Douglas Engelbart, coevolution, and the origins of personal computing /
First Statement of Responsibility
Thierry Bardini.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Stanford, Calif. :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Stanford University Press,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2000.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
xvi, 284, [1] p. :
Other Physical Details
ill. ;
Dimensions
25 cm.
SERIES
Series Title
Writing science
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [285]) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Introduction: Douglas Engelbart's crusade for the augmentation of human intellect -- Language and the body -- The chord keyset and the QWERTY keyboard -- The invention of the mouse -- Inventing the virtual user -- SRI and the oN-line system -- The arrival of the real user and the beginning of the end -- "Of mice and Man": ARPANET, e-mail and est -- Coda: where hand and memory can meet again -- Appendix: Personnel at Engelbart's SRI lab.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"Combining technological, social, and historical perspectives, Bootstrapping traces the genesis of personal computing through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it - including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Since that time, all these technologies have become so commonplace as to be taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Thierry Bardini analyzes Engelbart's singular achievement through a detailed history of his vision for a human-computer interface in the context of the U.S. computer research community during the 1960s and 1970s." "The book offers a careful narrative of the growth and decline of Engelbart's laboratory at SRI, and it examines the subsequent translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in the less challenging terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies." "At a time when the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web has spawned myriad pronouncements on our social and technological future, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution.""--Jacket.