FROM THE ARCHIVE

strategic use of the sys­tem for team knowl­edge work, includ­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment, by the team devel­op­ing the system

Watch Jeff demo the online software engineering environment

Watch Doug demo online hardware engineering environment

Historic Firsts:
For Engineering 0

Doug's research team was prototyping a general purpose system for powering the organization of the future, while using it intensively as a team to further its evolution per Doug's design strategy. Serving as a special pilot case, they pursued the future of Knowledge Work, Team Work, and Design Strategy for engineering.

For example each project team, and his research team as a whole, used the system for all aspects of their day to day work: designing, planning, coordinating, project management, intelligence collection (keeping abreast with projects and products outside their group), memos, reports, proposals, documentation, etc. The software team, initially led by Jeff Rulifson, also used NLS for coding, compiling, bug tracking, version management, and organization and navigation of the whole software engineering environment. Similarly the hardware team, led by Bill English, additionally used the system for rough schematics, bug tracking, version management, etc. Later a customer support team extensively used shared screens with end users, and recorded all their customer contacts, user documentation, course development and delivery, and generally coordination and navigation of the customer service environment. Office staff took dictation, transcriptions, and all manner of office support functions online. All in a cross-cutting, unified online environment.

Watch the demos at right, snippets from the Mother of All Demos, where Jeff presented their software engineering environment and methodologies, and Doug presented the hardware engineering, on behalf of Bill English who was behind the scenes orchestrating the demo real time.

Decades later, watch Jeff Rulifson reflecting crucially on what was missed in the demo, and Andy van Dam reflecting on what the demo represented to software engineering (he was in the audience at that demo) --his sentiments quoted in part below:

❝ Their deep and systematic, principled design methodology that these folks used [...] had built tools to build tools, and this whole recursive bootstrap idea, starting with the system itself, and working itself all the way up to Augmenting Human Intellect. It was just mind boggling, and informs us today still. ❞
— Andy van Dam, 2008

For more such reflections, watch this Stanford News report of key takeaways (3min), and browse Reflecting on the Demo at theDemo.org.

See Also 3

Explore More Firsts 3a

Click for more Historic Firsts

• Visit Historic Firsts - for more of Doug Engelbart's many groundbreaking firsts, including especially pertinent to the above
  - For Knowledge Work,
  - For Team Work,
  - Strategic Design.
• Visit Doug's Overarching Vision for Humanity - also among those Historic Firsts, this describes the larger context of this work.
• Visit Doug's Great Demo: 1968 - brings to life their early accomplishments with archive footage, photos, fun facts, story, and retrosectives (aka the "Mother of All Demos" – snippets shown above).

Papers from Doug's Lab 3b

• Working Together. Douglas C. Engelbart and Harvey Lehtman. 1988
• A Software Engineering Environment, Kenneth E. Victor, Proceedings of AIAA/NASA/IEEE/ACM Computers In Aerospace Conference, Los Angeles, CA, October 31-November 2, 1977, pp. 399-403 (AUGMENT,29292,)
• A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect. (the paper written for the conference where they gave the demo, describing the work they were demoing). Douglas C. Engelbart and William K. English, AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, CA, 33, December 1968, pp. 395-410 (AUGMENT,3954,). NOTE: This paper is a companion to the Mother of All Demos presented at said conference. Republished with articles No. 4, 21, and 23 in "Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings," Irene Greif [Ed.], Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, CA, 1988, pp. 81-105.
5b1
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. (Doug's seminal report documenting his strategic vision that drove the work) Douglas C. Engelbart, Summary Report, Stanford Research Institute, on Contract AF 49(638)-1024, October 1962, 134 pages (AUGMENT,133182,).
5b2
• Workstation History and The Augmented Knowledge Workshop. Douglas C. Engelbart, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations, Palo Alto, CA, January 9-10, 1986, pp. 73-83 (AUGMENT,101931,). Republished as The Augmented Knowledge Workshop in "A History of Personal Workstations," Adele Goldberg [Ed.], ACM Press, New York, 1988, pp. 185-236.
5b3
• Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1992.

From the Press 3c

• Stanford video: Stanford News Report | Engelbart Symposium (3min)
• Wired article: The Click Heard Round The World, by Ken Jordan, 2004