Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Engelbart believed that there were fantastic new horizons for human
potential with computers. The notion of augmentation, while not a meta-
phor, was a vision that drove all of his work and solidifi ed his team. It was
only much later that the world rewarded him for it. He was ahead of his
time, and the fl edgling industry predictably pulled away key members of
his team for shorter-term profi t-making ventures.
Engelbart's legendary demo in 1968 was an incredible theatrical tri-
umph as well as a technological one. Later nicknamed “the Mother of All
Demos,” Englebart sat on stage in San Francisco while his team was in
Menlo Park. Engelbart recalls:
Our computer was down at SRI in Menlo Park. In order to demo it, we
beamed two channels of video along two microwave links up to San
Francisco, bouncing them off dishes above the airport. There was only
one video projector on the West Coast powerful enough for the confer-
ence hall, a Swedish Eidophor that I had to borrow from NASA. It was
huge, maybe 6 feet tall. Then we rigged up a homemade modem—2,400
baud—to get signals from my console in San Francisco back to SRI over
a leased line.
On stage right was a big screen, 22 feet high. At the side of my dis-
play monitor, a camera pointed right at my face. Another camera was
pointing down to capture my hands at the keyboard. It was pretty elabo-
rate. My face would be on one side of the screen, with text on the other—
or on a split screen with people in Menlo Park showing something as I
talked about it. I'm told that this is the original videoconferencing demo
(Jordan and Englebart 2004).
The theatre of the live performance and the skin-of-your-teeth presen-
tation technology may sound familiar to theatre folk, but they were so far
away from the culture of computing at the time that they made an indelible
impact on the audience. Engelbart's demo lived on in the culture of SRI as
well as the culture of PARC. The MIT Architecture Machine Group (later
to become the MIT Media Lab) was still relying on demos that were of-
ten mock-ups, deconstructed as soon as they had been shown. At the same
time, the content of the demo marked a major turning point in the practice,
technology, and purpose of interface design.
enter the psychologists
Psychologists have been involved in
the quest to understand human-computer interaction since the beginning
