Back to the Future

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a 90 minute demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco.  He and his research team from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute had been developing an online system (called NLS for oN Line System) since 1962, and at the FJCC they debuted the first computer mouse and demonstrated hypertext, file linking and tele-conferencing to an audience of one thousand.  Engelbart was concerned with collective intelligence and networked knowledge; only these paradigms of shared thinking, he proposed, could effectively meet the urgency and fast-changing nature of contemporary problems.

Engelbart is oft-associated with firsts and technological history; in the photograph below, his 1966 workstation is complete with keyboard, monitor, and square black mouse on the far right.

But at the same time, many conversations about the future of technology and networked life invoke Engelbart’s theoretical positions and proposed practices as guiding principles and visions not-yet-achieved.  He is as much a part of the discourses of origins as he is with those of the future. I thought of Engelbart recently while reading about poet and essayist Lewis Hyde’s new project on intellectual property and the cultural commons.  Hyde argues that we have not yet spoken back to the market-driven gluttony of copyright law by articulating precisely where and how a limit should be set between public and private.

So it was somehow no surprise to learn that the mouse-maker himself awarded the first Collective Intelligence Recognition Award for an organization to Creative Commons, the non-profit dedicated to promoting sharing within the limits of copyright law, at the 2008 Program for the Future conference.  It was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the famous 1968 demo — and a simultaneous anointment of Engelbart as oracle of what’s to come.