How an Artifact of the Scottish Enlightenment Became a Digital Age Pioneer 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ted Nelson - Hypertext Envisioned and Pursued 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 [...]

Douglas Englebart 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 [...]

Alan Kay - The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency funding of SRI’s work dried up in the early 1970s. When Engelbart’s Stanford Research Institute  activity center closed in 1977, a number of its computer researchers moved on to Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to carry on their work on human/computer interfaces. PARC researchers, including [...]