BOOTSTRAPPING

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

If we "think" verbally, we act as biased observers and project onto the silent levels the structure of language we use, and so remain in our rut of old orientations, making keen, unbiased observations and creative work well-nigh impossible. In contrast, when we "think" without words, or in pictures (which involve structure and therefore relations), we may discover new aspects and relations on silent levels, and so may produce important theoretical results in the general search of similarity of structure between the two levels, silent and verbal. Practically all important advances are made that way. -ALFRED KORZYBSKI, Manhood of Humanity

Engelbart's "weird stuff" was in fact not weird at all. Instead, it was thoroughly grounded in what at that point was some of the most advanced thinking about how people think, act, and live in the world. It reflected what many influential thinkers-many of them also "outsider" free intellectuals-had been saying about language, thought, and reality, to use the terms that Benjamin Lee Whorf used to frame a book that helped blaze the path that Engelbart followed.

It is difficult to remember the time when computers could not deal with what is called "natural language," the ordinary, everyday language in which people speak and write. As strange as it can appear now, however, the notion of a natural-language interface between the computer and its user is a relatively new idea. The evolution of human-computer interfaces from specialized, artificial computer languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL to a natural-language interface was the result of a slow process of teaching both the user and the computer how to talk to each other, to find a common language. How that process worked out had significant consequences for the way the personal computer developed. The most significant consequence was Douglas Engelbart's inclusion of the body of the user in the interaction between computers and their users.

LANGUAGE

The history of how the computer and its relationship to its human users was imagined is a dance of metaphors. For Engelbart, as we have seen, the computer was to be less like a locomotive and more like a bulldozer or automobile, or more like a "slave" and less like an autonomous thinking machine. For Licklider, it was to be an artificial "colleague" with whom the user could "interact" in a "conversation." Engelbart, in his effort to develop computers as a kind of prosthesis, and those trying to develop them as a form of artificial intelligence, both agreed, however, that in one sense, the usual way of representing human-machine interaction was misleading. The user of a computer should not be thought of as "operating" it, the way a construction worker operates a bulldozer. Instead, the user and the computer should be thought of as "communicating" with each other.

Prior styles of interaction between people and machines-such as driver and automobile, secretary and typewriter, or operator and control room-are all extremely lean: there is a limited range of tasks to be accomplished and a narrow range of means (wheels, levers and knobs) for accomplishing them. The notion of the operator of a machine arose out of this context. But the user is not an operator. He does not operate the computer, he communicates with it to accomplish a task. Thus we are creating a new arena of human action: communication with machines rather than operation of machines. (Card, Moran, and Newell 1983, 7, emphasis in the original)

In both the AI community and in Engelbart's lab at SRI, much effort was devoted to figuring out what this metaphor could mean in actuality and to making it work with real people and computer hardware.

As Engelbart saw it in 1962, the interaction between users and computers is a process of information exchange that is not necessarily unique to humans using computers. All such exchanges take place within a larger framework. He called the larger framework as it operates with respect to computers the "H-LAM/T System" for "Human using Language, Artifact, Methodology, in which he is Trained." In this scheme, arrows represent flows of energy between the "outside world" and both the user and the machine, the "artifact." A caption in the original representation refers to the shaded areas, the defining element of the "Man-Artifact Interface" shared by both humans and machines, as "matching processes." Whereas these processes for computers heretofore had been the domain of a few programmers and depended on artificial languages to provide the computer with input, instruct it what to do with it, and obtain usable output, for Engelbart, they were ubiquitous, part of the givens with which humans interact with their environment:

Where a complex machine represents the principal artifact with which a human being cooperates, the term "man-machine interface" has been used for some years to represent the boundary across which energy is exchanged between the two domains. However, the "man-artifact interface" has existed for centuries, ever since humans began using artifacts and executing composite processes, exchange across this "interface" occurs when an explicit-human process is coupled to an explicit-artifact process. Quite often these coupled processes are designed for just this exchange purpose, to provide a functional match between other explicit-human and explicit-artifact processes buried within their respective domains that do the more significant things. (Engelbart 1962, 20-21)

For Engelbart, what seemed promising about computers was that for these "artifacts," the...