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A Person(alized) History of Hypertext
October 2009

Kahn+Associates | 2 a
A Personal History of Hypertext
— Four individuals whose work and writing inspired important aspects of how we
think about and use computers today:
• Vannevar Bush
• Theodor Nelson
• Douglas Engelbart
• Alan Kay

Kahn+Associates | 3 a
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)
— Inventor of ANALOG COMPUTERS for solving complex differential equations
— Founding partner of Raytheon, Merck pharmaceuticals
— Engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1920-1939
— President of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1939-1955
— Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1940-1945

Kahn+Associates | 4 a
Differential Analyzer
Overall view of the Differential
Analyzer.
The integrator units (six of them) are
inside the wood and glass boxes at
left, the bus rods which carry
numerical information are in the
center, and the input and output
tables are at right. In the foreground is
a numerical tabulator which converted
shaft positions to printed numerical
output. Samuel Caldwell is standing
at left.
[from David A. Mindell website
http://web.mit.edu/mindell/www/analyzer.htm]

Kahn+Associates | 5 a
Differential Analyzer
The picture is reproduced from IEEE Spectrum, July 1995
Found on http://www.science.uva.nl/museum/vbush_tbl.html

Kahn+Associates | 6 a
Differential Analyzer
Operator's console of the Differential
Analyzer,
a literally "graphical" user interface.
The operator (at left, Samuel Caldwell)
manipulates a pointer by hand to
follow the curves on the paper, which
are then integrated or otherwise
processed by the machine, which
drives a plotter to make another graph
as output. Vannevar Bush is looking
on.
[from David A. Mindell website
http://web.mit.edu/mindell/www/analyzer.htm]

Kahn+Associates | 7 a
Rapid Selector Concept (1930s)
— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) demonstrated high-density
microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)

Kahn+Associates | 8 a
Emmanuel Goldberg’s Statistical Machine (1931)
— Patent drawing for Goldberg’s
Statistical Machine
— See Emanuel Goldberg page
— http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/
~buckland/goldberg.html

Kahn+Associates | 9 a
Rapid Selector Concept (1930s)
— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) demonstrated high-density
microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)
— H.G. Wells essay “The World Brain” (1937), and essay for the new Encyclopédie
Française, proposed that the libraries of the world would soon be available to
everyone on reels of microfilm
— See https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html

Kahn+Associates | 10 a
H.G. Wells
— There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index
to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a
complete planetary memory for all mankind. And not simply an index; the direct
reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to any properly prepared spot.
A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and
weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent
anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it
in every detail.
— World Brain:
The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia (1937)
— See https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html

Kahn+Associates | 11 a
Rapid Selector Concept (1930s)
— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) demonstrated high-density
microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)
— H.G. Wells essay “The World Brain” (1937) proposed that the libraries of the
world would soon be available to everyone on reels of microfilm
— Harold Edgerton’s strobe light technique for high-speed photography was used
for rapid detection and re-photographing of coded frames.

Kahn+Associates | 12 a
Harold Edgerton
— 1931 Develops and perfects the stroboscope for use in ultra-high-speed and stop-
motion photography. Forms a partnership with Kenneth Germeshausen, an
MIT research affiliate to develop further uses for the stroboscope. Edgerton
receives his D.Sc. in electrical engineering from MIT.

Kahn+Associates | 13 a
Rapid Selector Concept (1930s)
— Emmanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon (Dresden) demonstrated high-density
microfilm readers and selectors in Brussels (1931)
— H.G. Wells essay “The World Brain” (1937) proposed that the libraries of the
world would soon be available to everyone on reels of microfilm
— Harold Edgerton’s strobe light technique for high-speed photography was used
for rapid detection and re-photographing of coded frames.
— A research project at Bush’s MIT laboratory in the late 1930s began to build a
machine to rapidly select documents recorded as microfilm images on reels of
35 mm movie film
— Coding of document topics in the form of dot patterns

Kahn+Associates | 14 a
Vannevar Bush’s Rapid Selector (1938)

Kahn+Associates | 15 a
Publication of “As We May Think” (summer, 1945)
— Bush writes the essay in 1939, titled “Mechanization and the Record”
— The Memex (memory extender) is based on a microfilm rapid selector
miniaturized into a desk
— Also mentioned is a machine to translate voice into text (Vocoder) similar to a
device demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York
— and a forehead-mounted miniature camera (Walnut camera) to permit “hands-
free” photographic recording in the laboratory.

Kahn+Associates | 16 a
Illustrations for As We May Think (1945)
— The essay is published in July 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly, weeks before the
first atomic bomb is used in the war with Japan
— An illustrated version of the essay appeared in LIFE Magazine in August

Kahn+Associates | 17 a
Memex (cutaway)

Kahn+Associates | 18 a
Memex: annotating on the screen

Kahn+Associates | 19 a
Walnut camera (right)
Vocoder (left)

Kahn+Associates | 20 a
Bush: Computer as Memory Extender
— Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized
private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex"
will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records,
and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with
exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his
memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it
is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting
translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading.
There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an
ordinary desk.

Kahn+Associates | 21 a
Bush: Literature accessed and linked by computers
— Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex
and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and
decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with
familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar
case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to
the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling
with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature
before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds,
and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

Kahn+Associates | 22 a
Bush: The image of navigational links as trails
— The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a
skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time
contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of
establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's
record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Kahn+Associates | 23 a
Vannevar Bush Legacy
— Bush ends his post-war governmental career as the founder of the National
Science Foundation (NSF)
— Rapid Selectors built in the 1950s and 1960s for the Library of Congress,
Department of Navy, Central Intelligence Agency all fail to operate properly.
— As We May Think (AWMT) is a direct influence on the work of J.C.R. Licklider,
Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart
— AWMT is reprinted and taught in Information (Library) Science from 1960s
onward.
— Computer Science Hypertext research consistently refers to AWMT as the origin
of hypertext concept, starting in the 1980s.

Kahn+Associates | 24 a
Theodor Holm Nelson (b. 1937)
— Inventor of new poetic language including
• hypertext *
• hypermedia
• cybercrud
• softcopy
• electronic visualization
• technoid
• docuverse
• Transclusion
* first appears in 1965: “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and
the Indeterminate”

Kahn+Associates | 25 a
Simple Hypertext (1965)

Kahn+Associates | 26 a
Ted Nelson
— Collaborator on Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University (1972)
— Author of “underground” computer books
• Computer Lib / Dream Machine (1974)
• The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
• Literary Machine (1981-1993)
— Introduced the concepts of Project Xanadu in the 1980s through many talks and
articles in Creative Computing, Byte, and other magazines
— Xanadu system project at Autodesk in late 1980s

Kahn+Associates | 28 a
Project Xanadu (quoted from Literary Machines)
— At your screen of tomorrow you will have access to all the world’s published
work: all the books, all the magazines, all the photographs, the recordings, the
movies. (And to new kinds of publications, created especially for the interactive
screen.)
You will be able to bring any published work to your screen, or any part of a
published work.
You will be able to make links – comments, personal notes, or other connections
– between places in documents, and leave them there for others (as well as
yourself) to follow later. You may even publish these links.

Kahn+Associates | 29 a
Project Xanadu (continued)
— Royalty to each publisher will be automatic, as materials are delivered over the
network. Each piece delivered will be paid for automatically, from the user’s
account to the publisher’s account, when the user receives the piece sent for.
Any document may quote another, because the quoted part is brought – and
bought – from the original at the instant of request, with automatic royalty
payment and credit to the originator.

Kahn+Associates | 30 a
Harsh critiques of the file hierarchy and WWW
— Calling a hierarchical director a "folder" doesn't change its nature any more
than calling a prison guard a "counselor".
— Hierarchical directories were invented around 1947-- I should check this--
when somebody said, "How are we going to keep track of all these
files? "Gee, why don't we make a file that's a list of filenames?" And that
was the directory. It's a temporary fix that doesn't scale up.
— Real projects for ordinary people tend to overlap, interpenetrate, and
constantly change. The software requirement of their staying in one place
with a fixed name is inane. The problem is much harder.
— HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links,
links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no
version management, no rights management.
— The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-
hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.

Kahn+Associates | 31 a
Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925)
— Moved from UC Berkeley to Stanford Research
Institute (SRI) in 1962
— Published Augmenting Human Intellect: A
Conceptual Framework.

Kahn+Associates | 32 a
Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect
— By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to
approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his
particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this
respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension,
better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of
comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems
that before seemed insoluble.
[from this report]

Kahn+Associates | 33 a
Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect
— And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats,
executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys,
designers–whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty
years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations.
We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try,
intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful
concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and
high-powered electronic aids.

Kahn+Associates | 34 a
oNLine System (NLS)
— Augmentation Research Center developed NLS in
1968
— Focus on developing new Human-Computer
Interaction models
— Introduced many concepts
• Using computers to support Intellectual Work
• Bootstrapping – using the development group
to test new tools
• Co-evolution – the co-dependent evolution of
the software interface and human behavior

Kahn+Associates | 35 a
NLS (continued)
— Developed the Mouse (analog pointing device) and Chord (5-finger) keyboard
— The NLS system (circa 1968) also included:
• Mixture of text and graphics
• Hypertext links
• Outline processing
• View control of text and graphic data
• Collaborative work space
• Shared pointing device
• Video conferencing

Kahn+Associates | 36 a
Engelbart at the augmentation laboratory at SRI

Kahn+Associates | 37 a
See Douglas Engelbart 1968 demo
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
Clip #5
Also see segments on Google Video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-
8734787622017763097&q=engelbart#

Kahn+Associates | 38 a
Engelbart after 1968
— NLS failed due to timesharing computer technology
— Many researchers from his laboratory moved to Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC), where the mouse and the personal workstation was
(re)invented
— Engelbart developed Augment, a commercial timesharing system for
documentation in the aerospace industry
— Engelbart worked on the first network protocols for the ARPAnet, foundation
of the current Internet (early 1970s)
— Created Bootstrap Institute in 1999,

Kahn+Associates | 39 a
Alan Kay (b. 1940)
— Worked with Ivan Sutherland (Utah) on graphics programming
— Worked with Seymour Papert (MIT) on educational programming
— Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, 1971-1981
— Chief Scientist at Atari, 1981-1984
— Apple Fellow and Disney Fellow, 1984-2001
— Viewpoints Research Institute (since 2006)
“reinventing programming”

Kahn+Associates | 40 a
Kay’s Contributions
— Combining cognitive science, learning theory, and programming languages
— Development of Object-Oriented Programming Language – SmallTalk
• Support for direct manipulation graphical objects as interface
• Use of graphical icons to represent programs
• Cascading menus to select actions
— Interest in making computer programs as simple to use as possible

Kahn+Associates | 41 a
The Macintosh Child Video
— http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdL6dzWvm5M

Kahn+Associates | 42 a
DynaBook Concept (1972)
— A Portable Computer
— Powerful enough to manage
all kinds of media
— Simple enough to be used
by children

Kahn+Associates | 43 a
from “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages”
— Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable
package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough
power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for
later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems,
letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms,
dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and
change.
We envision a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in
and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory
systems. Visual output should be, at the least, of higher quality than what can be
obtained from newsprint. Audio output should adhere to similar high-fidelity
standards.

Kahn+Associates | 44 a
from “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages”
— There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the
metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical
instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly
and consistently to its owner’s wishes. Imagine the absurdity of a one-second
delay between blowing a note and hearing it!
These civilized desires for flexibility, resolution, and response lead to the
conclusion that a user of dynamic personal medium needs several hundred
times as much power as the average adult typically enjoys from timeshared
computing. This means that we should either build a new resource several
hundred times the capacity of current machines and share it (very difficult and
expensive), or we should investigate the possibility of giving each person his
own powerful machine. We choose the second approach.

Kahn+Associates | 45 a
The Xerox Alto
— The Alto “interim DynaBook system”
— Stand-alone computer processor
connected to other disc and printers
via Ethernet
— High-resolution graphic CRT
— Typewriter keyboard, chord keyboard,
music keyboard
— Mouse pointing device

Kahn+Associates | 46 a
Xerox Alto’s Descendents
— Xerox Star – the first office product
with graphical user interface, mouse
and ethernet, $20-50,000 network
configuration (1981)
— See Xerox Star Demo 1984 on
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY
vxgNhUwBk

Kahn+Associates | 47 a
Xerox Alto’s Descendents
— Apple Lisa – the first personal
computer with graphical user
interface and mouse,
$10,000 each (1983)
— See Apple Lisa Demo 1983 on
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3
5vpsPIwlU&watch_response

Kahn+Associates | 48 a
Xerox Alto’s Descendents
— Apple Macintosh – the first successful
personal computer with graphical user
interface and mouse, $3,000 each
(1984)

Kahn+Associates | 49 a
Intermedia (1985-1990) at Brown University
— Apple User
Interface
running on
Unix
— Network
Hypertext
environment
with text,
graphics,
timeline,
animation,
video
— Anchors and
Links collected
in Webs

Kahn+Associates | 50 a
World Wide Web at CERN (from 1989)
— Hypertext
Transport
Protocol (HTTP)
— Hypertext
Markup
Language
(HTML)
— First browser
implemented on
the NeXT
computer
— All software in
public domain

Kahn+Associates | 51 a
Dream of the Digital Library
— Digital Libraries today:
• US Library of Congress American Memory (memory.loc.gov) and the
Library of Congress Online Catalog (catalog.loc.gov)
• British Library’s Online Gallery (www.bl.uk/onlinegallery)
• Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica (gallica2.bnf.fr)
• National audio-visual archives (INA.fr, bbc.uk.co, cnn.com)
— Wikipedia collectively written in many languages
— Google Search of the “public” Internet
— Digital libraries by subscription: news, business, science, law

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