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ENGLEBARTS_BARD
July 18, 2002
A review of "Bootstapping" by Thierry Bardini
Douglas Englelbart, Coevolution, and the
Origins of Personal Computing.
Stanford Press, 2000
Bardini's credentials: Associate Professor of
Communication at the University of Montreal
The good stuff here: the history of the
thinking behind the development of
"the personal computer", getting into
some of the details of alternate ideas
they tried, quotations from the original
players talking about what they were
thinking about and trying to do, and
how they feel about the way it played
out.
In broad outline, here's the story:
Englebart at SRI, starting around
1959 works on the idea of "Human
Augmentation" using computers
(though this doesn't get any
serious funding until the mid-60s).
He wants to build a system that can
be used first and foremost by the
system builders themselves, to make
them effectively smarter so they They developed a system
can continue improving the system with *three* input devices:
(this is the "bootstrap" process of (1) a 3-button mouse on the
Bardini's title). right, (2) the traditional
QWERTY keyboard in the
Around the early seventies, this middle, and... (3) a
project starts to fizzle for five-key "chording"
various reasons and a lot of keyboard to the left.
people start filtering over to
Xerox, where people like Alan Kay Ever get annoyed at
get to work on developing the having to switch
Alto and later the Star machines. back and forth
Unlike with Englebart, their between the mouse
concept is to develop machines and the keyboard?
for "secretaries", so they begin The original notion
the obsession with "ease of use" was that you would
that to this day either energizes have an alternate
or corrupts all computer related one-handed keyboard
endeavors, depending on your to use while you
point of view. These were the were on the mouse.
machines that Xerox famously
couldn't see how to market, and
were later imitated by Steve Jobs
and co to develop tha Mac-style
interfaces we're familiar with now.
Some great historical tidbits:
The original multi-user NLS system
developed at SRI needed about a dozen
displays. Raster scan displays -- much
like the one that's probably in front of
you now -- were out of the question: the
memory was far too expensive. There were
some decent vector scan displays (the
descendants of oscilloscopes and radar
screens), but those were pretty expensive
too... so what they did was to buy only
five vector scan displays (only five
inches), and multiplex them with TV
cameras and television displays. Luckilly
they were interested in collaborative
work: you and a co-worker would both quite
likely be looking at the *same* computer
display, shown on two different TV
screens.
The development of the pointing device:
they tried a number of alternatives,
including things like a "knee pointer"
that mounted under the desk.
One of the things that I particularly like
about Bardini's treatment is that he's
really trying to get at the ideological
sources of Englebart's thinking, and he
touches on disparate sources like Whorf,
Korzybski, and Bateson. There's also some
comparision of Englebart with some
alternate schools of thought (the
"artificial intelligence" guys; and Ted
Nelson gets some mentions also).
In fact I wish he'd gone into this a little
more deeply, and been a little more careful
about tracing references. It's not
immediately clear if Englebart claims a debt
to Whorf/Korzybski, or if that's just a
parallel that Bardini has noticed. Did
Englebart know enough about Ted Nelson's
writings to have a chance of being
influenced by them? (Or vice versa?) I
don't think Bardini spells this out -- ((check this))
though considering that Englebart was
hanging out with guys like Stewart Brand
at the time, it wouldn't be a huge
surprise if he'd read some of the
material that later ended up collected in
Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines".
But the downside of Bardini is that he
periodically gets lost in ungrounded
academic blather that I imagine would
sound really good to humanities majors
educated in the pomo eighties, but leaves
me almost entirely cold. It often either
doesn't seem to mean very much, or is
pretty clearly just wrong.
The main idea that Bardini is tracking
here is that different visions of the
"user" produced different kinds of systems
(Englebart had expert "knowledge workers"
in mind; Kay was thinking of novice office
workers; Apple targeted total beginners --
hence the one button mouse).
A simple enough notion, right? But
Bardini also likes to point out that
there's a cycle in technical development
where developers recruit (or "create")
users, and then the users in turn
influence the developers.
In other words you try something, you see
how it goes over (and how well you can put
it over), and then you try something else.
However, Simple language like this is not
Bardini's forte, and instead you need to
plow through a lot of pomo jargon that
appears to be the air that academic
intellectuals breath these days.
Here, I submit is the absolute low-point
of this book:
"The user is socially constructed and
socially situated in the processes by
which technology is developed and
diffused, and then the user is
progressively realized in a social
setting.
"The relations between designers and
users are organized in the negotitions
about the future uses of the
technology, starting from the abstract
or virtual representations of the user
in the mind of the designer and
progressively approaching
confrontations with real users.
"In this process, the kind of testing
initiated at PARC [...] was a
fundamental, but nevertheless limited
move. This move, according to their
claim, shifted the focus from a
comparison between devices to a study
of the human-device interaction.
However, although this move
demonstrated the interest of
introducing the human aspect of the
problem, it still fell short of fully
realizing the user.
"Instead, it reduced the user to a
subject, in the scientific, not the
philosophical sense -- an object of
study in which most of the qualities of
the human being were deemed not to be
of interest and bracketed out by the
experimenters. The introduction of
cognitive science as a way to introduce
real users into the processes of
technological development thus also
limited conceptions of what real users
might be and might do with the
technology being developed.
"[...] This choice of novice subjects was
the obvious limit of this process, not
because these subjects lacked experience
with the devices, but because they were
constructed as novices and as nothing
else. Attention was paid to differences
of sex, but their social identity was no
concern of the experiment [...]
"These subjects were only 'half-real'
or, in other words, they were model
subjects, subjects who could be read
as embodiments of the generic eye-hand
system. The experiments were able to
prove that using the mouse was as
efficient as pointing, but people who
point usually don't develop (This is the one
repetitive-stress injuries (RSIs). The and only mention
limitations of the definition of the of RSI... in a
user imposed by the cognitive-science book about "the
conception of the user as an inventor of the
experimental subject thus laid ample mouse".)
groundwork for subsequent unintended
consequences of the technology."
-- p. 178/179,
Ch 6, "The Arrival of the Real User
and the Beginning of the End"
If you're the kind of person who's
impressed by this stuff, this is probably
all very impressive, but what actually
strikes me is that it totally misses the
point. The fact that they didn't notice RSI
problems in the handful of Stanford
kids they tested is because that they
didn't work them for ten hours a day for
ten years. It had nothing to do with any
sort of failure to come to grips with
their humanity. And how exactly you're
supposed to do that in a preliminary
useability study remains a complete
mystery to me ("So tell me, how do you
*feel* about that pointing device? Does
it remind you of your mother?").
Note that they didn't just look at
statistical summaries of reaction
times; they were video taping the
user's faces to get a qualitative
sense of their reactions.
And further, the person who designed
the study under discussion actually was
a fan of cursor keys... the fact that
the users seemed to prefer the mouse
came as a surprise. How can one claim
there was no real contact between
experimenters and subjects? This is
the *one* place where Bardini documents
the iterative development process he
likes to talk about.
While the low points of this book are low,
the high points are pretty high. It has
many saving graces. First, as he mentions
in the preface, he does not think that his
ideas are more interesting than those of
the people he's writing about, so much of
the book can be read as "historical
realism". Second, as I mentioned above, I
think he casts his intellectual net wider
that a more computer-oriented person
would, and gets at some of the deeper
sources. And third, what I would take to
be his main thesis actually makes a good
deal of sense once it's striped of the
compulsive pomosity:
Decisions were made about the standard
computer user interface based on some
assumptions about the user that deserve to
be reviewed. There is no reason to assume
that the the course we've taken is the
right course, and perhaps the paths not
taken can still be taken, and should be
taken.
The point being that experts need
interfaces too, and maybe you're YOU_KNOW_TOO_MUCH
doing them a disservice if you force
them to use the same simplified
controls that might be appropriate
for a beginner or infrequent user.
But then this is a notion that
you're starting to hear from a
number of sources -- Jakob
Nielsen uses the example of
slashdot: possibly too
complicated for a totally
non-technical audience, but it
works well enough for the slash
crowd....
Myself, I would recommend this book as a
good historical review (e.g. Englebart
and his group at SRI got lost in "est" in
the early 70s!)
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