Persons:Who were they? What
did they do on the project? What were the courses of their subsequent
careers? Where are they now? We will contact as many of the original
group as possible, asking them to contribute their autobiographies
to our archive and to discuss their role in the development of
the NLS, Augment, and subsequent projects. We want to construct
a genealogy of the group.
Devices:We are collecting
stories about the development of different hardware and software
components, such as the mouse, the chord keyset, keyboards, lightpens,
windowing, hypertext, graphical displays, and many others.
Culture:We are interested
in collecting stories about the life of the group, including
stories about the daily life of ARC, visits of outside reviewers
from ARPA, Air Force, the group's seminars on ways to improve
the performance of organizations through improved communications,
and their developing views on human-computer interaction.
Wider Social and Historical Context:
We are interested in situating the development of these technologies
in the context of other events of the time and the work of other
groups, such as Project Mac at MIT and other projects supported
by ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). In
light of the recent take-off of the Internet and the growing
demand for networked resources, the question leaps out: Why did
it take so long? What conditions in the cultural environment
prevented the immediate adoption of ideas presented in the 1968
demo? What changes have occurred in technology and the perception
of users that have launched this revolutionary turn?
Persons
