<html> <body> I think that the only feasible way to do the equivalent of the "Mol Bio of the Cell" is on the net, and this would require quite a bit of work to organize. Of course, this was one of Engelbart's powerful goals, to boost the collective IQ of adults, especially groups of adults. Google isn't really set up to do this "Mol Bio of the Computer" but here's what I got from just typing "Engelbart" into Google today. <a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/">Bootstrap Institute: About BI</a> - 11:28am Doug Engelbart invented groupware. What's he up to now? <a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/" eudora="autourl">www.bootstrap.org/</a> - 24k - <a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:4awqRDhD96gJ:www.bootstrap.org/+engelbart&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1">Cached</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=related:www.bootstrap.org/">Similar pages</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=engelbart&btnG=Google+Search#">Remove result </a> <dl> <dd><a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html">Bootstrap Institute: </a>Engelbart<a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html"> biography</a> <dd>At Engelbart's headquarters, his Bootstrap Institute. <dd><a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html" eudora="autourl">www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html</a> - 40k - <a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:NOpaBBpWuEYJ:www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html+engelbart&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2">Cached</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=related:www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html">Similar pages</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=engelbart&btnG=Google+Search#">Remove result</a> <dd>[ More results from <a href="http://www.bootstrap.org/" eudora="autourl">www.bootstrap.org</a> ] </dl><a href="http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html">Doug </a>Engelbart<a href="http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html"> 1968 Demo</a> - 11:28am On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers ... The original 90-minute video of this event is part of the Engelbart Collection ... sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html - 27k - <a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:wHtoarMhT8MJ:sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html+engelbart&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3">Cached</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=related:sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html">Similar pages</a> - <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=engelbart&btnG=Google+Search#">Remove result </a>The first entry takes you to Doug's site. The third entry takes you to the great demo (I was there and its still the "mother of all demos" that I've seen.) So, as far as Engelbart is concerned, it is pretty easy to find out what we was trying to do. BTW, the answer to "how did Engelbart think about the mouse-use?" is found here also. He realized that browsing through hyperspace is like dynamic information retrieval -- and the main thing you get with information retrieval is stuff you don't want! So you need to move onward as quickly as possible. They quickly decided that they had to solve two main things (a) how to get sub-second response, and (b) how to avoid constantly moving the hands back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. The solution to (b) was to introduce a five fingered chord keyboard for the off-hand. <img src="cid:6.1.2.0.2.20060401175247.03a18678@mail.squeakland.org.3" width=300 height=161 alt="HermanMillerEngelbartNLS.jpg"> The five keys on the left plus two of the mouse keys provided 127 commands, which included typing -- the other mouse button (the one on the far right in the picture) was CommandAccept. This sounds tough, but the way you learned it was to first type commands (like MP for move paragraph). It took about 10 hours of use to get reasonably fluent. By the way, this ensemble was designed by them with Herman Miller. They noticed that people liked to scoot around their offices in their office chairs, and designed the above carrier that was attached to the chairs. So you could lean back, scoot around, etc., while still hacking. (But you can imagine, just as if the violin or bicycle were invented today, this would be rejected because it has a small learning curve, and was going into the 80s.) However, the Engelbartians, and visitors like me, wound up using NLS for many hours every day, and thus an interface that permitted great fluency made a lot of sense. This idea was also rejected over the years ("no one will use a personal computer, and if they did, it would only be for a few minutes per day"). The terrific NLS programmers were also able to achieve sub-second response on their time-shared SDS-940 (192K bytes, 1MHz) with 17 users. Why? Because they really wanted to! It is quite weird for me to use my PC laptop today that has more than a factor of 2000 more memory and cycles and not get sub-second response. Why? Because most programmers don't understand why it is so important for many tasks in the UI, especially retrieval. So the theory of the NLS interface should now be more clear. The idea was to navigate and do short typing tasks with hands apart, and only move hands together for typing longer paragraphs. This worked very well. The NLSers could type about 30 words per minute hands apart and get regular faster fluent typing speeds with hands together. We liked many things about this system, and there were a few things we thought could be improved. When PARC was set up, about 8 of Engelbart's folks were part of the original team. At PARC we added bit-map graphics, overlapping windows and unlimited desktops, made our interfaces iconic and modeless (select first then command), and came up with a few more ideas about metamedia and simulation. Here's what an Alto looked like at PARC: <img src="cid:6.1.2.0.2.20060401175247.03a18678@mail.squeakland.org.4" width=220 height=165 alt="SmallAlto.jpg"> Notice the chord keyboard and mouse! The screen here was the lowest pixelation that we did on the first Alto in 1973 (808x606), just enough for 1 complete WYSIWYG page. As soon as we could a few years later we doubled this to 808x1212. What went to Apple in 1980, seven years later, was pretty much only the part of the UI that we used with children (icons, windows, point and click) but none of the workflow ideas or the facilities for high fluency. That's pretty much still the case for Apple and MS. For example, we used unlimited desktops as a way to provide continuity over days and weeks for many parallel projects. The desktops were the gathering place for all the resources one needed for a project. And, of course, nothing like the weakness of powerpoint was needed because the desktops could be sorted and organized for presentations, with, of course, the full power of the system always available, etc. I should also mention here another great 60s UI (GRAIL at RAND Corp) that was a huge influence. It had a continuous stroke character recognizer that was much nicer and smaller than Graffiti (done in 1966), and a really great idea of how to do pen based interfaces. There are movies of this on the web. <img src="cid:6.1.2.0.2.20060401175247.03a18678@mail.squeakland.org.5" width=220 height=165 alt="SmallGRAIL copy.jpg"> This was actually the UI that we thought would be the grandparent of the Dynabook interface (not Engelbart's). And we did a pretty nice object-oriented version in Smalltalk at PARC. The problem was that tablets in those days were really expensive. The RAND tablet (the first great tablet, invented to do GRAIL) cost $18,000 in the 60s (almost $100K in today's dollars). The tablets you could see through in the 70s were about $7K (the Alto cost about $20K w/o a tablet). So the mouse, which originally was just two pots, won out. I didn't like it because you couldn't draw well with it (I could draw and I wanted kids to draw). Because the character recognizer was so good (you did have to spend about 15-30 minutes learning to use it), it was possible to also use the Engelbart idea of navigation+short-text-input as one mode of use, and heavy typing on a keyboard as the other. This worked really well (and would work well today). By the way, I got all of these examples via Google on the net in just a few minutes. So some of the great stuff from the past is available in an understandable and accessible form today. Bottom line: some of the opinions about Engelbart and the mouse as expressed in this list are curious, since the smallest amount of actual delving would provide a definite answer rather than just an offhand but needlessly assertive guess. Cheers, Alan </body> </html>