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ENGLEBARTS_BARD
July 18, 2002
A review of "Bootstapping" by Thierry Bardini
Douglas Englelbart, Coevolution, and the
Origins of Personal Computing.
Stanford Press, 2000
Bardini's credentials: Associate Professor of
Communication at the University of Montreal
The good stuff here: the history of the thinking
behind the development of "the personal computer",
getting into some of the details of alternate
ideas they tried, quotations from the original
players talking about what they were thinking
about and trying to do, and how they feel about
the way it played out.
In broad outline, here's the story:
Englebart at SRI, starting around 1959
works on the idea of "Human Augmentation"
using computers (though this doesn't get
any serious funding until the mid-60s).
He wants to build a system that can be used
first and foremost by the system builders
themselves, to make them effectively
smarter so they can continue improving the
system (this is the "bootstrap" process of They developed a system
Bardini's title). with *three* input devices:
(1) a 3-button mouse on the
Around the early seventies, this project right, (2) the traditional
starts to fizzle for various reasons and QWERTY keyboard in the
a lot of people start filtering over to middle, and... (3) a
Xerox, where people like Alan Kay get to five-key "chording"
work on developing the Alto and later the keyboard to the left.
Star machines. Unlike with Englebart,
their concept is to develop machines for Ever get annoyed at
"secretaries", so they begin the having to switch
obsession with "ease of use" that to this back and forth
day either energizes or corrupts all between the mouse
computer related endeavors, depending on and the keyboard?
your point of view. These were the The original notion
machines that Xerox famously couldn't see was that you would
how to market, and were later imitated by have an alternate
Steve Jobs and co to develop tha one-handed keyboard
Mac-style interfaces we're familiar with to use while you
now. were on the mouse.
Some great historical tidbits:
The original multi-user NLS system developed at SRI was
going to need a bunch of displays to do shared work.
Raster scan displays -- much like the one that's probably
in front of you now -- were out of the question: the
memory was far too expensive. There were some decent
vector scan displays (the descendants of oscilloscopes and
radar screens) but those were pretty expensive too... so
what the group did was to buy only five vector scan
displays (each only five inches), and multiplex them with
TV cameras and television displays. Luckilly they were
interested in collaborative work: you and a co-worker
would both quite likely be looking at the *same* computer
display, shown on two different TV screens.
The development of the pointing device: they tried a
number of alternatives, including things like a "knee
pointer" that mounted under the desk.
One of the things that I particularly like about
Bardini's treatment is that he's really trying to
get at the ideological sources of Englebart's
thinking, and he touches on disparate sources like
Whorf, Korzybski, and Bateson. There's also some
comparision of Englebart with some alternate
schools of thought (the "artificial intelligence"
guys; and Ted Nelson gets some mentions also).
In fact I wish he'd gone into this a little more (Nov 30, 2017)
deeply, and been a little more careful about
tracing references. It's not immediately clear if Actually, Englebart *does*
Englebart claims a debt to Whorf/Korzybski, or if reference Korzybski and
that's just a parallel that Bardini has noticed. Whorf in his 1962 proposal
to study the possibilities
Did Englebart know enough about Ted Nelson's for systems for "Human
writings to have a chance of being influenced by Augmentation".
them? (Or vice versa?) I don't think Bardini
spells this out, though it wouldn't surprise me, ENGLEBART_KORZYBSKI_WHORF
if so: Nelson talks about interviewing with
Englebart at one point, and there was that odd
connection between the young Stewart Brand and
Englebart circa "The Mother of all Demos"...
But the downside of Bardini is that he periodically
gets lost in ungrounded academic blather that I BOUNDARY_OF_METAPHOR
imagine would sound really good to humanities
majors educated in the pomo eighties, but leaves me
almost entirely cold. It often either doesn't seem
to mean very much, or is pretty clearly just wrong.
The main idea that Bardini is tracking here is that
different visions of the "user" produced different
kinds of systems (Englebart had expert "knowledge
workers" in mind; Kay was thinking of novice office
workers; Apple targeted total beginners -- hence
the one button mouse).
A simple enough notion, right? But Bardini also
likes to point out that there's a cycle in
technical development where developers recruit
(or "create") users, and then the users in turn
influence the developers.
In other words you try something, you see how it
goes over (and how well you can put it over), and
then you try something else.
However, simple language like this is not Bardini's
forte, and instead you need to plow through a lot of
pomo jargon that appears to be the air that academic
intellectuals breath these days.
Here, I submit is the absolute low-point
of this book:
"The user is socially constructed and socially
situated in the processes by which technology
is developed and diffused, and then the user
is progressively realized in a social setting.
"The relations between designers and users are
organized in the negotitions about the future
uses of the technology, starting from the
abstract or virtual representations of the
user in the mind of the designer and
progressively approaching confrontations with
real users.
"In this process, the kind of testing initiated at
PARC [...] was a fundamental, but nevertheless
limited move. This move, according to their claim,
shifted the focus from a comparison between devices
to a study of the human-device interaction.
However, although this move demonstrated the
interest of introducing the human aspect of the
problem, it still fell short of fully realizing the
user.
"Instead, it reduced the user to a subject, in the
scientific, not the philosophical sense -- an object of
study in which most of the qualities of the human being
were deemed not to be of interest and bracketed out by
the experimenters. The introduction of cognitive
science as a way to introduce real users into the
processes of technological development thus also limited
conceptions of what real users might be and might do
with the technology being developed.
"[...] This choice of novice subjects was the obvious
limit of this process, not because these subjects lacked
experience with the devices, but because they were
constructed as novices and as nothing else. Attention
was paid to differences of sex, but their social
identity was no concern of the experiment [...]
"These subjects were only 'half-real'
or, in other words, they were model
subjects, subjects who could be read
as embodiments of the generic eye-hand
system. The experiments were able to
prove that using the mouse was as
efficient as pointing, but people who
point usually don't develop (This is the one
repetitive-stress injuries (RSIs). The and only mention
limitations of the definition of the of RSI... in a
user imposed by the cognitive-science book about "the
conception of the user as an inventor of the
experimental subject thus laid ample mouse".)
groundwork for subsequent unintended
consequences of the technology."
-- p. 178/179,
Ch 6, "The Arrival of the Real User
and the Beginning of the End"
If you're the kind of person who's impressed by this
stuff, this is probably all very impressive, but what
actually strikes me is that it totally misses the
point. The fact that they didn't notice RSI problems
in the handful of Stanford kids they tested is because
that they didn't work them for ten hours a day for ten
years. It had nothing to do with any sort of failure
to come to grips with their humanity. And how exactly
you're supposed to do that in a preliminary useability
study remains a complete mystery to me ("So tell me,
how do you *feel* about that pointing device? Does it
remind you of your mother?").
Note that they didn't just look at statistical summaries
of reaction times; they were video taping the user's
faces to get a qualitative sense of their reactions.
And further, the person who designed the study under
discussion actually was a fan of cursor keys... the fact
that the users seemed to prefer the mouse came as a
surprise. How can one claim there was no real contact
between experimenters and subjects? This is the *one*
place where Bardini documents the iterative development
process he likes to talk about.
While the low points of this book are low, the high
points are pretty high. It has many saving graces.
First, as he mentions in the preface, he does not think
that his ideas are more interesting than those of the
people he's writing about, so much of the book can be
read as "historical realism". Second, as I mentioned
above, I think he casts his intellectual net wider that
a more computer-oriented person would, and gets at some
of the deeper sources. And third, what I would take to
be his main thesis actually makes a good deal of sense
once it's striped of the compulsive pomosity:
Decisions were made about the standard computer user
interface based on some assumptions about the user that
deserve to be reviewed. There is no reason to assume
that the the course we've taken is the right course, and
perhaps the paths not taken can still be taken, and
should be taken.
The point being that experts need
interfaces too, and maybe you're YOU_KNOW_TOO_MUCH
doing them a disservice if you force
them to use the same simplified
controls that might be appropriate
for a beginner or infrequent user.
But then this is a notion that you're
starting to hear from a number of sources --
Jakob Nielsen uses the example of slashdot:
possibly too complicated for a totally
non-technical audience, but it works well
enough for the slash crowd....
Myself, I would recommend this book as a
good historical review (e.g. Englebart
and his group at SRI got lost in "EST" in
the early 70s!)
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