Douglas Engelbart

One of the more interesting people from the early history (1960's) of computer technology is Douglas Engelbart. He is credited with the invention of the mouse, email, teleconferencing, etc., etc.

Some good sources for information about him and the wider implications of his "Augmentation of Human Intellect project" (Bardini, 1) are:

Bootstrapping : Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini. Stanford University Press, 2000

"Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing" by Susan B. Barnes, in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v. 19, no. 3, 1997 - p. 16 to 26

The Augmentation System Framework. Douglas C. Engelbart and Kristina Hooper, a chapter in "Interactive Multimedia," Sueann Ambron and Kristina Hooper [Ed.], Microsoft Press, 1988, pp. 14-31

and of course, chapter 9, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", of Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality, and the information about Engelbart on the book's website at http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Engelbart/Engelbart.html

Other articles by Engelbart are listed at http://www.bootstrap.org/institute/bibliography.html - many are in full text.

There is a set of webpages at http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/ - " Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution : A Symposium at Stanford University, December 9, 1998", which lists more of his accomplishments and shows some excellent videos from the symposium. The first three videos have some clips from the original 1968 presentation.

[April 11, 2006] The last link isn't working but the Stanford Mousesite has papers, videos, and much more. Some of their links weren't available but, thanks to Google Search, I found videos from the 1968 demo. This is one of the great seminal events of web interactivity so it's worth looking at.

Beginnings

The reason I've started this blog is that I want to trace my progress through exploring digital media classes that I find on the Web. I started thinking about this when I purchased Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan. The book has a website at http://www.w2vr.com/contents.html and Packer teaches classes at Maryland Institute College of Art - the class notes for those classes are at http://www.zakros.com/mica/ The teachers' guide for the book and the 16 classes listed on that page all refer to different aspects of digital media with some repetition as the classes change over the years. I wanted to explore the ideas on those pages, learning as I go along.

Although my intention was to do the work in each of the 16 classes week by week, getting the first week of each class done within a week of real time, I've managed only to get through part of the introduction to the first class. This is because I've been following links and looking up references that I've found. I got as far as following all the links in the first paragraph of the intro to History of New Media for Fall of 2003. In the second paragraph, I've got as far as Immersion and read the section about the Cave. Each page so far has led to other pages which have yet more links.

I've also read the Overture to MultiMedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality, which is when I got the idea to study the material covered in these 16 classes. A lot of the text in the links on the book's webpage so far are also in the book, but some is extra (or maybe just later on in the book). The webpages have colour images and video - which doesn't work. [Note: April 30, 2004 - The video links are now working so that you can see parts of speeches, some samples of early virtual reality, even an early performance by John Cage. So explore the book's website and find all this really neat stuff.] Much of it can be found elsewhere on the web, I think, which is yet another distraction.

I've also been reading Explorations in Art and Technology by Candy and Edmonds - the chapter by Harold Cohen has some references I want to follow up. Papers by Harold Cohen are at http://crca.ucsd.edu/~hcohen/

Lev Manovich teaches at UCSD - his webpage is at http://manovich.net/