DECEMBER 16, 2013, 3:16 PM
Theodor Nelson’s eulogy for Douglas Engelbart.
Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, has been a thorn in the side of the computing establishment for more than a half century. Last week, in an encomium to his friend Douglas Engelbart, he took his critique to Shakespearean levels. It deserves a wider audience.
Dr. Engelbart and Ted Nelson became acquaintances at the dawn of the modern computing era. They had envisioned and invented the computing that we have come to take for granted.
During the 1960s in Menlo Park, Calif., at the Stanford Research Institute, Dr. Engelbart created a research group to design what he described as the oN Line System, or N.L.S. It was intended to augment small groups of knowledge workers. Along the way, he pioneered computer interfaces by inventing the computer mouse, hypertext and many of the other components of modern computing.
On the East Coast beginning in the early 1960s, Dr. Nelson coined the term hypertext as part of his Xanadu system, which would presage the World Wide Web. In 1974, he published Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a Whole Earth Catalog-style description of a computing world that was far beyond the mainframe and minicomputer world of its day. Since then, he has remained an iconoclast and an outsider, regularly irritating the computing establishment.
In July, Dr. Engelbart died at 88. Last Wednesday, his life and work was commemorated at memorial event here at the Computer History Museum.
At the event, Dr. Nelson distributed an “unretouched” photo of Dr. Engelbart with a halo clearly visible above his head. Only Ted Nelson could portray the modern computing world as a Shakespearean tragedy. The following is his speech:
You don’t need me to tell you that Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time. We gather today, in pretense of unanimity and concord, to croon over Doug’s ashes and grab for scraps of his robe.
Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.
Some are no doubt here to cheer and march behind the mouse, as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of yore. Let them be happy in that celebration.
But the real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration.
Don’t get me wrong, the people who gave us all those fonts were idealists too, in their way — they just didn’t necessarily hold a very high view of human potential.
I used to have a high view of human potential. But no one ever had such a soaring view of human potential as Douglas Carl Engelbart — and he gave us wings to soar with him, though his mind flew on ahead, where few could see.
Like Icarus, he tried to fly too far too fast, and the wings melted off.The melt-off began after the Great Demo of 1968. His team dispersed to seek fortunes elsewhere; and he was subordinated to an artificial intelligence department, where his real intelligence was stifled.
All too soon the Augmentation Research Center was gone, fobbed off on an aircraft company.
He was cast out for the next 30 years into the endless spiral of what they call in Hollywood “Development Hell” — trying to find backing.
Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA, Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further.
But for Doug that great demo was only the beginning.
That great demo which defined the corners of our world was only Square One of his endless new checkerboard– the great playing field, the great workplace of sharing, cooperation and understanding he sought to create, and (alas) that only he could imagine.
Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.
Perhaps the Dynamic Knowledge Repository he imagined — the D.K.R. — would not be feasible in a real-world corporation.
Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil.
Of course he was naïve!
Gandhi and Martin Luther King pretended to be naïve, but Doug was the real thing– a luminous innocent, able to do in all innocence what sophisticates could not, would not, dare.
But that naiveté accomplished a dazzling amount in those few years of his Augmentation Research Center, even as the knives were being sharpened for him.
Did he actually have any more great inventions under that halo?
We’ll never know, will we?
Doug hoped eventually to take on all the urgent and complex problems of humanity, dealing with them in parallel he saw as the true and final challenge.
Could he have done it somehow: given us exalted, radical tools for optimization and agreement, in this urgent complex world of hurt and hatred?We’ll never know, will we.
But who better should have had the chance to try? To quote Joan of Arc, from Shaw’s play about her:
“When will the world be ready to receive its saints? I think we know the answer — when they are dead, pasteurized and homogenized and simplified into stereotypes, and the true depth and integrity of their ideas and initiatives are forgotten. But the urgent and complex problems of mankind have only grown more urgent and more complex.”
It sure looks like humanity is circling the drain. To quote the great poet Walt Kelly:
“The gentle journey jolts to stop. The drifting dream is done. The long-gone goblins loom ahead– The deadly, that we thought were dead, Are waiting, every one.”
And here we twiddle in a world of computer glitz, as the winds rise, and the seas rise, and the debts rise, and the terrorists rise, and the nukes tick.
So I don’t just feel like I’ve lost my best friend.
I feel like I’ve lost my best planet.
I’ll give the last word to Shakespeare’s Marc Antony.
He speaks to the body of Julius Caesar while he is confronting the gang who murdered him:
“O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. Thou art the ruins of the noblest man that ever lived, in the tide of times.”
Thank you.