Historic Talk:
The Augmented Knowledge Workshop

Doug's Talk - Jan 9, 1986
"The Augmented Knowledge Workshop"
Doug's presentation at the ACM Conference on the History of the Personal Workstation in Palo Alto, CA, detailing the evolutionary development of his seminal work leading up to his 1968 demo and beyond, including a narrated slideshow of historic photos, plus selected footage from the demo. See Experience Doug's Talk below.

The conference was itself a seminal event, gathering the who's who of the lead visionaries and innovators to present their contributions that shaped the personal computing revolution. Demand for a companion book produced from the proceedings was met the following year-ish (see below), thanks to Adele Goldberg. Held at Rickey’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto, CA, Jan 9 & 10, 1986, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and hosted by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). See event summary by the Computer History Museum.

Experience Doug's Talk 2

Follow along with Doug's Slides
See also Conclusions from Doug's paper

Referenced in Doug's Talk 3

Silicon Valley Archive at Stanford - Doug starts his talk with a nod to the folks at Stanford Univsersity Special Collections, Silicon Valley Archive Project, which includes the Douglas C. Engelbart Papers
Doug's Paper for this Conference - Workstation History and the Augmented Knowledge Workshop, Dec 4, 1985. Republished as The Augmented Knowledge Workshop in companion book for the Conference (see below)
1962 Framework Paper - Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework -- Doug's seminal research report that launched it all. See especially our Fieldguide to 'Augmenting Human Intellect' for pointers.
Display-Selection Experiments and the Mouse - Learn more at Epic Firsts: The Mouse. Results of the experiments were published in the paper Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation.
The 1968 Demo - landmark presentation by Doug and his team, now known as the "Mother of All Demos." See Epic Firsts: The Demo for details, fun facts, complete footage, retrospectives by the team, and more. Watch the Clips Shown in Doug's talk (15min), or the recently produced Demo Highlights (6min) (shown at right)
NLS/Augment - Their prototypical software system showcased in the 1968 demo, was operational by 1967, evolved through community pilots -- see About NLS/Augment.
Augmented Community Pilots - ARPA and Beyond - Such communities served as testbeds for reverberating the evolution. The flagship pilot was Doug's team, which yielded special benefits -- developers rigorously using results intended to help user groups become more effective, what Doug called bootstrapping the evolution. Next was the ARPANET community using the network information system fielded by Doug's team -- see Licklider's first-hand account in 1968, and 1969 accounts in our ARPANET timeline. Soon organizations in the ARPANET community began launching internal pilots, whose architects participated in Doug's Knowledge Workshop Architects Community (KWAC) -- watch Christina describe the KWAC. Over the next decade, dozens of end-user organizations in public and private sectors launched pilots across three networks. At the end of Doug's talk, he describes budding interest through his then homebase at McDonnell Douglas Corporation. Within five years he was a launching a prototype Bootstrap Alliance.

Afterword 4

In his talk, Doug articulates a vision and a roadmap for augmenting our collective human intellect to its highest potential (Vision Quest above), by explicitly co-evolving the human side along with the tools (Evolutionary Framework), architecting the tool system to optimize the co-evolution (Enabling Architecture), deployed within augmented community pilots bootstrap the evolution (Augmented). With that calling he launched a revolution with a constellation of groundbreaking, award-winning results, and yet to this day prevailing paradigms have fallen far short of the higher objectives. This talk represents his earliest articulation of this "Unfinished Revolution" which still awaits our earnest pursuit, through grassroots initiatives on up to the Grand Challenge level. What are we waiting for?