, or anything. So we have no idea what all they could be used to harness. So we’d better get busy, because the computers can really provide much more flexible structures that show concept structures and all that. So, okay, let’s go after that. Boy, we could boost our capability in some new direction.
But yes, we do have to handle this problem of paradigms—of people for whom it just doesn’t fit into their world. So one of the things we possibly could do is get them to realize how magical their cognitive, sensory, and perceptual combinations are: recognizing all sorts of things with just one glance that a very primitive person who grew up in a cave would look at and see a bewildering array of stuff that had no meaning to him and wouldn’t be recognizable. With that, you can digest all of that, and then set about turning the crank to readjust your paradigms. And then we’ll all be able to get on the train and head for the future.
Chapter 6: Scale, strategy and the HyperScope
Well, the whole picture of what I’ve been committed to for these decades has to do with really boosting the collective capability of humans to deal with complex, urgent problems. That really tends toward the scale of the biggest problems and the largest collection of people there might be in the end. So it’s always a scale that’s in my mind as I keep thinking and trying to do next stages. And because of the scale—it’s worldwide potential, etc.—there’s an issue of strategy which needs to come in: one can’t just make a frontal attack on really large-scale issues. It became clear to me after the first years of really thinking about how we really help ourselves reason and develop knowledge and be able to clarify it and keep it evolving, that the role of computers in that would be so important.
And then that work, of course, and then the hypermedia, in order to take advantage of the fact that we have a technology now that’s very different from the technology it’s replacing—that of books. The pages of a book are not changeable. You scan them, and when you give a reference to a given article or book, generally you just cite the whole book, the whole article. So the reader, if they want to follow up on that, has to go get it and then trace through the thing until they find what the discussion’s about. So there’s the appreciation that the technology makes it possible that, when you make a citation, you can cite the explicit object in a document and you’ll jump right to that. And then also, instead of just having the fixed view that the page gives you, you can have all sorts of optional views that help you scan or find things or review them or get yourself oriented. So those are two particular points: one is what we call high-resolution linking, and the other is the optional views. And this is the way the Augment system was built over the years.
But to get that out in the public world, because of the scale of change that’s required, it didn’t seem very likely that you could just invent a brand-new super system that someone would have to transfer all their work onto before they’d begin getting the benefit of it. So out of this came, first, discussions in the ’80s and so on about what I called “reach-through”: you have a system that could reach through from its ordinary environment into others. And this kind of matured until, I guess it was three years ago, I started explicitly talking about something I named the HyperScope. Its design is getting much more firmed up. The thing it’s aimed to do is that, for any of the legacy kinds of documents or databases, you’d be able to have a link pointing to any object in them. And the way it could be pursued would be by this special HyperScope—not an ordinary browser or anything. The scope was oriented as something that would go and get the cited document, or access the cited database, and create from the cited stuff an intermediary file, written flexibly in XML, that not only brought the basic content over but also, using algorithms that could be reproduced accurately, put addressable tags on appropriate locations—for instance, on every paragraph or header.
And so when the HyperScope was given the URL, it went there and got that document or accessed the database, created a transformation into the file, and then presented the file to the user over the modified browser the scope had. If you just said, nominally, jump to a given location, it would do just what you could do with an HTML browser—jump to a given paragraph that has an address label on it. But moreover, this could actually create views: the user, by means of whatever kind of flexible commands or interfaces you wanted to build, could say, “Well, just show me the first line of every paragraph.” And this turned out to be a very, very interesting, valuable way to start scanning. And we had many, many other views, which will naturally tend to evolve as more and more people find ways in which particular views can be generated. So this gives us a basic ability to interlink with high resolution between different legacy files. And we can also do something I’ve been dreaming about for years: whenever any link is established, the information about it is put in a database, so that if you were looking at some given document in the scope, one of the views could be, implicitly, “I want to access that database”—by saying, “I want to see who’s pointing at any given object in here,” or I can put criteria against that, saying, “Who among this particular collection of people is talking about it?” Well, then we also want to have the links be able to have a type.
That’s been talked about for many years. The link type would let people, if they start working with this thing, have a much better way of categorizing why they’re pointing at something: whether they’re questioning it, whether they’re supportive of it, whether they need it for supporting their own argument, etc. And the people that are doing visual argumentation and concept mapping, etc., are already getting experience in which of these types of links fit into their graphic structure of an argument, say. So introducing that kind of graphic argumentation would be very, very nice and give a real acceleration to the kind of thing of building knowledge bases that can have much more structural coherence in them. Anyway, these sorts of things—after some design reviews, etc.—look feasible, and so we are starting to build it. To me that offers an especially valuable evolutionary stage in the road ahead, because it doesn’t require that people adopt some unique whole system that they’re going to do all of their work in.
It means that people can still be doing work in the legacy environment and still get much, much, much more value out of it. But it also means that out of this HyperScope and its intermediary file, etc., could grow a system that can do all of its editing and linking within that. And it can grow to have more and more properties that would be very, very valuable in knowledge development, in a nice evolutionary fashion. So people in their environment, where they have much already going on, can start adopting a HyperScope sort of thing within their environment and find a good deal of use for it. And the utilization can increase smoothly, by the number of people that are using it and by the depth of the use, and then by moving into more stages toward what we call an Open Hyperdocument System. So anyway, this kind of evolution in the tools was extremely important. And concurrently, the evolution in the way people think and work together, and the way their organizations structure their knowledge work, etc.—that’s a chance to evolve also, concurrently. And even the modes of application and the scale of application: all that needs to evolve. At every stage of evolution there’s a new mixture of all the social and cultural aspects of how to use it, as well as the technologies that will be evolving.
So there’s just a lot of concurrent evolution that’s needed. Thinking about that scale, and the large scope of the facilitation and evolution that one has to arrange for, means it really is a strategic sort of challenge to try to get that going. So that’s the sort of orientation that’s captured me all these years. And I’m pretty excited now about finding any chance to get off on this next stage with the HyperScope. Oh, sure—this evolution all around needs to get going in different specialized domains of what people are doing today with their legacy files, etc., and it can get started all over the place. The blogs would be very interesting, for instance, to do that with. And one kind of need is to stay in touch with whatever things are moving. That’s also part of the evolution—that’s the stage after getting this going, as I see it: we have to find the means for the close observation and integration of what’s being learned in the different applications and the different kinds of work people are doing, so that they don’t splinter and go off. You want to encourage splinters, but you don’t want to encourage them turning into islands that don’t talk to each other.
Chapter 7: How the concepts matured: scaling, paradigms, co-evolution and structured argument
Doug Engelbart: Well, over the succeeding eleven or twelve years after the epiphany thing, there was a lot of maturing of the concepts that supported what I was trying to do. Let me just describe a few of them. One of them came after I’d gotten my PhD and was working at SRI. I happened to be talking to an officer in the Air Force research group and was just describing generally something I’d picked up when I worked closely with some aeronautical scientists, and that was the effects of physical scaling—changing the physical size of things, and the surprising differences that made in how things operated. And gee, he gave me a grant. So I spent, I don’t know, eight months or something doing a study. That was a hugely effective thing in my mind. It did two things. On one hand, it really buoyed me up about the belief that there was going to be all the computer technology and capacity we needed in order to do what I was hoping to do. And the other was to provide an introduction into my thinking about the factor of scaling: that the complexities I had pictured in 1951 were by this time—let’s see, ten years later—really accelerated. And then the picture of the technologies that were arriving was also now viewable as accelerating their change. And then the whole picture about, well, what is it that brings social units—
Big social groups—I was coming to call them social organisms. What is it that brings them to start viewing the future in different ways, and in some sense getting it so that the forthcoming changes or problems fit realistically into their paradigms? And boy, then I began to realize, in talking to different, quite learned people—some in the newly emerging field of cognition theory, and others in other disciplines like information retrieval, etc.—that the pictures I had about the future really conflicted with theirs. Actually, they were polite about it, but one group wasn’t so polite. They just called me a goddamn liar: I had no right to be fooling around in this other field, which they were the specialists in. So anyway, the whole thing of prevailing paradigms is a hugely critical factor in being serious about helping the world evolve to get the better benefits that you can see could be achieved that way. That becomes a factor in the scale of the challenge.
And there were more things that I came to perceive that were different. One was that the prevailing terminology in a lot of such discussions was that you would come in and automate some function that heretofore had been sort of a drag in our knowledge world. “Office automation,” for instance, was a very common term and seemed to dominate. And so I was making pictures in my mind: well, really, our net capability—any social organism’s—is really a whole infrastructure of capabilities that you have, and if you automate some capability—that is, make it more effective—then the higher-level capabilities that depend upon it, oh, they are changing too. And then maybe they, in order to take advantage of this new augmented or automated capability, would require changes or upgrades in the capabilities of some of the other things that altogether gave that capability its power—not just singly the one that you fixed up. And then that would reverberate up and down inside this infrastructure of capabilities. And boy, if you’re talking about significant changes you’re trying to evoke within this social entity—the social organism—you have to consider all of that reverberation up and down the infrastructure. And then, oh, look at all of the associated customs, practices, organizational structures, other skills, vocabulary—all that inside the human system would change. And so for large-scale changes you’re pursuing, you have to think about the associated concurrent evolution, or co-evolution, among all these factors. And so it soon became clear to me that, really, the best you can do is to set up some kind of infrastructure within our social organisms that can facilitate that evolution.
And boy, you just realize it’s a combination of coping with fixed, unchanging, large-scale prevailing paradigms, and all kinds of things having to change. The scale of the change you have to start facilitating has many, many, many more factors, and is more complex, than just simply coming in with a tool that will fix up one aspect of our information environment. So all these things really grew—slowly enough not to just demolish my hope, but to make the challenge, well, gee, you know: you have to do something with a bigger scope to it. And pretty soon you start trying to say, well, you have to have a really strategic framework in this, if you’re going to say we can boost society’s basic capability for doing collective knowledge work, collective understanding, etc. And so that’s what matured through the years into this bootstrapping strategy, which seems to have stabilized quite a bit in the last ten or fifteen years. So it evolved. But unless you can get people to stop and contemplate some of these things—like, well, prevailing paradigms: what are they like? Oh, well, they’re just what you unconsciously absorb and get established in your mind about what kinds of things are reasonable to consider. And if somebody comes along with something that is outside what you’ve been conditioned in, you’ll get laughed at.
And oh boy, the way I got laughed off the stage so many times in the ’60s, even in the ’70s, talking about the scale of this change that we could make. It’s just so clear that the prevailing paradigm is a very critical thing. With the advent of the web and the experience that people have had since then, one can make proposals now that were actually hooted off the stage fifteen years ago. Just amazing.
So anyway—sometimes I’ve been asked if there’s a difference in my mind between manipulating the information in one document, to find better ways to portray the concepts contained in there, and comparing two different documents. And yeah, there’s a lot of similarity there. Because if you’re comparing two documents—in the future we’ll have different structures of symbols to portray important conceptual relationships and concepts themselves, and you use that both to provide the initial discussion or description of them, as well as in comparing between different people. In fact, a great example of that is the techniques that have matured in the last decade in areas that you can call structured argument portrayals, where the various information or knowledge bundles, I guess, are put into some large-scale argument structure about—yes, this is the real cause of global warming; or yes, there really is global warming; or yes, da da da. A lot of the basic knowledge components, things that people don’t argue about: how do they fit together to make a very strong case for an assertion based upon them? And then other people can make assertions saying certain data or arguments that have been made over in this set of documents counter that. Well, all right, let’s start digging down. So there’s an arrow pointing between the two to indicate that the material over here is negating the possibility over there. So you don’t have a free way to assume that the argument you started with is really solid enough. You have to track back on the counterarguments and their structure and relationships, etc., based upon whatever observations or surmises people make. So you can at least build your knowledge base in a way that has as much verification of the argument as you can find, and there’s a pathway you can follow back to see what it’s based on. These are things that the tools that can come about will be able to help with immensely. And so in the very practice of doing this, it’ll be just an extension of what schoolkids learn about how you can diagram a sentence to find out if it’s got a valid structure.
Yes, we’ve already learned that a little bit, but now you can go right on above that: we’ll learn how to diagram an argument to find out whether it’s an appropriately solid one, and the computer will be able to help us immensely in gathering and finding these different nuggets of knowledge and surmise in an argument, and then in interconnecting them, in a way in which you can show actual diagrams of all these different nodes put together and just see: hey, here’s a node that represents an assertion, and this side of the argument just uses it to say, “Oh, because of this, you can’t worry about that other.” Well, you can then find a really solid way to go back and find that that isn’t really solidly supported. And instead of whoever can shout the loudest, you say, “Well, here’s the basis right now. And if you can’t counter this observation and these measurements that were made back there eight years ago as being a valid way to discount this other assertion, then what have you got?” So it would be almost like an accounting system that you can follow down and say, “No, look—unless the figures of your accounting can be challenged, this is really your overhead rate in your company, not that other one.” So that sort of thing is one of the potentials that the computers can offer, and it’s one that I’m hoping to start getting people to consider. Right now, at the Open University in England and other places around the world, they have been spearheading an activity like this. Dr. Shum there has promoted and helped put together a book by a number of authors from all over the world—a very good thing about structured argumentation. And then another man in the U.S., Jack Park, has done a similar thing with something he calls concept maps, which is very much related. And then somebody else, Dr. Jeff Conklin, who now lives in Virginia or someplace near the Washington, DC area, has a process that he’s been plugging away at for years—visual mapping—much of it about the real-time interactions people go through in discussing or arguing about something, which he helps in diagramming as one goes, to help make better maps. Anyway, so these things are very important and will become just part of the way in which people show arguments—just like people are used to putting together… oh hell, what’s that thing we put together with…
Chapter 8: The Navy: draft, boot camp and training
Doug Engelbart: A brief story of my life in the Navy. The war started when I was, oh, I guess sixteen. And I started college; the draft wasn’t hassling me yet. Later, after I’d started college in engineering, the draft board told me that they were, for the time being, deferring engineering students, because the war effort was probably going to need more engineers even more than more soldiers. Anyway, I enjoyed it. The campus was very small at the time, because the war had sucked away a lot of at least the guys in the upper grades, so the classes were small and really, really good. One thing that had been exciting to me about going into electrical engineering was the stories about how important a part radar had come to play—for England especially, and then of course our own services. It was a brand-new technology, and there was this new influence with the officers, etc. And then they told the story that the Navy had training programs for young people—the more technical the background the better—and they would train them for almost a year. And in the radar classes, the story was that it was so secret that in these military classes, as you went into your classroom they locked the door, and then they opened the door to the vault and brought out the textbooks on radar, etc., and locked the door to the vault.
And you studied and worked on that, and when your period was over they took all those things away, checked to make sure they had them all, and locked them up before they opened the door to let you go out and go back to your barracks. That just sounded—oh, mysterious and nice. For some strange reason it gets kind of a giggle, but that seemed to be a strong thing about why I decided to study electrical engineering. Then during those first two years I really got interested in some things. I remember I was pestering one professor about some kind of phenomenon that seemed to me to be something that could work, and would he tell me why or not. So anyway, I got drafted—and it’s a fortunate thing it didn’t interfere—right at the end of my sophomore year. So I reported for that, and was totally oblivious to the pain in my mother’s eyes as I left her. A big adventure coming on, and it was a real kick. They loaded about six or eight of us onto a freight car that had been fixed up with makeshift hammocks and bunks and things like that, and you could open the door and so on while it was traveling.
So we spent a lot of time as we traveled from Portland across the upper part of the United States over to Chicago. We had a lot of chance to play for fun. I remember when we’d get to a station at the appropriate time, you could get out and go into the dining room and get fed and get back in. We didn’t have uniforms yet, so we wanted to make sure everybody knew that we were service people. So anyway, boot camp was a fun experience—fun in the sense of looking back to see the kind of people they were trying to get you used to being a service person with, getting oriented with that, and your buddies and so on. Being sailors, we were even taken out to learn how, as a group, to row together in a kind of whaleboat situation—for when you have to abandon ship and get out and row yourself away. And I remember one day—I’d taken, in the summer before, for gym, an option to go out for rowing, like a rowing team. They had regular contest-type rowing shells, where eight people could sit in there, four of them staggered along with the left oars and four with the right oars.
And so trying to race those boats—those boats are very slender, and when you fall forward and get into the water and pull like crazy, it’s really, really moving. I just thought it was a real kick. But why I think of that is that during boot camp we had to spend time going out and supposedly learning how to get in these boats and row ourselves to safety some way. I remember we got in, and whoever it was—an older, more seasoned Navy guy—was telling us all what we were going to do: “When I say ‘pull,’ you’re all going to pull.” Well, being used to the way the sculls work, when they’re ready to pull, you just put your back into it. So I did that with the smaller, lighter oars, and bingo, I found myself in the lap of the guy behind me. Anyway, so they decided I needed to be the special person who would sit in the last seat, so if I went over like that again I would just hit my head on something.
But anyway, there were a lot of experiences. Since I’d been in ROTC at a state college—Reserve Officer Training Corps, which was almost demanded of every kid, that they take it for two years. It’s like a going course, but you learned how to march, and you had a uniform, and you learned how to handle the military arms—present arms and that—which really was kind of fun; I enjoyed that. So I was oriented for a lot of that already. Anyway, that came to pass, and it was interesting. A fair number of the guys in that class were headed for the same training program I was. So I don’t know how many—six or eight weeks or something—in boot camp. And then it was roughly only about a month for the primary training on electronics, which took place in some high school they’d taken over in Chicago, where the boot camp was close by, and we lived in barracks. That was a really great experience, because it was in the lower-income area and everybody lived in apartments—the way we lived as kids, I’d never experienced or seen that. And so we eventually got to go out for the evening.
If we wanted to go, we could walk down to the market. But I remember walking along, and all the families would be out on their front steps because there wasn’t air conditioning. What really was a surprise was that so many of the women were whistling and making lewd remarks—to an innocent young man, that was a real kick. And then we went to what was called secondary training, and that would have been for three months. For some reason—I don’t know why they picked it—there was a training place in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where Oklahoma A&M College was. So that was an interesting experience, being down there. The things I was learning then began to be a lot more oriented around the actual equipment we’d be looking at, and it was really just very interesting. I remember one thing: I got very restless in that there was no place to go unless you had enough time to go to the main town in Oklahoma—I can’t remember exactly now—but you’d have to hitchhike quite a ways. So I talked to this other fellow: “Hey, we have bicycles; let’s go riding in the country.” “Oh, that’s great.” And riding in the country meant that as soon as we were outside of Stillwater, there was a horizon about fifteen miles away, totally flat.
We rode along for some miles and the horizon stayed just out there, uneventful. It was just such a totally different experience for me, where every place I’d been there were trees and hills and ravines and rivers and creeks and things, so that going for a long ride was always an interesting change. My God, I never realized what it was like for people who grew up out there on the flat prairie, and the difference it would be for them if they came to live in an area where I’m sure they’d feel claustrophobic. So eventually we came out of that training and were all distributed. About three months gives a good chance to get acquainted with more of the guys in your group, and here we were being split up and going to about five different secondary training places. Mine was Treasure Island, San Francisco. Growing up in Oregon, I knew San Francisco was someplace way south of us, a big city, and I wasn’t quite sure, in my innocent orientation, whether that was farther away to the south of us than, say, Chicago was to the east. It really was strange. I imagine a lot of us not terribly well-oriented country kids went through a lot of those experiences as we got shipped around.
But anyway, we took a long train ride and got there. Treasure Island was, I guess, largely if not totally taken over by the Navy, with a lot of barracks and buildings. We were bussed from the train depot in Oakland, I guess, down there, and you’d carry your gear into a barracks, and they’d say, “Okay, this is where you guys are. Your company, da-da-da. In the morning you’ll report for first muster,” and so on, and the mess hall is down there. By this time I was six months into being in the Navy, and you’d sort of gotten used to that. This next six months of training was much more really interesting for me, because you dove in to actually study the radar and the sonar and the radio—the actual equipment—and you’d have laboratory experiments where you’d actually go and it was real equipment. And then a little later, after you’d learned how they were all made, and the engineering things that seemed to be involved in keeping them at the right temperature and so on—and of course everything was vacuum tubes of various sizes; some of them were about two feet tall. Anyway, it was just a terrific experience to play with them.
And then they’d have you leave the room, and they would make something go wrong inside it, sometimes putting in a defective part in place of a good one, or a contact or something. Then you’d have to come in, and: how long does it take you to find the trouble and fix it? That was a fun challenge. So that experience was that. And there were just a few times we could—it seemed like a few times, because I guess I was innocent about all the pleasurable things people could do with an evening off, going to San Francisco. I’m trying to think if there were any notable events. I don’t think that’s the important part of the story. But then we had a couple of weeks to take off and go home and come back, and the only transportation available in those days for people was the train. San Francisco to Portland, I think it was a day and a night and a day, or something; I can’t remember. But it was interesting to see the country and get up there, and, hey, my family was there. And so I could then be a kid in uniform, telling all these other non-uniformed kids about this great life in the dangerous military service.
Chapter 9: Shipping out to the Philippines
And some places even took photographs of the young sailors. So then I got back, and within a few days we were loaded onto a ship. It was a converted freight ship, almost the kind that I had worked on for two summers—between high school and college, and the summer between the first and second year of college, I was employed in the shipyards in Portland. The first year I’d carefully scraped together money and paid for a course in welding. And by George, after that they made me a journeyman welder—which in peacetime would take you quite a while, with experience, to get to journeyman status. So then I could go hire on in the shipyards and get journeyman’s wages. Gosh, they paid us a whole dollar-twenty an hour! Oh my gosh. I’d worked very, very hard—at least hard enough to be keeping up with any adult male gardener or someone doing heavy work—for twenty-five cents an hour. I was glad to get it, but this was just a real elevated point. So I could save enough money by working a couple of months there to pay my way through the year, because I had no other way of funding my college.
But living in a dormitory, a cooperative house, the first two years, I think thirty dollars covered all the expenses, room and board. You got a small room and a sleeping porch. So anyway, getting on one of these ships just seemed almost like an old friend, because I’d welded many parts of that kind of a boat. So anyway, we all got on, and there was much kidding and so on, because very few of them were veterans of anything, and they all looked sort of resigned. The veteran ones, and the younger ones, were acting macho, because we were going to go over and invade Japan. That was just uppermost in everybody’s mind, and it was clearly assumed by all the military experts that Japan would not surrender without a really, really, really bloody combat. Anyway, everybody was a bit edgy. The ship backed out of its position, very slowly started forward, turning and heading north along the coast of the southern part of San Francisco Bay, and then underneath the bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, and cutting along the coast there. There were a lot of explosions, firecrackers and things—hey, we hadn’t realized they’d give any kind of festive send-off to just one ship at a time.
But we all went to the rail and waved at whatever we could think of waving at. And then the captain came up on the bridge over our heads and shouted out, “Hey, Japan just surrendered.” It was such a strange, unforgettable experience, just sensing it. All the guys there—none was going to admit it to anybody else in any way, but that was our main reaction. Then we all turned to look up at the captain, and almost all of us shouted, like, “Well, for Christ’s sake, turn around!” I don’t know whether we assumed that he could or not, but he just gave a little laugh and turned his hand from straight up to down—sort of thumbs-down on you guys. And so he turned around, and I don’t know if we saw much of him at all during the whole thirty-eight days that it plowed through, at about ten miles an hour, from San Francisco to the Philippines. But who cared? So anyway, the men in the Philippines: they don’t know where all the individuals there are slated to go, to meet their different groups of what they’re going to be assigned to. Some were Marines—I can’t remember any soldiers, but sailors and Marines. And so what they do is dump you on a campground near a shore; in Navy terminology that’s a “receiving ship,” but it’s a campground on the ground.
I was in two successive ones of those before I got an assignment. I remember the first one—a very important kind of thing about a technical future and such, but because it was so low and swampy, there was a little hill up there about fifteen feet high, and so they put the outdoor bathrooms up there: a big bench with holes about every three feet that we had to sit on and go to the toilet, right out there, not only in the open, but elevated on that level. All this was part of a training that’s affected me for the rest of my life, about actually feeling lonesome if you’re in a bathroom all by yourself. But one of the things the native women would come in and do was pick up clothes and wash them and bring them back, or sell fruit or something like that to the sailors, and they’d go walking right by us. And we all thought, well, geez, you hear about native life, that it’s all very natural, and people are a bit like that. We were just sure they were all used to this.
And I found out later that, on the contrary, they were all kind of strictly careful about the different sexes being private, etc. So anyway, it was such a kick for us to not know that. So then I got assigned and put on some boat that’s about as big as a landing craft—about thirty feet long—and it started chugging away. We had a rough idea of the way the islands were in the Philippines, but we had to keep asking the guys running the thing, the crew. They all wanted to be sure that every one of us knew that they were seasoned veterans of this area, so it took a while to get them to talk to us and tell us more about what we were passing. So I guess there were a couple of days in there. On the left of us was pretty open ocean, and on the right was the kind of heavy vegetation that’s thick out there. And then, my gosh, there was this place you could turn and go in. I didn’t know it—it took a while to appreciate that it was almost exactly as if you were turning in to the mouth of the Golden Gate at San Francisco. You go in through this split in the gorge inland.
And what opens out in front of it is a huge bay, and the main city—I don’t know if it’s the capital, but it’s by far the largest city in the Philippines [Manila]—lay straight ahead, in roughly the Oakland–Berkeley kind of relative position. And then as we steamed over, people were pointing out, “There’s Corregidor, it must be,” and the crew people said, “Yeah, I’m sure that’s Corregidor.” That was the heavily fortified island with barracks and stuff underground and all of that, from which the Americans stuck in and did a lot of damage to Japanese ships during their invasion, and to which a whole bunch of people—Americans and, I guess, others that were allies—escaped. Sort of like going down to Marin County: they came down from the north, being chased, scrambled into boats and went out to the island and hid there. By then that had cost the Japanese a lot in time and casualties, and they were very grumpy about that. They weren’t just going to let that happen, so they really pulled in a whole bunch of barges and stuff. Corregidor was so heavily buttressed with underground places that for them to then beat that down and capture the people cost them a lot, and they were very grumpy about the extra loss of life and energy it took, because they’d already put up with the long struggle of fighting their way all the way down that peninsula and getting in there and taking so much.
And it wasn’t until later, talking to our own guys who had been in combat, that I realized: yeah, if Americans were doing that all the way around, and it took that many casualties, that much time and that much sweat and effort to capture them, then you probably wouldn’t be very polite to them either. So anyway, when they marched them out of there, all the way across the northern rim of the bay—they now call that the Bataan Death March. And it was highly publicized: the real stresses, and the anger and cruelty of the Japanese guards that bashed people and shot them on the spot. Anyway, just thinking about it, and seeing the sunken ships in the bay, we realized we were getting into something here where we could learn, and be very grateful that we didn’t have to be involved that closely. For the rest of it, then, I got assigned—actually there’s a naval base that’s not a fortified thing, but it’s got offices and little warehouses and lots of equipment, etc., where the commander of the boats for the Navy of the whole Philippine area had his post.
One important thing for him was the communications. So they had a workshop there, and lines that ran out—radio lines to outlying areas with high-frequency interconnections, and landlines that went out and around, and some radio transmitters, etc. But for really high-power transmissions and such, they were depending on stations that were like twenty-five or thirty miles away. So anyway, I was assigned to be one of the technicians to support that central station. And then people started leaving, and within a few months I was in charge of it. It didn’t seem to be—I thought it’d be a lot different if it were wartime and you suddenly had to handle a real emergency—but still, the pressure was high enough. One time there was a ship in distress, and they were going to depend upon this commander to control which different kinds of ships could go out to help, and to stay in complete control. And something started to go wrong with the relay stations and their power. And it turned out the only place where the senior officers could stand around and see what happened was my shop. So I remember the admiral and the captain and so on just sort of standing there patiently, but watching, saying, “You guys know what you’re doing, we assume, but we want you to be really aware of how significant this is.”
They didn’t say it in so many words, but it just happened that everything that was going wrong was with things that were apparent enough that I could tell the younger guys how to do it. A little bit of excitement. That one thing alone—we still had to stand watches, to be there personally twenty-four by seven, rotating like that, sometimes from midnight to four in the morning or something. And so for one thing, for some reason, to keep awake, I started looking at the instruction manuals. And I’d taken one class in typing in high school—and the other guys said, “What do you want to learn that for?” “Well, it just seems like it’d be a useful thing.” So we had teletype machines, and I could set one so it would just type locally, and I’d sit down and start typing the content of the instruction manuals, just to keep awake. And then I remember starting to say, oh, I could practice different ways to see about speed and so on.
I was later quite glad I’d done that, because my touch-typing didn’t need any particular help when we started getting our interactive computer stuff. But anyway, they decided there was some kind of points system for when it was that they would send you home. If you were a draftee, you were in for the duration, and the duration for each person could extend a reasonable time so as not to abandon some post overseas that was important. So they assumed they were doing their duty about trying to get replacements out there—people who’d signed up for regular service—but then there was the matter of them getting out there and having enough experience to keep doing it. For some reason—I know the reason now, but it was a sort of slow country-boy sign—guys started to take off and go home who had been in for less time than I had. And it slowly dawned on me that it was because of the responsibility of my role. And sure enough, I was the very last person of the Navy draftees in the Philippines to finally get sent home. I guess I don’t blame them for doing that. But all my friends would say, “Geez, all you would have had to do was write some letters to somebody.”
Chapter 10: Vannevar Bush and “Making the Most of Your Life”
So anyway, I came home, I think a matter of weeks before college was going to start again. For some reason I think I’d taken care of enrolling again, and got back to find a campus just bursting at the seams with all the returning vets. Anyway, one strain of activity that I found myself doing, even in these receiving ships out on the remote islands, was—when we first got there, I found libraries, and they were really quite pleasantly equipped in the range of books and magazines. One thing about the first one that I liked—this was before I got shipped up to Manila—was that I found a Life magazine, just totally by haphazard looking, and there was some article that, gee, this is really interesting. It told about a man who had been the President’s right-hand person on science and technology during the war. His name was Vannevar Bush, and he had been a professor at MIT. He had written an article for The Atlantic magazine some months earlier that had created enough of a stir that Life magazine got the okay to run a short tutorial about it. And that’s when I saw it.
That was Bush’s picture of something: he had the idea that he wanted to be able to make trails through documents, and he chose things where you’d use microfiche and microfilm for the pages of the documents. He was saying that on the associated frames—maybe every other frame was a picture of a page of a book, and the other ones would have information on them, what do you call it, links, that would cite some other frame in some other place, whether it was that roll of film or that frame of microfiche or whatever. But anyway, he said this would really revolutionize the way in which knowledge could be dealt with, and it just—oh, it was thrilling. I don’t know how long I carried that around in my head. Many years later I went back and read those things. But anyway, that was exciting. And then I found more and more, when we got up to Manila, more and more things in the library that intrigued me. I even started reading about some philosophers, and about the psychologist who was a famous psychology guy—what’s his name? He’s so famous, I can’t remember his name, but it’s a very well-known name. And then I came upon a book that really did affect me. It was called Making the Most of Your Life.
It was a most popular book, because it was pragmatic sort of things about your life: that there was something to actually doing some planning and cultivating of what you wanted to do, and it would make a big difference to you later on if you’d actually done some of these things appropriately—that what you created or did would be more valuable to the world, or to whatever standard it was. Somehow the whole thing intrigued me, and I kept re-checking it out and going through it. During that time it came to me that there were vocabulary terms. So someplace I bought some three-by-five cards—I can’t really remember how I got hold of them—and I put a word on one side and a definition on the other, and got an increasingly sized deck of these words. I remember I said, okay, that’s the kind of thing I could do on watch, with that deck. I’d look at the top one, and if I could think of the definition, great; and if I couldn’t, well, I’d have to read it. But the ones that I had trouble with, I would reinsert maybe a quarter or less of the way back into the deck, and the ones I knew I’d put all the way in the back. That way I would see the harder ones more often.
I don’t remember whatever happened to that deck, but it was really fun to do that. Then I ran across a few aphorisms and said, hey, that’s kind of an acute thing. So I started a deck like that on aphorisms, and I just had really, really fun with that. Some of them I remember totally directly. One thing from Benjamin Franklin, early in his writing, in Poor Richard’s Almanac—there was this aphorism that said you wouldn’t worry half so much about what other people thought of you if you realized how seldom they did. And to a country boy, I just thought that was really neat, and I remembered that for years and years. But this book also had very practical things: if you’d like to see something done well, what’s the first step? It’ll never get done if you don’t take the first step. What is it? Is that going to be such a big deal? Why don’t you just take it? Just things like that. And something like: the attitude that you express to the world as you walk and talk is a very important part of how the world views you, and how they view you is a very important part of how you can affect the world.
So, oh hey, why do you know about that? I remember when I got back to college—well, at an intermediary point, when I was ready to go home, I thought, God, that book has meant so much to me. I kept checking it out, and I finally violated all the principles of integrity and just stole the book, took it with me—because in that whole year of being there, I only saw one, two, or three other people in the library. So I didn’t know what to feel: sort of proud of myself, or ashamed of myself, for taking that book. But I kept it around, and unfortunately it was part of the extensive library that we lost when our house burned down in 1976 or ’77, I guess—I’m trying to remember. But anyway, those aphorisms and that book really did have an impact on me, because that was like 1945–46, and 1951 was five or six years later—and 1960 was fourteen or fifteen years later, when I was really trying to write. But anyway, some of the big decisions I made in my life, as I said, are something I just have to trace back to that book and the sort of spirit of pragmatic goal-setting, and allaying your fears and your bashfulness.
Chapter 11: Brother Dave, losing a father, and Redmond
So, to return to that: school was starting very soon, and my younger brother Dave was about six or seven and playing about ten feet from me. I didn’t like splitting wood, so I’d started to take my turn playing with my sister with some mock-up thing we pretended was an airplane, and Dave picked up the axe. We didn’t think anything of it, because he certainly knew it was dangerous. But somehow he tried to make a manly overhead heave at splitting his piece of wood sitting on the block—it’s just an everyday thing that people do—but somehow it didn’t go in straight, so it got deflected. And where in the world did it get deflected to but right into his right knee. And oh boy. He went for the house, and I met my dad partway along, out of breath, and Dave got scooped up, a quick message to my mom, into the car, and soon he was gone. He went to the hospital, which was probably eight miles from us, because we lived outside of town—even more than that. And he was there for six weeks or more, and almost died of blood poisoning, because there were no simple things like sulfa drugs in those days. Anyway, that affected him all his life, and it affected our relationship too. He got out of the hospital finally, but he was so pale and weak. And it wasn’t too long after he got out of the hospital that my father contracted a heavy cold, and it got so bad that the ambulance came and got him; it had gone to his heart.
He was in bad shape, and he just died that night. So that started a lot of tough years. Losing a father—not having a model about how to think about managing a career, a household, or what the world is like—it was a depressing time. We had also been hit hard enough that his business had finally fallen apart, and they’d lost the house we were living in in the suburbs. They had optimistically bought this sort of ramshackle country house out on a street that dead-ended after it wound around through the woods and down the side of a ravine and across a bridge over a creek and on up the hill, with people living up there. But right across the creek, just over the bridge there on the right, on the edge of the bank looking down over the creek—that was the house we bought and moved into. And right behind it, the property line was about fifteen feet from the back of our house.
But beyond that, for a long way—a mile or so—the woods were all untouched: virgin fir forest, and alder and maple, and that creek wound its way past our house along through the woods. It made a spectacularly unique playground, because nobody was quite sure who owned it. Our parents would say, “Oh yes, it’s owned by some kind of estate,” or something like that. That location had a lot to do with the way I grew up. But not having a father around had a lot to do with it too. And having a mother that was just a gem in her way. She’d finished high school and that was all, but she could still remember a lot of the poetry she’d learned, and even some German. And she was very artistic: she would paint watercolors on some of the windows of her house; it just really lit it up. And she never had to hassle us at all about “don’t waste money, don’t waste that,” because we were just acutely sensitive and didn’t want to burden her with that. So we became as serious as you can about how long you’d use everything before you discarded it or threw it away. And to this day I keep using the same razor blades.
I think it’s ridiculous, but—well, one more time won’t hurt. I don’t know. But all of that, and then the other people in that area, all the neighbors, etc.—there was only one that I knew of who had college training. They were all good people, but their orientation was quite simple, at least never talking about issues like the dynamics of the world or the way things work. But it was still a neighborhood, and everybody had a huge respect for my mother, and her father, who had become totally deaf from an accident—falling off a horse and hitting his head on some ice or something, up in the state of Washington, where they had their homestead. Oh, by the way, that grandfather homesteaded in an area where my mother grew up. And the winter after my father died, she just packed us three kids up, left my grandfather to take care of the place there, and went up to move in with her sister and her three kids and husband, who were living in the homestead, a big house that Mom had grown up in. And so we went to school; we had to get on a school bus, and we had a fair amount of way to go, etc. This was in a town up in Washington that later on a few people began to notice or hear the name of.
It’s Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft has all its buildings and things. I went up there twelve years ago to visit Microsoft and took a ride around, and I couldn’t find the old farm. It was just a little disappointment. I thought, with the geography that I knew about the area—and there was this sort of semi-river they called the slough that we used to swim in, and we’d have to cross a bridge over it. Anyway, so that whole period of being in a unique social position, in an area in which—well, these were hard times; everybody was having a hard time, but everybody there knew that we didn’t have a dad. And in just some way, the way we were treated was that they didn’t want to make a point of it or embarrass us by it, but they would sort of go out of their way to see that we weren’t embarrassed by things. Nobody ever kidded us about how worn our clothes were, or how many knots there were in the shoelaces in our shoes—because, I mean, before you buy new shoelaces, you keep tying up the breakages until there are too many knots. All that, I’m sure, made a lot of difference in the earlier years.
Chapter 12: Back to college, and on to NACA
And so, getting back to school: I worked hard, but some of that Make the Most of Your Life was actually affecting me. Like in the first semester back—there were so many veterans back that the faculty even had to start classes at seven in the morning. And so in the winter it was still dark when I got up, and of course, in the middle of Oregon, it was very often raining. And so having to walk to class—about six blocks or something like that—walking there in the drizzle and rain and thinking, geez, today I’m going to have the first midterm test. This is an engineering course, and I wanted to go on with that, but it’s—oh, boy, it’s cold and miserable. And all of a sudden I remembered that book, and it was telling you: don’t let the world see it if you’re discouraged; you keep your head up and keep going. Oh, yes. Okay. So I purposely changed my stride and held my head up, and actually started whistling as I was walking through there the last block. And I went in and got an A in the midterm. I don’t know if there was the slightest correlation, but anyway, that was sort of reinforcing all of that.
And so during the next two years it was so exciting for me to learn more and more about the underlying phenomena of the equipment I had been working on. And I actually started getting out of my shell of being the country boy who, in high school, was too bashful to talk to the person that might have the adjacent locker in the hall, for a couple of quarters or something, before I’d get acquainted. I ended up, for some reason, getting to be active in student activities, and was elected to one of the men’s activity clubs—so that was a good thing—and, you know, the newspaper editor, and the student body president, all of us were in there. So that was all done, and the grades. And then I didn’t have a picture really about what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go. The professors were talking about a really interesting training program that General Electric ran: they’d take you from college and send you for maybe a year rotating to different places to get the experience of different activities, and then, assuming you were bright and had all that experience, you could start helping in a larger framework for the corporation.
Oh, that was really interesting. Oh good, boy, I think that’s something. So I signed up, and there were still a couple of months to go, I guess, before we graduated. And then another thing happened. One of the friends I’d made, a fellow engineer who’d been a Navy pilot—he and I one day were walking and talking, and somebody else passed us and said, “Hey, we’re going to go hear a lecture from a guy that’s on a hiring tour.” “Oh, yeah? What is it?” “Oh, it’s a guy from NACA.” “What’s that?” Well, my buddy knew: that was the forerunner of NASA. “He works down by San Francisco in a laboratory.” “Oh, well.” So we went, and I was listening to this guy talk about his laboratory and stuff, and I thought, oh my gosh, that’s really kind of interesting—all those big wind tunnels and all of that. And then I got to remembering being at Treasure Island for about six or seven months, and how much I liked the area. I wasn’t married or engaged yet, and Stanford University was just down the road, and stuff like that. Gee, and it’s nicer weather than if you go back east, and all that. So I just got carried away and signed up, and found myself some time later on a Greyhound bus going to work there. That was the spring of 1948. And so that sort of finished the college experience.
Frode Hegland: You have a great sense of timing, because you managed to get all of that in exactly one hour. That was wonderful, and I’m very, very happy.
Chapter 13: Parents, Portland and the Depression
Doug Engelbart: My mother and father had moved to Portland. They’d been married in a small town, Bremerton, Washington, which had shipyards that had been active during World War One. So they both had been working there when they met. It turns out my mother’s sister and my father’s sister and my mom had all been rooming together, sort of accidentally, and that’s how my dad and mom met. So they married there and then moved to Portland. I’m not sure when—my sister was three years older than I, and I’m quite sure she was born in Portland anyway.
Frode Hegland: What profession was your father in?
Doug Engelbart: Oh, he had a degree in electrical engineering from Washington State College, and I assume that’s what he was working at at the shipyards. But by the time I became aware, somehow he’d got caught up in the brand-new thing of radio, and because he had this engineering background he could understand it, and what’s better. So somehow or other he started a radio store, which was selling and repairing, and it was busy. Then the Depression hit—I wasn’t very old, I guess, when the Depression hit. By the time I could remember much about his work, he was working and going back to his shop after dinner every night; we didn’t see much of him. But then, when the Depression really came in, it clobbered his business. And also, he apparently had gotten himself insured—what in those days was very comfortable. And apparently his health failed. I was never quite clear what was going on, but I think they made him quit working. And also, apparently, they lost their home; they couldn’t keep paying the mortgage on their home in Portland.
That’s the first place I can remember living. So when I was seven or so, we moved out to the country, where they found a place that was much cheaper, but for us kids was hugely more attractive. It was an acre of land that spanned a little creek and then went up the incline to a level place where the house was, and then a garden, and a barn above that. That’s where I got most of my memories of childhood. And right behind our house, between us and the city of Portland, was a ninety-acre virgin fir forest that really created such a barrier, and so much fun: the gate right behind our house went right out into the woods, as we called it. We roamed through all that and played in the creek and built things. It was just terrific. I’m sure all that country-ish roaming, freedom, exploring, etc., shaped my personality. Anyway, it was a big part of our lives. Then, when I was nine, in ’34, my father—
Frode Hegland: Could you pause one second? Okay. 1934.
Doug Engelbart: My father caught a cold, and in a few days it got much worse. The kids weren’t getting the exact story, but we knew he was worse. And an ambulance came and picked him up and took him to the hospital, because they figured he needed care there. As they were carrying him out, I said, “So long, Dad,” and he said, “Goodbye.” But anyway, sometime during the night he died. So all that was very abrupt for us kids. And right in the middle of the Depression—it didn’t really get over until World War Two got going, I think. But all the years we lived out there, my mom was just eking out on the insurance money. I don’t know how she did it. So we were all acutely aware that we were very hard up, but it didn’t make it visible for me: my mom’s sense of humor was always there, and so we just weren’t worried. We just knew we didn’t have any money. So anyway, I finished grade school in the little tiny district we lived in.
Frode Hegland: Hang on. When did you finish grade school?
Doug Engelbart: Just after the eighth grade.
Frode Hegland: Okay. What year was that, do you remember? How many years was that after your father died?
Doug Engelbart: I’d have to guess. I think it might have been 1941.
Chapter 14: The Model T
Frode Hegland: Oh—but why don’t we stop at 1938 and talk about your Model T?
Doug Engelbart: Oh. Well, we would be looking for odd jobs around, if you could get them—like helping somebody dig ditches, or heavy labor, because by the time I was in my early teens I was strong and able, so we could really get good money out of that: twenty-five cents an hour. And we also got paper routes that we delivered on our bikes around the country. Anyway, we were trying to earn money to help. And—oh, what did you ask me?
Frode Hegland: Oh, the Model T Ford.
Doug Engelbart: We also roamed around in adventures through all that forest land and such, but right on the edge of it was orchard land that had been abandoned or something like this, and a barn that was abandoned. And, oh my gosh, sitting in this barn, sheltered from the rain and weather, was this glorious old car. It had a brass radiator, and the windshield went straight up, and when somebody was sitting in the driver’s seat, their head was about two feet higher than someone standing next to them—that’s how high the seats were. It was a 1916 Model T Ford, and it hadn’t been used for years. It was a touring car, and the back seat had been torn off, so the lumber and such that made up the frame of the car was sitting there bare behind the front seat. But oh, I just fell in love with that car. So we found the owner, and he said, all right, he’d give it to me for eight or ten dollars, something like that. I think that’s like forty hours of labor. But I just bought it. My mom didn’t object at all. It was such an interesting thing. So we towed it home—I remember how we towed it home and pushed it—but it didn’t have tires that worked. So for the next year or so I was traveling all over the country on my bike, after delivering the papers and such, going to junkyards and trying to find tires for it; secondhand ones wouldn’t work, and this and that.
And finally I had enough nerve to get it started. It didn’t have a starter—1916 was the first year that electric starters were optional on the Model T Fords, but mine didn’t have one. So the only way it ran was that around the edge of the flywheel were horseshoe magnets, all bolted to the flywheel, and they spun past some coil sitting there. That was the way it generated the electricity that could be used for running the spark plugs and stuff, and also for the lights, because in those early years they had electric lights: the two front headlights were electric, but in case you were going to park someplace, there were little oil lamps, one on each side of the windshield, sitting up kind of high. That was really cute. When we finally got it running, one of the kicks was that the faster your engine ran, the brighter the headlights got. So if you came up to an intersection and wanted to see what the signs said, you’d stop and put it in neutral and gun the engine so you’d get enough bright light to see the sign. Anyway, in fixing it, I finally took it all apart.
The engine. There was a garage a mile or so from our house that was a repair garage, owned and run by two brothers. And of course everybody in the community knew that we were semi-orphans, etc., but they were really nice, when they found out how honest I was about it. We had an arrangement that I could come up and say, “I’ve got to try to get the piston rings off of this thing,” and they’d tell me how to do it, and they’d show me the right tool and loan it to me so I could ride home and do the fixing. And then the agreement was I’d bring it right back. So I’d have to make a two- or three-mile round trip to do that. But it was just very fortunate that I could have that much support. So I had it all rebuilt. It was just a big part of my young life, an adventure.
Chapter 15: High school in Portland
Our little district didn’t have its own high school, so we had our choice of going into Portland—we could pick any high school—or going out farther to an outlying country town. And I chose to go into Portland. But, not knowing anyone—only a few from my small graduating class went to that school—I was in a sea of strangers, and it seemed like everybody was much more socially aware than I was. Frode Hegland: Why did you choose to go to that one? Doug Engelbart: I don’t remember. Any of them would have been going to a strange place, but I don’t remember. Frode Hegland: Okay. Doug Engelbart: But it presented problems in getting to it, because they didn’t run school buses out in the country or anything. So we would have to walk a mile and a half or something like that to the city limits, where the streetcars and buses would run, if we wanted to take a bus in—or we could hitchhike. My sister and I went together for a while, but she got a scholarship to a very special school, so she was not often there with me. And then the neighbor we had—the only man in the whole neighborhood who had been to college; he ran a pharmacy, and he was really a very good guy—the agreement was that as he was leaving in the morning he’d beep the horn on his car (he lived on the other side of the creek, on the other side of the road), and we’d go running across the bridge and jump in his car, and he would drive us up to his store, which then still left about a mile or a mile and a half to school, and we’d walk from there. So it was always a sort of a journey into school. I’d get up at 5:30 to milk our cow and finally get into school at ten after eight or something like that, for an 8:30 start-up—and ten or fifteen minutes later the kids would come dragging in who lived only a matter of blocks away. I contrasted the difference in how much it took me to get there. And I was also just so bashful; it’s just so amazing. One thing I keep remembering: we had lockers in the main halls, and you’re assigned a locker, and so you go to your locker and stand around and such, so the people with lockers next to yours would intersect with you sometimes—but I was too bashful to get acquainted with them. It’s just unbelievable. And it was like that, and I sat there and kept realizing how different I was. One time, when I was a junior, I happened to look up and down the row next to me, and I just noticed that almost everybody had what we’d call fancy shoes—they were oxfords, low-cut shoes, like everybody wears now. And I only had one pair of shoes to my name, and they were high-top walking shoes, and I didn’t see any other like that in there. And I looked more closely at mine and then looked up and down the row and said, hey, none of them had any cowshit on them either. So mine were distinctive from two points of view. It never occurred to us to clean our shoes anyway. So anyway, I guess I got good grades, and I can’t remember much else.