I'll take an unlikely start and begin with dinosaurs. I have a six-year-old son who is tremendously impressed and intrigued with dinosaurs. We read and re-read all of the dinosaur books, and every time we go to the library we have to bring home new ones. 2a

Consider a dinosaur (with what little we know and much we may speculate) as a big, monstrous organism whose specialized organs cooperated reasonably well by the then-prevailing standards of "organism design", but whose function was coordinated by a clumsy, crude nervous system and a pitiful little brain. My image of this "clumsy nervous system" can be characterized by the story I've heard (or perhaps this is one that I've invented for six-year-old consumption, and now believe) about an embattled dinosaur not sensing for several minutes that it was dead. 2b

But yet apparently this was an organism marvelously fitted to its environment. The dinosaurs thrived for over 200 million years, as I remember from all those books, much longer than our race has been around. But suddenly -- suddenly in terms of geological time -- they disappeared. 2c

My learned deduction, derived from first-grade scientific literature, is that competition from better-designed nervous system did them in: better sensors; better sensory-data analyzers (perception); better peripheral contingency decision making (reflexes); better coordination of the functioning of organs, muscles, etc; better rational analyses of events and history; better accumulation of learned experience; better projection, visualization and planning, etc., etc. 2d

I want to fix in your minds an image of a biological organism that possessed formidable capability within the environment into which it evolved, but which couldn't make the grade against the competition that a continuing evolution brought into that environment. 2e

Human organizations can be likened to biological organisms, and I find much value in considering the analogy. Organizations evolve too; their mutations are continually emerging and being tested for survival value within their environment. I happen to feel that evolution of their environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, large and small -- finding them seriously deficient in their "nervous-system" design -- and that the degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc. which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their "clumsy nervous systems", into extinction. 2f

It is these "nervous-system" functions, within human organizations, where I find the most significant intellectual complications stemming from the forthcoming multi-access computer networks. 2g

For many years I have been developing a research program at Stanford Research Institute aimed at Augmenting the Human Intellect. By intellect I mean the human competence to make, send, exchange and apply to decision-making the commodity called knowledge, as applied toward giving human individuals and organizations more effectiveness at formulating and pursuing their goals. My basic formulation of such a pursuit considers a large system of things to be involved in being intellectual, and being successful at it. A rough but useful categorization of the system's components is as follows: 3a

An Effective Organization (EO) is composed of a group of EI components, plus another particular set of CP items associated with their working together. 3a4

In the context of this Conference, it is useful to talk about providing an individual with a "private intellectual work space" -- sort of what his office is supposed to be for him now. 4a

In using his office, an individual goes in, perhaps shuts his door, and spreads his current working information over his working surfaces. He keeps some local files there, does some thinking, some formulating and transmitting of messages to the outside, and receiving returning messages, etc. Some of these transmitted formulations are requisitions for things to be bought, made, commented upon, or etc. He sends them out and results will come back, usually in the form of information -- control feedback, substantive information from colleagues or support staff, etc. He digests, stores, reformulates, responds, and occasionally pursues reflective, creative thought. 4b

The image I'm trying to develop is of an office being the "intellectual workshop" in which one does his collaborative bit within his working environment: one needs work spaces, tools to suit a myriad of tasks, places to store working materials, aids to hold them for examination and shaping -- and they all should be easy to reach, quick to adjust to the task, easy to keep track of, etc. Interactive computer aids will have very significant effects here. 4c

This is the particular area that my group and I have been working on for some six years -- improving the individual's intellectual workshop -- as the first stage of exploring what augmentation might be like. By today's standards, we can demonstrate some impressive features in the workshop environment which we have created to test by our daily use (for doing our daily work). But by our own perspective, as developed through constant struggle in this domain, we have but a primitive outpost on an unbelievably rich frontier. References 1 through 4 describe our work. I invite you to become acquainted, e.g. with Reference 1. Copies of the movie (Reference 2) are available; viewing this provides the best introduction to our "augmented office". 4d

It will take the explorers of this domain decades to even map its currently visible dimensions. The real rush hasn't begun: this Conference is a meeting of suppliers looking at the prospector trade; we haven't really been giving attention to the developments that will follow the prospecting. 4e

My research group is now moving into a next stage of work that we call "team augmentation". Here, instead of just the individual facilitating his private domain of searching, studying, thinking and formulating, as his office place provides for him, we are exploring what can be done for a team of "augmented individuals" who have in common a number of terminals, a set of computer tools, working files, etc. (as we do) to facilitate their team collaborations. 4f

Our major initial step toward augmenting a team is to facilitate the collaborative dialogue between its members, aiming for new kinds and degrees of collaboration that can thus be achieved. 4g

To discuss our "Dialogue Support System", consider a shared-file space. This is a common enough thing in today's time-shared environment; but our dialogue-file space comprises "frozen" contributions from the collaborators -- i.e., it represents the "Journal" of transactional entries that make up the collaborative dialogue, entries that are part of the history of things and aren't to be changed. 5a

Assume that you are a participant in this dialogue, as from a CRT terminal in your office. You have just contributed some sort of entry into this Journal -- some tentative formulation of a plan or design. You expect some of your collaborators to be interested. You may have installed an "attention" signal at entry time, aimed at a particular set of people. At their consoles, they either receive an "annunciator" signal to alert them, or may have come across you entry via any number of natural pathways in the course of their work. 5b

These other people can very quickly and flexibly survey your contribution. At any subsequent time, in any passage of your contribution, one of them can attach a "comment" to any specific entity (e.g., word, string of words, paragraph, drawing line or label in the drawing). A comment can be one word (e.g., "Congratulations!"), or a reference to a contradictory passage, or a long exhortation about a better way to do the whole thing, other people will be attaching comments at other places, including comments upon other people's comments. What soon evolves from such activity is a network of contributions that represents a full-scale discourse, distributed over time and, if you wish, over space. 5c

A good "office-support system" will provide powerful aids to improve the effectiveness with which one can participate in such a dialogue. For example, one needs speed and flexibility in studying the consequent network of dialogue contributions and in filtering out that which is relevant -- for instance to make a successive version of a plan or design. We are evolving aids for searching through specified sub-nets and selecting upon such attributes as content, previously assigned descriptive tags, authorship, absolute or relative "publishing" time, and citation linkages; assembling passages from the dialogue, and from one's own notes, with flexible disposition of one's screen into "windows" for independently viewing different materials; easily affixing new links and tags to arbitrary segments of a given memo; conveniently copying into one's own working file a categorized compilation of extracts. etc. 5d

One recognizes, of course, that the existing system of professional journals represents a similar mode of dialogue, distributed as it were over space and time. But the computer-aided dialogue has certain advantages to offer: interchanges in cycle times of minutes or seconds instead of years or months; accommodating more items, and items of much smaller size, without overloading the "clerical system"; accommodating more people making simultaneous accesses and contributions; providing citation followup to exact items (i.e., the computer can take you almost instantly to look at the particular item cited within another "document"). 5e

Within a team that has the kinds of tools and methods that are easily foreseeable, these features are really quite interesting and exciting to consider. We are planning to experiment with this type of collaboration in support of our own system-development activity, within our own shop. 5f