1968: the year of the blog
Having heard Alan Kay’s inspiring talk at the 2003 Emerging Technology conference, I already knew how much of modern computing Douglas Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo of the NLS (”oNLine System”) contained within it — and how far we still have to go to match the stuff Engelbart showed off then, not only in its individual elements (graphical interface, hypertext, advanced input devices, distance collaboration, and so on) but in their total integration.
What I didn’t know was that the NLS appears even to have had a kind of blog capability as one of its many tricks.
I’ve been watching the amazing videos (shot by Stewart Brand) of Engelbart’s demo — all available online, here. If you take a look at this one, you’ll see Jeff Rulifson explaining that the NLS programmers — who, in true bootstrapping fashion, seem to have maintained all their code within the NLS itself — kept a kind of bug log. Since NLS tracked who was using it and what everyone did when, each entry in the bug log has a little subscript line, flush right, with the name of the person who posted it and the time it was posted.
Sure looks like a weblog! And if you were logged into NLS you could even add comments. (I’d clip a still from the Real stream but haven’t been able to do a screen capture — perhaps part of the Real format’s DRM, or I’m too much of a klutz. Anyway, the video clip is under a minute.)
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April 29th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Dear Mr. Rosenberg:
I enjoyed your book “Dreaming In Code”. Your book offered many new insights to me, despite many years of studying the challenges of software.
However, I was completely puzzled by your mention on page 46 that Douglas Engelbart’s NLS project went into decline, partly because it “…foundered on the shoals of the human potential movement and Werner Erhard’s est…” What is “est”? Perhaps you could add some more commentary at your web site. (If you already have, I cannot find it.)
Could you elaborate on how closely Werner Erhard and “est” frustrated the development of NLS? Did you mean to say that the general cultural climate of in the U.S., in the 1970s, turned against the financial support of all computer and technology projects? Or, for some reasons not stated, did Werner Erhard and “est” have a more direct impact on Douglas Engelbart’s NLS project?
Despite the current capabilities to search the internet, I cannot find clear explanation of “est”. The online dictionaries and search engines are frustrated by this strange thing called “est”, which is partly a concept, partly an acronym, but seems to be primarily a motivational training program. (WikiPedia.org offered some information concerning Werner Erhard and the origin of “est”.)
John Ferral