"Being very very different from prevailing paradigms is very much like being an extreme radical politically. There might be some friends that really like you, but they can't understand why you say what you do and they think its injurious and they wish you'd quit it."

Full Lecture (1:44:08) Excerpt 1 (6:14) The collective IQ - augmenting the human intellect of groups of people acting collectively. Excerpt 2 (2:42) Augmentation systems - Looking for changes to make to take advantage of new tools. Excerpt 3 (2:54) Easy to learn and natural to use - moving beyond the introductory stage. Excerpt 4 (10:42) Improvement infrastructure - strategies for improving the capabilities of organizations.

From an introduction by Randall Packer: As with most visionaries, it has taken the World a long time to catch up with Douglas Engelbart. Although Doug's work took place in relative isolation, he is best known in scientific and academic communities. His ideas have profoundly touched us all. When during the 1950s the digital electronic computer was being conceived as a sophisticated calculating machine, Doug saw it as a tool for expanding the mind's creative abilities. During the same period when the computer's most celebrated function was to calculate artillery trajectories for the military, Doug was talking about human-computer interactivity, collaborative information systems, and other innovations that would become the norm much later, in the 90s. This man who was way too ahead of his time struggled for years to convince the military and scientific world he was on the right track. It wasn't until the 1960s that he received the funding he needed to begin his work. Doug once told me that the Washington establishment laughed at him when he said he wanted to put together a programming team to build an interactive on-line computing system here in California. He was told in 1960 that there are no software engineers on the West Coast. An irony now but at the time most computer development was taking place at MIT and other institutions on the East Coast. But Doug persisted and by 1968 he launched the Wdorld into information space with the on-line system he had designed and build at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. This machine has changed the way we think and learn. It is reshaping our culture and it is transforming our art.

Fall 96 | Ted Nelson | Alan Kay