47 interactions . . . march 1996 As We May Think 50 Years After “As We May Think”: The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium This paper gives a thematic view of the Vannevar Bush Symposium held at MIT on October 12-13, 1995 to honor the 50th anniversary of Bush’s seminal paper, “As We May Think”. It is not intended to be an exhaustive review of the speeches and panels, but rather to convey the intense intellectual and emotional quality of what was a most extraordinary event, one that was self-referential in ways unanticipated by the planners. To capture this event further, we are planning a Web site that will contain extensive hypertextual written, audio, and video records. Rosemary Simpson Information Programming Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and Andries van Dam Brown University
Transcript
47i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
As We MayThink
50 Years After“As We May Think”:
The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush
SymposiumThis paper gives a thematic view
of the Vannevar Bush
Symposium held at MIT on
October 12-13, 1995 to honor the
50th anniversary of Bush’s
seminal paper, “As We May
Think”. It is not intended to be
an exhaustive review of the
speeches and panels, but rather
to convey the intense
intellectual and emotional
quality of what was a most
extraordinary event, one that
was self-referential in ways
unanticipated by the planners.
To capture this event further, we
are planning a Web site that will
contain extensive hypertextual
written, audio, and video records.
Rosemary SimpsonInformation ProgrammingAllen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and Andries van DamBrown University
48 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Introduction
In honor of the 50th anniver-
sary of Vannevar Bush’s semi-
nal paper, “As We May Think”,
Brown University and MIT
cosponsored The Vannevar
Bush Symposium on October
12-13, 1995, at MIT. The fea-
tured speakers — Douglas
Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Robert
Kahn, Tim Berners-Lee,
Michael Lesk, Nicholas Negro-
ponte, Raj Reddy, Lee Sproull,
and Alan Kay — are all pio-
neers who have shaped the
legacy of Bush we are
immersed in today. They also
represent the major topics of
“As We May Think”: augmen-
tation of human sensory and
mental capabilities; informa-
tion structuring, retrieval, and
transmission; and the syner-
gistic interplay of technology
and human enterprise. The
invited audience included peo-
ple from many diverse areas,
literary computing to sociolo-
gy to computer engineering;
many of them were as well
known or influential as the
speakers themselves. Togeth-
er the speakers and partici-
pants represented the
multidisciplinary community
that reflects the many lines of
research and thought emanat-
ing from Bush’s paper.
In addition, Andy van Dam
and Paul Kahn presented
background and supporting
information about Vannevar
Bush’s life and the history of
attempts to transcend the lin-
earity enforced by a paper
medium. Paul Kahn, co-
author of From Memex to
Hypertext, presented an ani-
mated simulation of the
memex created for the sym-
posium that provided a valu-
able context for the speeches
that followed.
The symposium was
designed as a “posthumous
Festschrift” — a research sym-
posium in honor of Bush’s
vision. Andy van Dam, the
symposium organizer and
moderator, charged the speak-
ers to ground their talks in the
intersection between their
work and Bush’s vision and
then to look at the still
unsolved problems — to, in
effect, set the research agenda
for the next 50 years, as the
prescient Bush had for the
previous 50. But these two
days became — perhaps
inevitably, given the speakers,
the audience, and the occasion
— rather more than either a
Festschrift or a repositioning
of a research agenda. The
talks, plenary discussions, and
coffee-break conversations
taken together turned into a
celebration of Bush’s vision
and its powerful influence in
creating the world in which
we now live and an extension
of that vision into today’s
physical, social, and cyber-
space realities.
The event was in fact an
exhibition of Bush’s legacy, a
self-referential, interweaving
(intertwingling, Ted Nelson
would say) of all the themes —
social, technological, and psy-
chological — from Bush’s
paper. In the course of the
two days it became very clear
how deep and ambitious —
socially and culturally — Bush’s
most central ideas were. At
every turn we were reminded
that Bush was writing about
how fundamentally new intel-
lectual practices could change
the entire landscape of human
social life. Bush’s vision was
not just about hypertext, or
data management, or informa-
tion retrieval, let alone about
microfilm or calculating
machines; rather, it was about
extending the power of human
beings by giving them radically
new ways of working together.
The goal of fundamentally
changing how we work in
order to address pressing
human problems continued to
be central throughout the
development of Bush’s legacy
in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most
obviously in the work of
Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay.
Its continued evidence
throughout the symposium —
even (perhaps most notably)
in the presentation of Tim
Berners-Lee, the youngest
speaker — and the warm
response of the audience
made it clear that this opti-
mistic social agenda still res-
onates. It seems that we are
not too jaded, skeptical, or
post-modern to believe, 50
years later, that technology
can bring us “a new relation-
ship between thinking man
and the sum of our knowl-
edge”, one that will promote
“the application of science to
the needs and desires of
man” (“As We May Think”).
49i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
“As We May Think”In 1945 Vannevar Bush (1894-1974) published “As WeMay Think” in The Atlantic Monthly. A condensed, illus-trated version was published in Life later the same year. Inthese articles Bush reflected on how technology could helpsolve the problems of post-war society. He was particularlyconcerned about the explosion of scientific information anddescribes, among other things, a device, or rather system ofdevices, that could be used to help researchers search,record, analyze, and communicate information. Thesedescriptions, and Bush’s accompanying account of how newtools could radically change the nature of intellectual work,were rich and compelling. Today almost every litany of thepioneers of hypertext, computer-supported-cooperativework or interface theory begins with Bush and his extraor-dinarily influential “As We May Think”.
Bush was well situated to reflect on the course andpromise of technology, the explosion of knowledge, and theemergence of large-scale collaboration in scientific endeav-ors. An accomplished engineer and research manager (seesidebar), he had served as the Director of the Office of Sci-entific Research and Development, coordinating the warefforts of 6,000 scientists against the dramatic backdrop ofthe end of a great war and the beginning of the atomic age.The opening paragraph of “As We May Think” captures thiscontext, as well as the pragmatism and optimism about theusefulness of technology that was characteristic of bothBush and the symposium.
This has not been a scientist’s war; it has been a warin which all have had a part. The scientists, buryingtheir old professional competition in the demand of acommon cause, have shared greatly and learned much.It has been exhilarating to work in effective partner-ship. Now, for many, this appears to be approachingan end. What are the scientists to do next?
Bush goes on to describe a system that would allow scien-tists and others (he also mentions lawyers, physicians, busi-nessmen, and historians) not only to cope with the massiveincrease in scientific production and the need for managinglarge amounts of data in all walks of life, but to do so inways more suited to human thought.
The human mind does not work that way [i.e. linear-ly]. It operates by association. With one item in itsgrasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggestedby the association of throughts, in accordance withsome intricate web of trails carried by the cells of thebrain. It has other characteristics, of course; trailsthat are not frequently followed are prone to fade,
items are not fully permanent, memory is tran-sitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy oftrails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
At the center of his vision is an imagined device he calls a“memex”, what we see now as a workstation, based on avariety of analog technologies such as microfilm storageand readers.
The owner of the memex, let ussay, is interested in the originand properties of the bow andarrow… He has dozens of possi-bly pertinent books and articlesin his memex. First he runsthrough an encyclopedia, findsan interesting but sketchy article,leaves it projected. Next, in ahistory, he finds another pertinent item, and ties thetwo together. Thus he goes, building a trail of manyitems. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own,either linking it into the main trail or joining it by aside trail to a particular item. When it becomes evi-dent that the elastic properties of available materialshad a great deal to do with the bow, he branches offon a side trail which takes him through textbooks onelasticity and tables of physical constants. He insertsa page of longhand analysis on his own. Thus hebuilds a trail of his interest through the maze of mate-rials available to him.
[Later the owner finds a friend who is interested in this topic.]
A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keysprojects the head of the trail. A lever runs through itat will, stopping at intersecting items, going off onside excursions…. he sets a reproducer in action, pho-tographs the whole trail out, and passes it to a friendfor insertion into his own memex, there to be linkedinto the more general trail.
Imagining a world in which such technology was deployed,Bush sees new products:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear ready-made with a mesh of associative trails runningthrough them, ready to be dropped into the memexand there amplified,
and new professionals:
As We MayThink
Sections of text
highlighted in
blue, are linked to
“As We May
Think” which pre-
cedes this article
50 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
…there is a new profession of trail blazers, those whofind delight establishing useful trails through theenormous mass of the common record.
This is an surprisingly accurate description of the sort ofinformation environment we are today on the verge of real-izing. Bush’s achievement here is, of course, his functionaldescription of such an environment. That his environmentwas analog and based on microfilm, telephony, andmechanical technologies, where ours is digital and relies on
electronics, doesn’t matter. Even when Paul Kahn’s 53memex simulation made vivid the now quaint analog tech-nology that Bush’s version was based on, it was still clearthat functionally the memex was almost exactly what we arestill trying to perfect.
The prescience of Bush’s vision is astonishing. Hedefined a goal, a strategy, and a research agenda that arestill alive today. But, as Andy van Dam 53 made clear inhis opening remarks and the subsequent symposiumspeakers confirmed in their testimony, Bush turned out tobe not so much predicting the future as creating it throughthe influence, both direct and indirect, of his compellingvision on major figures like Engelbart, Nelson, and theother symposium speakers.
Van Dam introduced the symposium by describing hisown “trail to Bush”, which ran first through Nelson, with
whom he collaborated on the hypertext system HES (Hyper-text Editing System) in 1967 and 1968. Van Dam and hisstudents then went on to build FRESS, the first hypertextsystem on commercial hardware, in 1969. They foundedBrown’s Institute for Research in Information and Scholar-ship (which developed Intermedia) in 1983 and in 1990helped found Electronic Book Technologies (a maker of soft-ware for developing and viewing SGML-based hypermediabooks and document management environments). He hasassigned “As We May Think” to generations of students now
teaching, researching, and working in industry.Van Dam described each of the speakers’
backgrounds and roles in helping create thetechnological state of the art in collaborationtechnologies, networks, hypertext, graphics,and personal computing, emphasizing the tan-gled web of influence and interaction (of hisown: “I had the privilege of spending nearly aweek in Engelbart’s lab, and stole many greatNLS ideas for FRESS”) that always seemed tolead back to Bush.
Van Dam pointed out that Bush’s memex wasnot the first imagined device for assisting intel-lectual work; speculations about variousmechanical devices and techniques for extend-ing reading and writing technologies can befound in history back at least to the MiddleAges. Language itself is a technology for orga-nizing and transmitting information, as aresymbolic systems for writing, numeration, andcalculation, organizational devices such asalphabetization, tables, and catalogues, and con-ventions for page layout and numbering, andannotation. The intricate systems of commen-tary and cross-referencing used in the Talmud
and the Bible, for instance, make it clear that hypertextualcomplexity comes naturally to the human mind.
Van Dam also noted that recent researchers such asMichael Buckland and W. Boyd Raymond have been recov-ering for our attention neglected 19th- and 20th-centurythinkers in the history of information systems, such as PaulOtlet and Emmanuel Goldberg. Otlet, for instance, imple-mented hypertext-like systems with analog means and alsoimagined document management systems that would workwith linked microfilm and telecommunications. Goldberg,the first Managing Director of Zeiss Ikon AG, demonstrat-ed and later patented a prototype of a microfilm selectorusing a photoelectric cell, the first functioning electronicdocument retrieval system in 1932 — his patent blockedBush’s attempt to patent his “rapid selector”.
Van Dam commended these investigations, but noted
S y m p o s i u m P r o g r a m
Thursday, October 12 Opening Remarks
Andries van Dam, Program Chair
Paul Penfield, Jr., MIT Host
Paul Kahn, “Memex Historian”
Douglas Engelbart — The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ
Theodor Holm Nelson—Where the Trail Leads
Robert Kahn—Augmenting Bush’s Vision with Digital Technology
Tim Berners-Lee—Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny
Michael Lesk—The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval
Douglas Adams, Banquet Speaker
Friday, October 13 Nicholas Negroponte—Being Digital
Raj Reddy—Bush’s Intelligent Systems Revisited
Lee Sproull— Information Is Not Enough: Computer Support for
Productive Work
Alan Kay—Simex: the Neglected Part of Bush’s Vision
Closing Remarks
51i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
that in the time available this symposium could not addressthe definitive history of information systems and hyperme-dia in general, or the genesis or priority of Bush’s vision, butwould limit itself in particular to first-hand accounts bypioneers of the influence of “As We May Think” — and itssignificance for the future.
Bush’s Legacy in 1995While many components of Bush’s vision were addressedby the speakers and many new themes were apparent, oneoverarching theme was evident in both “As We MayThink” and almost every talk in the symposium: thepotential of intellectual technology to alter the very foun-dations of the society in which we live and to provide solu-tions for the problems that may threaten our well-being, ifnot our very existence.
Bush’s paper begins with a reference to the historic andunprecedented team contributions of scientists to winningWorld War II and ends with a somber yet optimistic call toscience to save the human race:
The applications of science have built man a well-sup-plied house, and are teaching him to live healthilytherein. They have enabled him to throw masses ofpeople against another with cruel weapons. They mayyet allow him truly to encompass the great record andto grow in the wisdom of race experience. He mayperish in conflict before he learns to wield that recordfor his true good.
Nearly every speaker echoed Bush’s focus on the socialeffects of technology and exhibited the same combinationof pragmatism and optimism. Tim Berners-Lee 52 , thespeaker whose work, the World Wide Web, is most in evi-dence at the moment, ended his talk with a quote from thatparagraph: “They may yet allow him truly to encompass thegreat record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience.”
Most references to Vannevar Bush in recent literature callhim the inventor of the modern concept of hypertext andstop there. What was intriguing and important at this sym-posium is that hypertext was not much in evidence. Otherthemes just as prominent in “As We May Think” were at theforefront, and it was clear from the speakers who had beendirectly influenced by the Atlantic article that hypertext wasnot the most important legacy, but rather a byproduct or ameans to achieve other goals such as human augmentationand collaboration. However, the WWW and the ubiquityof the Internet both in academic life and, increasingly, incommercial and personal spheres highlight the Web as themost widespread instantiation of Bush’s vision.
Of the many specific themes that wove through the sym-
posium, three stand out, each reflecting the mastertheme of technology and society:
• That technology has enormous potential to augmenthuman power, increasing our ability to achieve ourgoals or shape new ones.
• That by far the most significant augmentation isachieved via technology’s ability profoundly to reshapethe structures and dynamics of human collaboration.
• That the co-evolution of technology and human prac-tice is producing fundamentally new ways ofhuman/machine interaction.
These are easily recognized as reflecting Bush’s funda-mental vision of new powers, new tools for collaboration,and new relationships to our tools, and they are each close-ly connected to his dominant concern with the societalimpact of technology. These themes, which seem to haveguided so much of recent development since Bush and arenow being taken to new levels of insight and refinement bycontemporary researchers such as our symposium speakers,are a convenient matrix for conveying some of the thoughtsand ideas of those two intense days at MIT.
Douglas Engelbart 52 , who was the keynote speaker andthe numinous soul of the symposium, has interwoven thesethemes throughout his life’s work from the very beginningwhen, shortly after WWII, he decided to devote his life to avision of using computers to help individuals and groups aug-ment their capabilities to deal with ‘complexity and urgency’.
He has had one of the most significant records of tech-nical contributions to computing in the period since Bush,so it was entirely appropriate that he was the most com-manding presence for the entire community at the sympo-sium. The extent of his influence over several generationscould be gauged by comments ranging from those by AlanKay 52 and Ted Nelson 52 to those of the student volun-teers. Kay commented that
This was the visit that changed my life. What Doug Engel-bart offered was not just a vision of interacting with thesystem, but also a philosophical underpinning that is evenmore important today than it was then.
while Nelson variously referred to him as “my wonderfuland very great stepfather Douglas Engelbart” and as “one ofthe two men I admire most in the world” (the other is TimBerners-Lee). The graduate student volunteers, in a discus-sion after the symposium, agreed that the opportunity tohear and meet with him was the most important part of thesymposium to them, something they would remember forthe rest of their lives.
As We MayThink
52 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Tim Berners-Lee is the creator of the World Wide Web. Hecurrently is with the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) atthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and directsthe W3 Consortium that coordinates WWW development.
Paul Penfield is Professor of Electrical Engineering andHead of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Com-puter Science at MIT, and is affiliated with the MicrosystemsTechnology Laboratories.
Alan Kay is best known for theidea of personal computing and theintimate laptop computer, and theinvention of the now ubiquitousoverlapping-window interface andmodern object-oriented program-ming. He is a Fellow at Apple Com-puter and a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences, theRoyal Society of Arts, and TheWorld Economic Forum.
Dr.Raj Reddy is Dean of theSchool of Computer Science atCarnegie Mellon University and theHerbert A. Simon University Profes-sor of Computer Science and Robot-ics. His research interests includethe study of human-computer inter-action and artificial intelligence. Hiscurrent research projects includespeech recognition and understand-ing systems; collaborative writing,design and planning; JIT LearningTechnologies; and the AutomatedMachine Shop project.
Douglas Carl Engelbart is theinventor or the mouse, interactivereal-time telecollaboration, outlineprocessing, and hypertext creationand navigation tools. Throughoutthe `60s and `70s his lab pioneeredan elaborate hypermedia-group-ware system called NLS (for oNLineSystem), most of whose now-com-mon features were conceived of,fully integrated, and in everydayoperational use by the early 1970’s.In 1989 Engelbart founded theBootstrap Institute, feeling the timewas ripe to pursue in earnest hiscomprehensive strategy for boot-strapping organizations into the21st century.
Ted Nelson was always media-intensive. In1960 he took a computer course and saw a chanceto create a new world of interactive media — anew fusion of literature and movies, based onarbitrary constructs, interconnection and corre-spondence. Since then he has worked on digitalmedia designs outside the prevailing paradigms.
53i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Not photographed
Lee Sproull is Professor of Man-agement at Boston University. Priorto joining Boston University, shewas Professor of Social Sciences atCarnegie Mellon University for 13years. Professor Sproull’s researchcenters on the social, managerial,and organizational implications ofcomputer-based technologies thataugment human communicationsuch as electronic mail, computerconferences, and interactive video.
Robert E. Kahn is President ofthe Corporation for NationalResearch Initiatives (CNRI), which hefounded in 1986 after a 13-yearterm at the Advanced Research Pro-jects Agency (ARPA). He wasresponsible for the design anddevelopment of the Arpanet, thefirst packet-switched network, andfor originating the Internet Pro-gram, and is a co-inventor of theTCP/IP protocols .
Michael Lesk manages the com-puter science research group at Bell-core. He is best known for work inelectronic libraries, including theCORE project for chemical informa-tion, and for writing some Unix sys-tem utilities including those fortable printing (tbl), lexical analyzers(lex), and inter-system mail (uucp).
Andries van Dam is Professor of Computer Science atBrown University. Since 1965, his research has concernedcomputer graphics, text processing and hypermedia systems,and workstations. He has been working for 30 years on sys-tems for creating and reading “electronic books” with inter-active illustrations, based on high-resolution graphcs for usein teaching and research.
Nicholas Negroponte is a founder and the director of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology’s uniquely innovativeMedia Laboratory. He founded MIT’s pioneering Architec-ture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tankresponsible for many radically new approaches to thehuman-computer interface.
Rosemary Simpsonis an informationstructures artist, thedesigner of Gateway,an interactive object-oriented hypermediasystem developed atLMI (Lisp Machines,Inc.) in 1985, andPresident of Informa-tion Programming(formerly IndexingUnlimited).
Allen Reneardirects the activitiesof the Scholarly Tech-nology Group atBrown University, aswell as participatingin STG consulting.His current researchinterests are in theo-retical issues in textencoding and docu-ment abstractions,epistemology andtechnology, large sys-tems for collaborativework and publishing,and the use of inter-active networkedhypermedia to sup-port educationreform.
Elli Mylonas provides consultingand project manage-ment at the ScholarlyTechnology Group atBrown University. Herareas of specialty arehypertext, SGML andstructured text prob-lems and electronicpublishing. Beforecoming to STG shewas Managing Editorof the Perseus Projectat Harvard University,a multimedia data-base on classicalGreek civilization.
Paul Kahnhas training in litera-ture and typographyand has worked witha variety of electron-ic publishing systemssince 1977. Heworked at BrownUniversity’s Institutefor Research in Infor-mation and Scholar-ship (IRIS) from1985-1994 where heserved as projectmanager and direc-tor, developing edu-cational hypertextapplications in Inter-media. In 1990 heformed the informa-tion design firm ofDynamic Diagrams,Inc. with KrzysztofLenk.
Douglas N. Adamswas educated atBrentwood School,Essex and St. John’sCollege, Cambridge,where he read Eng-lish. He originally cre-ated “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to theGalaxy” as a radioseries for the BBC,and then wrote itagain as a novel.Adams has also writ-ten two Dirk Gentlybooks, and with JohnLloyd he co-wrote“The Meaning of Liff”and “The DeeperMeaning of Liff”, andwith zoologist MarkCarwardine he haswritten the wildlifetravelogue “LastChance to See.”
54 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Augmentation■ Bush’s VisionHuman and social augmentation was the keynote themeof “As We May Think”. It permeates the entire article,from the opening paragraph with its description of theextraordinary team efforts engendered by WWII, throughthe descriptions of technological advances needed to aidinvestigators overwhelmed by an information glut and iso-lated by specialization, to the final call to use technologyin the service of society. Augmentation, in Bush’s view,involves both sensory enhancement and mental enhance-ment. He proposed tools that would supplement andextend the visual, vocal, and memory capabilities of the
human being, as well as tools that would reflect and sup-plement the nature of the human mind—both the cogni-tive and associative aspects.
■ View from the SymposiumHuman augmentation by means of technology appeared inmacro- and micro-contexts at the symposium. The WWWprovides the first glimmer of the global network withinwhich people will work, which will become an extension oftheir own information banks, and within which they willneed increasingly sophisticated help to function creatively.As several speakers pointed out, personal augmentationthrough symbiosis with specialized hardware that is part of
T h e T w o D a y s a t M I T
T he two days of the Bush
symposium were full
and fully engaging, both
because of the busy program and
because of the many informal
opportunities to meet with speak-
ers and other participants and dis-
cuss the issues that had been
raised in paper session, at coffee
breaks and meals.
Another such moment was pro-
vided by the highly entertaining
and compelling banquet speech
by, Douglas Adams. This speech,
by a writer who has invented one
of the best known computer aug-
mentation systems in fiction, the
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
gave a different perspective on
the influence of “As We May
Think” that was nevertheless con-
gruent with those presented by
the other speakers. One of
Adams’ main points was the con-
trast of the historical develop-
ment and deployment of
computers with the views of the
future held by computer
“experts” and science fiction writ-
ers. His conclusion was that they
were both wrong, because they
overvalued the importance of the
computers and discounted the
societal contribution. Another
vivid image that has stayed with
all who heard the speech was of
two Amazon tributaries, one
white and the other black, that
join but do not merge. Each
stream travels in parallel for
many miles before finally blend-
ing into one. The lesson for those
attempting to introduce new
ideas was clear and the analogy
provided yet another metaphor
from nature in a symposium dom-
inated by biological images.
Finally, the closing panels on
both days provided moments of
synthesis that brought together
many ideas expressed during the
individual presentations. The
questions for the panel on the
first day ranged from the ethics of
malleable content, which sparked
an interesting debate between
Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee
about the best methods of pro-
tecting author rights, and con-
cerns about McCarthy-style witch
hunts, through queries on han-
dling ‘spaghetti-web’ information
structure problems, to projections
about all-electronic libraries and
digitally alive paper and clothing.
The final panel was extraordi-
nary in that Douglas Englebart,
Tim Berners-Lee, and Alan Kay
gave mini-presentations that
elaborated and extended the
themes addressed in their
speeches, and the entire panel
participated vigorously in
debates that centered around
two questions: 1) what would
our world be like if Microsoft
had never existed? and 2) how
can we improve our educational
system? In response to the final
question asking the panelists to
comment on what they had in
common, Berners-Lee gave a
striking analysis:
…one thing everybody had in
common was persistence, having
ideas and, then though people
told you not to do it, hanging on
to it, being really stubborn and
doing it, even though nobody’s
giving you money to do it. That
seems to be something which
everybody has in common. I
don’t know if it’s something
that’s intrinsic to us or whether
it’s the ideas – once they’ve got
you, they don’t let go.
55i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
our clothing and other mundane objects, as well as inte-grated physical and virtual reality studios, used to be thestuff of science fiction but is now rapidly becoming feasible.
The first speaker, Doug Engelbart, told how he firstencountered Bush’s article in a hut in the South Pacific andafter the war decided to develop methods and tools to helphumans augment their intelligence, both individually andcollectively.
During the first part of his career Engelbart created toolsfor augmenting human intelligence, such as the mouse,interactive real-time telecollaboration, outline processing,and hypertext creation and navigationtools, as well as software engineeringmethods that enhanced the productivi-ty and effectiveness of the tool-builders.One of the highlights of the symposiumwas a set of clips from the “mother of alldemos” (as van Dam described it) thathe gave at the 1968 FJCC (Fall JointComputer Conference), a demo of NLS(oNLine System)—a multiuser hyper-media system that included theadvances described above.
At the same time, he was developingconcepts and methods to help organi-zations deal with complexity andchange management—what he callsgroup IQ augmentation. These strate-gies for guiding organizations throughparadigm shifts (which are at the heartof the Bootstrap Institute, his current effort to disseminatehis theories on group augmentation) include concepts ofbootstrapping, scaling, hypertext, and the co-evolution oftools and humans in a systematic and effective way.
In Engelbart’s view, augmentation of human powersmakes possible better handling of complexity, greater abili-ty to shift paradigms, and enhanced capacity to see fartherand deeper into any issue. Engelbart’s theories on the natureof the human mind are a logical extension and expansion ofBush’s dual vision of cognitive and associative processing.Kay describes one aspect of Engelbartian thought:
One of the phrases that he [Engelbart] used that I particular-ly liked was “thought vectors in concept space”. I’m not sure Iunderstand what he meant, but what I think is that you arecreating an extension of the kinds of spaces that you think interms of inside of your head. So, you are creating an aug-mentation of the ways of thinking, the ways of representing,the ways of associating that was now going to be extended ina way somewhat analogous to the way writing has extendedus but somewhat more like the way we actually think.
Engelbart describes it as a method
…to externalize your thoughts in the conceptstructures that are meaningful outside; moving aroundflexibly, manipulating them and viewing them. It’s a newway to operate on a new kind of externalized medium.
Like Engelbart, Ted Nelson had a vision from a veryearly age that has molded his life and world, a vision of a‘docuverse’ shaped by the tripartite concept structure oftransclusion, transparallelism, and transcopyright. To him
they are so fundamental to any viableapproach to electronic informationthat he declared in response to a ques-tion from the audience: “Transclusionand transparallelism are the answer. Itdoesn’t matter what the question is.”
In the film in which he demonstrat-ed a prototype of his work in Japan,Nelson described transparallelism andtransclusion:
…putting it into today’s terms, we’retalking about transparallel media,meaning things which are side-by-side and explicitly connected. So, forexample, transparallel mediaincludes captions for a picture whichpoint directly to the picture,transparallel media includes any-
thing where you have explicit connections. Parallel mediais where you just see things side by side, like an articleand an illustration. So, what I’m showing you here istransparallel media with transclusion only. We’re leavingout links because I want to stress the notion of transclu-sion as the counterpart of links – transclusion and linkare like left and right hand. Links are connectionsbetween things which are different. Transclusions are sys-tem-maintained connections between instances which arethe same in different contexts. So, to me transclusion hasalways been the heart of electronic media, and I thinkeventually people will understand this.
Raj Reddy 52 , the Dean of the School of Computer Sci-ence at CMU and a pioneer in speech processing and AI,presented essentially the same augmentation thesis as Engel-bart, i.e. augmentation of human powers makes possiblebetter handling of complexity and change.
Reddy spoke about current work under way at CMU inintelligent multimedia database retrieval systems, mixed virtu-al and physical reality research, and speaker-independent
As We MayThink
Human History
World War II and the Post War
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Specialization Lack of Communication
WWII Teamwork –How to Harnessthe Experience
Isolation
InformationLoss
Individual Society
Danger
p r o b l e m s
56 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Bush wrote AWMT within an
interwoven context consisting
of his own career as scientist
and manager, the end of
World War II, and the experi-
ence of human history and
civilization.
The problems delineated in
his paper reflect his focus on
the nature of information over-
load and the dangers that
information loss resulting from
that overload presents to both
the individual and to society.
The solutions he proposed
for information management
comprised four activities: 1)
more effective capture of infor-
and CivilizationPeriod including Digital Electronics
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Communication
Associative Trails(Hypertext)
Activities
Activities
Information Structures Implemented By
Implemented By
Implemented By
Implemented By
Implemented By
Implemented By
Technology
Technology
Technology
StrategyTechnology
Information Structures
Activities Activities
OrganizationLogic Machines
MemexAugmentationof Mind
Augmentation of Senses
RetrievalCapture
Sharing Collaboration
Eye Voice
s o l u t i o n s
57i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
mation through augmentation
of the mind and the senses,
2) better organization of that
information both through tech-
nical advances such as logic
machines (what we call AI) and
through new information
structures that he called asso-
ciative trails (what we call
hypertext), 3) new methods of
retrieval to be implemented
through the memex, and 4)
sharing that information with
colleagues. The first and last
paragraphs of AWMT only
allude to the related issues of
collaboration and what Doug
Engelbart calls co-evolution.
WWW(TB-L)
Protocols(TB-L)
NLS(DE)
CoDIAK(DE)
Fractal Scaling(DE, TB-L)
Open Architecture(RK)
Mouse(DE)
Information Retrieval(ML)
Dynabook(AK)
Speaker-Activated Input(RR)
Multimedia Database(RR)
Virtual Reality Studio(RR)
Personal Computing(DE, AK)
Transclusion and Transparallelism
(TN)
SOCIETY INDIVIDUAL
TECHNOLOGIES
STRATEGIES
55
55
55
55
52
58
55
60
61
55
61
55
60 61 62
62
58 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
unlimited vocabulary dic-tation. He showed threedemos illustrating thiswork. The first showed theemail application of thespeake r - independentunlimited vocabulary dic-tation system, an applica-tion of more than casual
interest to those who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. Thesecond demo showed Infomedia, the intelligent multimediadatabase retrieval system that combines research in naturallanguage processing with image processing and retrieval. Thethird demo showed Takeo Kanade’s mixed virtual and physi-cal reality research studio at CMU’s Robotics Lab.
He said that the motivation for this work comes from thedesire to enhance human productivity by orders of magni-tude over what is possible now. This goal, in turn, is moti-vated by the desire to help humans handle ever-increasingamounts of information and thereby more effectively deal
with a rapidly changing environment. He spoke of theimportance of obtaining relevant information on demandand of the need for information structures that both work theway the mind works and effectively locate what is needed.
Reddy was a pioneer of the early days of AI in the 1960s,so it was interesting to hear his current characterization ofAI as a practical common-sense effort to amplify humanintelligence:
Almost all the areas we are looking at, that Vannevar Bushwanted – speech, image, language, information retrieval –all kinds of things, these are what I call imprecise tech-nologies. They are never going to be perfect. Nevertheless,we are at a stage where useful systems doing useful thingsfor average people are possible.
Reddy’s view was that it is the nature of humans to createand think — and to take advantage of all the augmentationtools that the research labs can imagine and develop.
Michael Lesk 53 of Bellcore also focused on the aug-
Augmentation Themes
The two axes of Individual-
Society and Technologies-
Strategies form a quadrant
within which the augmenta-
tion approaches of the various
speakers can be placed. These
theme range from technologi-
cal aids for the individual, such
as speaker-activated input, to
strategies for transforming
society, such as the CoDIAK
proposals of Doug Engelbart.
WWW(TB-L)
CoDIAK(DE)
Copyright(RK, ML, TN)
Protocols(TB-L)
Multiple Group Support(LS)
Open Architecture(RK)
Economic Changes(TB-L)
Legal Restrictions(TB-L, ML, NN)
Civil Rights Issues(NN)Information Plumbing
(TB-L)
CO-EVOLUTION COLLABORATION
POLITICS/ECONOMICS
TECHNOLOGY
60
61
60
6362
6362
62 63
62
61
62
59i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
mentation of human capabilities in the area of informationretrieval. He took a historical approach, however, beginningby evaluating Bush’s predictions and comparing them withwhat has already been achieved. His own prediction is thatthe capabilities described in “As We May Think” will havebeen achieved by 2010, that is within one lifespan from thewriting of the article. As he traced the development of infor-mation retrieval and, by necessity, of online informationfrom the 1940s into the third millennium, Lesk describedthe alternating cycles of machine and human categorizationas a solution to the information retrieval problem. He con-cludes that we will arrive at a mixed solution, driven bymanual data entry and linking, as in the WWW, which heconsiders a kind of embodiment of the memex but aug-mented by algorithmic retrieval methods. The new area ofresearch that Lesk pinpointed as most interesting is theintroduction of nontextual media into online databases,which should trigger much of the whole cycle of informa-tion retrieval research all over again.
Many of the speakers discussed the WWW and the grow-ing use of the Internet; the consensus was that it is a sugges-tive example, despite its limitations, of what a working
memex might actually do. The shared and collabora-tive aspects of the WWW are not highlighted in thedescription of the memex, but embody scholarlypractice that Bush would have taken for granted and mighthave included had he been familiar with technology thatallowed it. Robert Kahn 53 , President of the Corporationfor National Research Initiatives and a creator of theARPANET (forerunner of the Internet), for example, locat-ed human augmentation in the network itself, specifically inthe intersection of the evolving communications infrastruc-ture with new technology and new uses of information.
In this light, Tim Berners-Lee, director of the WWWConsortium and creator of the WWW, seemed the mostlikely heir of Bush’svision. His description ofthe beginnings of theWWW, however, and ofits subsequent develop-ment highlights the prob-lems that can occur whencommercialization of adesign creates a de-facto
As We MayThink
Collaboration/Co-Evolution
Interaction
The two axes collaboration-
co-evolution and technology-
politics/economics provided a
framework around which the
symposium discussions of the
human/technical interaction
interwove. Concerns and pro-
posals ranged from the purely
technological (protocols) to
the purely political (legal
restrictions).
60 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
standard that may be difficult to update or replace: theWWW was originally designed as an interactive means forcollaboration and augmentation, but has instead become astatic medium for hypertextual publication. These issueswere further discussed in the panel on the second day whenAlan Kay told how the PARC windows interface, whichwas intended to be a naive set of training wheels for chil-dren, a stepping stone to be replaced by more powerfulinterfaces, became frozen into an inflexible, difficult-to-change form.
Berners-Lee’s original vision of the WWW was of a seaof interactive shared knowledge, in which our computers arememexes whose knowledge base exists in cyberspace ratherthan microfilm. He presented a vision of the “great brain”, ashe calls it, as a living organism, a vision that conveyed anoscillating analog/digital sense of the dynamic, interactiveinformation continuum that is the Net and its users.
At the same time as the WWW provides a form of aug-mentation on the global level, the incorporation of com-puters into everyday objects is a form of augmentation onthe personal level. Nicholas Negroponte 53 of the MediaLab described the blending of the digital and analog intoordinary objects such as paper, clothing, and doorknobs.This vision is a striking enough enhancement of the per-sonal information space that several other speakers, includ-ing Raj Reddy and Robert Kahn, also alluded to it.
Collaboration■ Bush’s VisionIt has sometimes been suggested that Bush neglected theimportance of collaboration and work groups, since he didnot make these issues as explicit as later writers have. It istrue that this theme is only latent in Bush. Nevertheless, sup-porting collaboration and managing teams is an essentialaspect of Bush’s vision. “As We May Think” actually openswith a comment on the teamwork of scientists during thewar, and one of its most compelling scenarios incorporatesthe sharing of trails among investigators using the memex.Bush clearly imagined researchers working together andusing the shared results of trail building as part of a strategyfor managing information overload. That the theme of col-laboration is understated in Bush isn’t surprising. At the timeof “As We May Think” and throughout much of his life,Bush was an organizer and administrator of large researchand development projects in the university, the military, andin industr; he would take for granted the importance of theworld of collaborative scientific interaction.
■ View from the SymposiumLee Sproull 53 of Boston University gave a thorough his-torical and theoretical summary of collaborative work in the
sciences as it is actually practiced and of the process of dis-covery as it is thought to occur by the scientists themselves.In her opinion, Bush, like Kay and Licklider among otherssaw the process of discovery as a fairly solitary one. Infor-mation sharing, in this view, is not part of a collaborativeprocess, but rather something that takes place after the fact,as a record or for validation. She went on to describeresearch suggesting that science is a social enterprise and topinpoint the areas and relationships in which collaborationoccurs and information is transmitted among members of ateam. Computers and networks, ever since the earlyArpanet, have supported collaborative work among scien-tists. In her view, technology has to improve in order to fos-ter better communication among scientists and otherresearchers. It can do this by modeling the multiple socialcontexts in which collaboration works effectively and bycustomizing the information environment to the type ofsocial interaction that is occurring. As her title, “Informa-tion is Not Enough: Computer Support for ProductiveWork,” shows, information alone, however well structuredand linked, is not enough to engender productive work.The single early researcher Sproull cited as realizing theimportance of collaborative work was Doug Engelbart.
From the beginning, Engelbart’s work focused on col-laboration through both software tools that support cooper-ative work and strategies for helping organizations dealeffectively with the issues surrounding complexity manage-ment and paradigm shifts. At the symposium Engelbartreported on his current thinking, which centers around acomprehensive strategy he calls CoDIAK—ConcurrentDevelopment, Integration and Application of Knowledge.The key insight behind CoDIAK is the need to apply effec-tive tools to an organization’s process for improving produc-tivity, not just to the elements of the organization or tospecific problems it faces. In this he is using the same prin-ciples of good software engineering that he applied to thedevelopment of his own inventions. In effect, he is propos-ing meta-management change tools, where previously hehad designed and used meta-assemblers and meta-compilers:
I mentioned the other day that you’ve got to have a strategyto lift organizations – you can’t just lift them all at once.The strategy I finally worked out is that in the improve-ment infrastructure there are roles in the improvementprocess for high-performance teams. They would really behelping the improvement process come about since therewould be ways for them to be plugged into an organizationin a very supportive function… they are an elite team.
As in the past, he is still creating tools to improve the cre-ation of tools, thereby leveraging many-fold the efforts of
61i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
everyone involved in the process.Ted Nelson described his approach to collaboration (or
its absence) and its relationship to Doug Englebart’sapproach in this way:
The fundamental difference between my wonderful andvery great stepfather Douglas Engelbart and myself is thathe wanted to empower working groups and I just wantedto be left alone and given the equipment and basically toempower smart individuals and keep them from beingdragged down by group stupidity. The amazing thing isthat our designs have converged to some degree, showing, I think, the fundamental validity of this whole approach.
Tim Berners-Lee talked about how the WWW was creat-ed as a collaborative tool for underfunded, geographicallydispersed teams. The original implementation, althoughnot as visual as some of today’s browsers, actually had inter-active editing capabilities, so that creating a link was as easyas following one. For Berners-Lee, another important partof the collaborative scenario inherent in the WWW is itsdistributed, decentralized form. However, in order thatthere be apparent decentralization, a less visible, underlyingshared set of rules and a centralized, common protocol typ-ically exist. The development of the collaborative universethat is now in its infancy will be affected by the evolution ofthese shared rules and protocols. The collaborative anddecentralized aspects of the WWW are in the hands of thebodies who are evolving the protocols, on the technicallevel, and the rules of behavior, on the social level.
Sounding a less optimistic note, Nicholas Negropontedetailed exactly how legal developments and social tenden-cies towards centralization and control are working againstthe open and collaborative nature of the Internet. He citedseveral examples of censorship that were possible because ofthe ambiguous legal nature of the Internet. These are sig-nificant because the Internet and the information availableover the WWW have no fixed legal status—they are toonew. Negroponte’s cautionary message is that the collabora-tive nature of the Net depends on social, legal and constitu-tional events that still happen outside of it.
Co-Evolution■ Bush’s VisionBush viewed technology as a partner in the evolution ofsociety towards a future in which human beings use tech-nology to solve their political and social problems. Humanpractices and technological tools develop in concert. Atone point he even imagines a bionic melding of humansand electronics that would avoid “the present cumber-someness of first transforming electrical vibrations into
mechanical ones, which the human mechanismpromptly transforms back to the electrical form”.But the critical partnership is not about physicalconnections but about the co-evolution of practices andcapabilities. This is a deep theme that has continued todevelop and was prominent and explicit at the conference.
■ View from the SymposiumThe co-evolution of humans and their technology threadedthrough most of the talks in a variety of different ways.Engelbart introduced the term itself when he described thecollaboration processes involved in the CoDIAK strategy.He feels that a mix of humans and tools is crucial to suc-cessfully effecting a paradigm shift. In fact, that perspectiveprovides the criterion by which we should evaluate newtools—we should look at not how they fit today but whatchanges would occur as the system evolves with the use ofthat tool. Thus, just as in biology, the evolution of mam-mals is constrained by their environment, “nanotechnologyis exactly right” as a correctly scaled successor to current sil-icon technology.
Vannevar Bush’s memex was a tool that was never built,couched in terms of technology that did not develop in theways Bush thought it would. However, it provided the seedfor describing a revolutionary way of thinking and workingthat would take place because of, and by means of, emerg-ing technology. The memex illustrated a way for aresearcher to collect and navigate information, leaving hisor her own personal narrative marks on it. As alreadyremarked, the best-known example of this revolutionaryway of working and thinking can be found in the Internet,specifically on the WWW. Bush may never have imaginedthe shared, network component of the WWW, but other-wise, the vast database of information that is organized byauthored, narrativized collections of links is very close tothe memex and the style of work it was intended to sup-port. As users of the WWW become more sophisticatedand begin to evolve new methods of working, their inno-vations are influenced by what is happening in the tech-nology they are using, while at the same time thetechnology evolves to their needs. At the symposium, thetheme of co-evolution of human and technology wasprominent, encompassing the parallel development of thenetwork and the societies that use it.
Co-evolution, on the technological side, takes the formof advances that reflect, amplify and support the socialstructures that are unfolding on the Net. There was a greatdeal of discussion at the symposium of what some of thesedevelopments might be. It was the proposed and predictedevolution in the human realm, however, that was the mostinteresting. Most of the speakers alluded to the paradigm
As We MayThink
62 i n t e r a c t i o n s … m a r c h 1 9 9 6
shift that our minds must accomplish in order to be able tofunction productively in this new, global collaborativespace. However, they also discussed the changes likely tohappen in many of the social institutions that influence ourlives. These changes, for which there are no real models, arethe most intriguing, and perhaps the most formidable.
Robert Kahn, in describing the open architecturerequirements of the National Information Infrastructure(aka Information Superhighway), talked about the need togive our increasingly complex networks the ability to tell usabout their state. He foresees the certainty that humans willnot be able to understand the behavior of these systems andmust therefore build in adaptive and intelligent reportingcapabilities. Ultimately, the systems and humans will co-evolve in partnership.
Kahn also described the difficulties in communicatingnew concepts and helping people to make the cognitive shiftsthat new technologies mandate. Solving this problembecomes increasingly urgent as we move into a world inwhich the virtual reality of cyberspace is the only locus forcertain experiences; when an event is experienced only incyberspace, as distinct from being experienced in physicalspace and reported in cyberspace, there will be no “objective”external referent to which participants can point. There willbe only the sum of each individual experience, which Kahncompared to Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon taken to the ulti-mate degree of subjectivity. In such a world, the need foreffective structures to help people be flexible and adaptive ismore than just important, it is essential. Ted Nelson, indescribing his motivations for creating his hypertext theories,also referred to Rashomon. He, however, used it as ametaphor for the many paths that can be made through anygiven set of information. He described linear writing as adestructive process in its selection of one path among manyand affirmed his desire to make all the information accessible.
Kahn’s solution to these issues is to emphasize creatingopen architectures, allowing the network to evolve withinthat open architecture. This gives everyone a chance tomake a contribution. He also points out that the challengein development is not in technology itself but in the appli-cations to which it is put. The interesting developments areat the intersection of technology and the people using it.Reddy, in reporting on the work his labs are doing inblending virtual and physical reality, echoed Kahn’s con-cerns. He feels that part of the answer lies in giving peopletools that enormously enhance their ability to deal withchange and information overload.
Kahn, Lesk, and Nelson commented on the need for re-evaluation of copyright law, the whole paradigm of financialtransactions on the network. Nelson described histranscopyright concept:
What I am trying to do is build a new literature inwhich you have automatic copyright handling by electronic means. Here anyone is free to quote anybodyelse but they’re only referencing the original objectwhich is taken out and the royalty is paid on a prorated basis to the copyright holder on each frame,audio sample, or piece of text.
and elaborated on its use in response to questions from theaudience. Tim Berners-Lee discussed how the technologyin the form of the link and human economic behavior asrepresented by the dollar have become intertwined in theevolution of the Web.
Berners-Lee suggested that the acute political and socialissues currently swirling around the debates about the Inter-net can best be handled through the creation of protocolsthat allow people to behave reasonably. People need to havelinks at many levels, and when a society provides these linksit becomes stable and able to successfully walk the pathbetween the “mountain of despotic dictatorship and theswamps of terrorism”. He described these protocols as frac-tal topologies that can occur both in network and socialstructures. Fractal topologies are those that scale so as to bepresent at all levels. In the Web, these result from creatingeffective protocols. In society, they result from setting upinterpersonal linkage structures, which he calls “informa-tion plumbing”. When the right information plumbingexists for a team, it can work together effectively and feelcomfortable. Like Bush, Berners-Lee feels that our goal as acommunity and a society must be to learn to work togeth-er lest we perish as a species. His essentially optimistic viewof this partnership was revealed again when, in response toa question from Michael Lesk about the political dangersthreatening to destroy the Internet, he reiterated his confi-dence that protocol changes can stave off that threat.
In the final presentation of the symposium, Alan Kaygave a retrospective of a period that he felt embodied a greatparadigm shift in the way people thought about and want-ed to use computers. He described the figures who influ-enced him in the ’60s and helped shape his own vision of acomputing society and its technology. Prominent amongthese influential figures and events were Ivan Sutherlandwith Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart and the FJCC demo, theSimula language, and the Grail system at Rand. The peopleand systems populating Kay’s talk were all examples of suc-cessful efforts to do something completely new. His expla-nation for their success was that at this point in theevolution of research in computer science, the players wereall people whose main interests and training came from out-side the field. They didn’t know what the technology could-n’t do, and so weren’t bound by such restrictions.
63i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
Kay’s talk, which looked back at a period of great inno-vation and co-evolution, was a fitting conclusion to thepaper sessions, which had begun with a look at an innova-tive vision of 50 years ago, hoping to be able to understandhow innovation, creativity, and technology will continue towork together.
The FutureWhat future vision and research agenda emerged from thissymposium? Clearly there was great concern as well asgreat optimism for the impact on society and the Internetof the increasing involvement of the political process inthe Internet’s management and direction. Negropontesounded the alarm most emphatically when he describedthe civil rights violations involved in the Michigan studentpornography arrest and the extradition of a California res-ident for trial under Tennessee laws. But, he also reflectedan optimism that the Internet would survive intact whenhe described the persistence of a migrating flock of birdsin which there is always a new leader at the point of the
formation, no matter how many times hunters may shootthe previous leader. Nelson addressed the issues of intel-lectual property rights and their erosion through copyrightproblems with networked media, reiterating his confi-dence that the correct solution lay in the implementationof the transcopyright concept.
Both Lesk and Reddy addressed the future of informa-tion retrieval. Lesk sees the completion of an all-electron-ic information system, including video and audio as wellas images and text, by 2010. Reddy further elaborated thisvision by describing the need for information on demand,information that is in “decision-ready form.” In describingwhat would be required to implement this vision—reallyintelligent image processing, semantically-based informa-tion retrieval, and natural language processing—hedescribed the components of a research agenda for thenext 50 years.
Engelbart, Berners-Lee, and Sproull all outlined waysin which the coevolution of technology and society couldfacilitate the process of collaboration among groups ranging
As We MayThink
T e c h n o l o g y a t t h e C o n f e r e n c e
T echnology itself was a
participant in the sym-
posium in the form of a
combined Mbone, video/cable,
and audio real-time transmission
of the proceedings. The control
center that guided the multiple
forms of recording and interac-
tive transmission across the Inter-
net was next to the stage and the
activities of the crew were appar-
ent as they interacted with the
speakers. Their presence rein-
forced and underscored the mean-
ing of the entire celebration.
The Mbone production for the
symposium involved three com-
ponents – real-time audio, video,
and a whiteboard, plus a fourth
application that displayed the
speakers’ transparencies. Each
component of the multicast was
in a separate window so partici-
pants could arrange their screens
to suit their preferences. The
audio window simply showed
volume controls, while the video
displayed the video feed that
was simultaneously being broad-
cast over cable to the MIT com-
munity. The transparencies were
made available through a facility
created by Paul Penfield and Ed
Moriarity called the Companion.
The whiteboard was an interac-
tive text window that enabled
participants from all over the
world to communicate with each
other by typing messages into
the window.
Producing the varied transmis-
sions was another self-referential
example of the themes the gath-
ering was addressing. In this
case, it involved getting people
from very different disciplines,
with very different working
needs and processes, to work
together in real time to create a
coherent and useful production.
In this process, content and form
were intimately interconnected
in what were not only cutting
edge technologies but also cut-
ting edge collaboration methods
of handling the interaction of
the different teams. This
involved linking together differ-
ent forms of communication –
local audience, video (cable – MIT
community) and Web, and differ-
ent production dynamics, blend-
ing the technologies and the
disparate processes involved
with producing those processes.
As Ed Moriarity, who coordinated
the different teams, said, “This
was a proof-of-concept experi-
ence involving the coming
together of cutting-edge technol-
ogy, content, and collaboration
methods. The process is not pol-
ished yet, but it worked. In a
sense it was like the Wright
brothers’ flight.”
64 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
in size from small project groups to nations. Engelbart, inaddressing the urgent need to help groups to flexibly andrapidly handle complex issues and accelerating change, hasdeveloped a comprehensive strategy to boost the capabilitiesof those portions of organizations whose mission isimproved productivity. Berners-Lee spoke of the need toevolve the Web into an interactive environment for peopleto work together and described the social tools, informationplumbing, that can facilitate collaboration and paradigmchange. Sproull described some of the technical develop-ments needed to support more effectively the kind of col-laborative work that is rapidly evolving within a highlyinterlinked society.
Kahn and Kay pointed towards the types of environ-ments that would be needed to support the social and tech-nical innovation necessary to handle a rapidly changingworld. Kahn spoke about the urgent need for open archi-tectures to allow new components to be created and inte-grated within existing frameworks. Kay, by stressing thereasons why so very much was accomplished during the’60s, helped set the requirements for a research environ-ment that would facilitate that kind of creative ferment inthe future. He described a world in which the fundingagencies funded people, not projects; a world in which thepeople came from different backgrounds and had diversesets of knowledge and experience on which to draw whenthinking about problems and their solutions; a world inwhich optimism and confidence in one’s own ability werethe norm. He warned about the dangers of engineeringsuboptimization as an inhibitor of genuinely new thinking.
In the panel that ended the second day, Engelbart,Berners-Lee, Nelson, and Kay engaged in a spirited dis-cussion of the role and deficiencies of education in shapingthe future. Engelbart closed the discussion with a powerfulplea that we cannot wait for future generations to reshapeour world:
We can’t wait for the 20 years or so until those children areout and integrated into society with the roles with whichthey could start making changes. The change-drivingthings in both world events and the technology are movingtoo fast, so we are faced with the fact that we must learn abetter way to shift organizations with the people that arein them now. That’s really why you need a strategy for it.
It’s exciting to think of what children can become andhow they can flourish, but the daunting problem I thinkwe really have to face is how you deal with the change ofthe adult world.
In the end, a group of extraordinary visionary thinkersinteracting amongst themselves and with a stimulating
F u t u r e o f
H y p e r t e x t
W hat of the future of hypertext, the
information structure represented
by the memex, beyond the Web?
This issue was not addressed by the speakers,
but we can speculate based on current devel-
opments in the field.
One direction can be seen in the work being
done by groups such as Brown’s graphics labo-
ratory in the intersection of virtual reality
research and the Web. Waxweb, which the
New York Times calls “sophisticated work…
deeply surreal” (“Art in Cyberspace: Can It Live
Without a Body?” Sunday, January 21, 1996),
provides an interesting illustration of some of
the potentials of this medium.
Another direction of active research is in the
use of more expressive markup and knowledge
representation, facilitating richer retrieval,
inference, and link discovery. Tim Berners-Lee
alluded to some of the work related to this
when he talked about typed links.
A third possibility lies in spatial hypertext
and information farming. Information farming
provides an extremely large plane, called a
farm, on which units of information may be
laid out in groups that reflect their meaning
and use. When combined with computational
agents that can link together pieces of infor-
mation located in different areas of the plane,
the result is a fluid medium in which informa-
tion is internally associated spatially and logi-
cally as well as being linked into the Web and
other Internet applications.
Most current commercial hypertext and
hypermedia systems are based on work initial-
ly reported in the ACM Hypertext conferences,
the first of which was held in Chapel Hill, NC in
1987. The proceedings of these annual confer-
ences are available from the ACM and are an
excellent resource for tracking the future of
this information structure and its domain.
Hypertext ‘96 will be held in Washington, DC
on March 16-20.
65i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
audience still did not come up with as gripping a researchagenda as the solitary visionary, Bush. What we do have is acollection of ideas and points of view that can lead to theformulation of a new agenda. To facilitate this, the authorsplan to create a Web site that will function as a core resourcefor the development of this agenda. Initial plans includeconverting the videotapes into a digitized data-base at Carnegie Mellon and making that search-able database available at the site. In addition,the lead author has abstracted the videotapes andwill, subject to author permission, create a hyper-text from these abstracts in conjunction with thetext of this paper and extensive links into theWeb and make it available on the Web. Fromthese and other resources we hope that a clearvision will emerge that will carry our legacy fromBush well into the next century.
AcknowledgementsSponsors: The National Science Foundation(NSF), NSF/ARPA Graphics and VisualizationCenter, Brown University, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), Apple Corporation,Microsoft Corporation, Silicon Graphics, SunMicrosystems; Program Chair: Andy van Dam ofBrown University; Local Host: Paul Penfield of MIT;Symposium Coordinator: Lisa Manekofsky of BrownUniversity; Planning and Support: Chris Nuzum, Greg
TECHNOLOGY
ENVIRONMENT
Natural Language Processing(RR)
Embedded Computers(NN)
Nanotechnology(DE)
Multiple Group Support(LS)
Human/Internet Organism(TB-L)
Education(AK, TN, TB-L)
Open Architecture(RK)
Fractal Topologies(TB-L)
Political Repression(ML, NN)
CoDIAK(DE)
Complete Electronic Docuverse
(TN, ML)
Intelligent Image Processing(RR)
Semantically-BasedInformation Retrieval
(RR)
Virtual RealityHuman/Computer Studio
(RR)
HopesDangers HopesEconomic/ Funding Strategies
(AK, RK)
58
6055
63
61
64
64
64
61 62 63
63
63
5955
62
60
60
64
Future Visions
While no single vision emerged from the symposium, the set that did clus-
tered along the axis form by the augmentation technologies at one pole
and the impact of the environment at the other pole.
The technological visions ranged from clear extensions, such as intelli-
gent image processing, of what we are currently developing to radically
new approaches incorporating new approaches such as nanotechnology
and virtual reality.
When speaking of the dangers presented by the current environ-
ment, speakers described economic and political realities that impact
the human/technical internet organism. When speaking of the hopes
presented by the current environment, speakers described both social
and technological structures that can influence the future.
Thus we see both an extension of Bush’s information management
vision and a flowering of the social implications to which he only alluded.
As We MayThink
66 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a r c h 1 9 9 6
W W W P o i n t e r s
Bush Symposium Web Site: The web site that was set up in anticipation of the symposium:
Lloyd, and Steve De Rose of EBT who first had the idea ofholding a commemorative event and helped in itsproduction; Allen Renear of Brown University; MarilynJaye and Maria Clara Valenzuela of MIT’s IndustrialLiason Program: Audio/Visual Staff; Jim Rose and RobertMcDermott of the University of Utah; Ed Moriarity, ScottDynes, and Larry Gallagher of MIT; Dave Klaphaak andAndy Forsberg of Brown University; student volunteersfrom Brown and MIT; Paper Support and Reviewers:Thanks to Steve De Rose, Dave Klaphaak, and PeterWegner for review comments on the paper as a whole, MarkBernstein for help with the Future of Hypertext section,Trina Avery for world-class copyediting, Dave Klaphaak forheroic efforts in obtaining necessary resources, and theScholarly Technology Group (STG) and the graphics lab atBrown for resources and moral support.
Selected BibliographyBush (AM) Atlantic Monthy, July 1945Nyce, James M., and Kahn, Paul. (1991). FromMemex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine,Academic Press, Boston.Goldberg, Adele, editor. (1988). A History of PersonalWorkstations, ACM Press, New York.Grief, Irene, editor. (1988), Computer-Supported Coopera-tive Work: A Book of Readings, Morgan Kaufman Publishers,Inc., San Mateo, CA
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