An Unlikely First Mover
Who would have guessed that at the end of the 20th Century it would be a company founded in Scotland in 1768 that would invent a key part of the mechanics that would let people intuitively navigate the electronic flood of text, sound and images soon to drench the planet from the internet?
In 1989, 221 years after the company’s founding in Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., publisher of its eponymous Encyclopædia Britannica reference work, had not only solved this puzzle for the first time, it was issued a patent for it. While it may be incongruous that a legacy reference print publisher would be the party to make the discovery, this is exactly what happened.
Normal patents on inventions have a revenue producing life of 20 years. The patents Britannica filed for in 1989 were issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1993, but they were unusual in that they never earned a nickel. Indeed, after years of litigation in multiple court venues, they were finally found to have been improperly issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2011 because of a technical error in the original filing papers. The technical defects meant that the courts never got to a detailed ruling on whether then commonplace GPS navigation systems infringed the patents covering Britannica’s invention. Though Encyclopaedia Britannica never benefited financially from the extraordinary human/machine interface it had been the first to build, it had reason to be proud of its fundamental achievement. Its revolutionary human/machine interface provided seamless navigational paths into and through complex digital databases of mixed media including, text, graphics, maps, videos and audio elements that even a nine-year old could master.
Britannica’s landmark invention has partly to do with the evolution of the personal computer in the mid-1980s. But it also has to do with a small group of encyclopedists who had been struggling for many years before to define what an electronic encyclopedia would look like. The culmination of their work happened to coincide with the coming of age of the personal computer in the nascent consumer market.
This fortuitous combination produced a remarkable cultural breakthrough. It meant that for the first time, children, as well as adults, could easily and quickly access and navigate complex and media-rich stores of digital information. It also created a plumbing roadmap for the software design that in later years would prove essential in making user friendly such diverse applications as automobile GPS navigation systems and websites.
Hypertext and the Search for the Machine/Human Interface
Four pioneers in the development of computer interfaces stand out: Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, and Alan Kay. Each of these four individuals made exceptional contributions to the developing field how humans interact with machines and each helped set the stage for Encyclopaedia Britannica’s unique invention in the 1980s. Two of these four individuals, Bush and Kay, even directly applied their thinking to the problem of building an electronic encyclopedia.
Vannevar Bush
The scientist with the most penetrating early vision of the machine’s potential role in helping us easily access the growing storehouse of human knowledge was Vannevar Bush. After he received a joint doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in 1916, Bush showed a bent for military applications by inventing a submarine detection device during World War I. Then in the 1920s at MIT, he began to design and build analog computers. These early machines used voltage variances to reflect different numeric values.
These machines were the precursors to today’s binary language, digital computers that use zeros and ones to represent data. In 1928, Bush was issued a pioneering patent for one of his computers and by 1935 his Rockefeller Differential Analyzer was the most powerful computer of its day. It was quickly put to the task of solving problems associated with the development of long-distance power lines. Then, in World War II, it was turned to the task of producing artillery ballistics tables to assist the military.
At the beginning of World War II, Bush made recommendations to President Franklin Roosevelt about how to organize scientific research to keep the military abreast of new technologies. Then, during the war, Bush headed the federal government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. It has been said that radar (from the acronym for “radio detection and ranging”) won the war, and the atomic bomb ended it. Bush and his Office had played a crucial role in both developments.
Towards the end of the war, Bush gave considerable thought to the potential application of computers to peacetime requirements and their likely evolution in the post-war era. He came to believe computers could play an important peacetime role in managing the increasing store of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
The Atlantic Monthly’s 1945 “As We May Think” Article
In a now landmark article for the Atlantic Monthly published in July 1945, entitled “As We May Think,” Bush laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be central to our social and business life. The article remains, to this day, stunning in the accuracy of its perceptions regarding the likely evolution of computing. In an introduction describing the thrust of Bush’s article, the Atlantic Monthly’s Editor wrote, “Now, says Doctor Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give men access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages.” No small step for Mankind that.
In the article, Bush looked at recent advances, such as the cathode ray tube, dry photography and microphotography and pondered how logical extensions of these technologies might be applied to create a future miniaturized Encyclopædia Britannica:
“The Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising
blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van.”
December 1945 Life Magazine Reprint of Atlantic Monthly Article Bush’s “Memex” and Today’s Personal Computer
Although Bush thought in terms of microfilm rather than magnetic drives, optical discs or silicon wafers for data storage, he conjured up a likely playback machine for a high-capacity storage medium that closely resembles the personal computer of today. Bush called it a Memex and described it this way:
“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. … 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. In one end is the stored material . . . 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.”
Bush did a prescient job describing in 1945 his idea of what a personal computer of the future might look like. This is particularly true given the required reliance on vacuum tubes for the computers in that era. Vacuum tubes were a great limitation for the computers of the time.
Though the transistor was invented in 1947 by physicists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the shift from slow, heat producing vacuum tubes that often burned out, to cooler, more powerful and reliable transistors did not unfold overnight.
For instance, when the March 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics surveyed the then state of the art ENIAC computer (from “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer”), the potential impact of the transistor, let alone the microprocessor chip, was entirely missing: “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.”
Hypertext Envisioned
Another element of the information management challenge that Bush understood was the fact that quickly finding information through data compression and advanced displays didn’t solve the need to move with ease from one type of pertinent information to different, but related, information. He recognized that there remained a need for a human/machine interface that more realistically mirrored the way people thought.
And, so, in one final burst of creative insight, Vannevar Bush dreamed up what we call today “hypertext” or “hyperlinking.” That’s the highlighted text or interactive graphic on a computer screen that, when clicked upon with a mouse, takes the user to related information stored in a different location.
Bush saw that static indices were an imperfect way to search for and access information and what was needed was a more direct way of moving from one thought to a related one. He understood that a major limitation in quickly accessing desired information was the absence of ways to associatively access that information. In short, he saw the need for a random access mechanism that would also provide quick connections to related information in different locations– hyperlinks as we now refer to them.
“Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass.
It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re- enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized.”
Hypertext Pursued
Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
While Ted Nelson’s software concept named Project Xanadu, was unable to be reduced to practice notwithstanding decades of fitful development, researchers today look back on Nelson’s ideas about hypertext as influential in how people thought about computer interface concepts and the potentially revolutionary nature of hyperlinks.
His parents were Hollywood royalty. Father Ralph Nelson was the directed the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field that led to Sidney Poitier winning the first Academy Award for Best Actor. His mother was actress Celeste Holm who was nominated for her performance in the 1950 movie All About Eve.
With a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania founded by Quakers, Nelson started graduate school in sociology in 1959 at the University of Chicago. Moving on to Harvard, he received his MA in 1962.
It was at Harvard that he began to work on a “writing system” that would let people store what they had written, change it, and print it out. His concept included being able to see alterations in a side by side format that would also retain the train of changes. As Project Xanadu evolved through the decades of the unsuccessful effort to produce a useful and commercial software product, hints of what could be in store were evident, but never made workable.
Xanadu Showing Changing Drafts of the Declaration of Independence
Nelson used the term “hypertext” in several papers he published in 1965. Though the code for Xanadu could never be written that would make dream come true, the search went on to find a workable way to make usefully connect non-sequential text. Nelson published his ideas in a paper submitted to the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965. He further developed them in his books Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) and Literary Machines (1981).
In the 1950s and 1960s, the utility seen in the foresight and musings of Bush and Nelson was still far away given the state of computer development at the time. This was the era of big iron, as the IBM and other mainframe computers were known. Even with their growing power and scale, they could not yet manage the facile integration of images with text, let alone coupling them with sound and video. While continuing to develop, the speed and processing power of big iron’s central processing units remained in its infancy. On the storage end of things. magnetic drum memory devices had come to market in 1950. They functioned by storing information on the outside of a rotating cylinder coated with ferromagnetic material. This was circled by read and write heads that remained in a fixed position.
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
It was Douglas Engelbart who was able to take Bush’s concept of hypertext to a more concrete level with a stunning demonstration in 1968 of what the future held.
Engelbart, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925, he died in 2013. Ted Nelson gave an impassioned eulogy at his memorial service. You get a good view of his charismatic personality as he rails against the forces he believes held himself and Engelbart back during their lives.
Engelbart had been drafted into the Navy in World War II, where he had served as a radar technician. Perhaps his familiarity with cathode ray tubes prepared him for the role he was to play later in the evolution of the visually-centric human/computer interface. While awaiting discharge from the Army in the Philippines at the end of the War, he had read Bush’s article, “As We May Think.” As it turned out, Bush’s precepts remained at the center of Engelbart’s later career in computer science. When he got home, he pursued an education in electrical engineering, receiving a B.S. from Oregon State University in 1948 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955.
After 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth orbiting satellite, the U.S. government, through the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects’ Agency (ARPA), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research made funds available to further research in computer science. Engelbart had joined a group at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California and in 1962, under a contract with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, wrote a seminal paper building on Vannevar Bush’s earlier concepts. In the paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework