the clerks and scribes of the Middle Ages who practice the art of writing pioneered a medium which would become the very foundation of civilization yet for many centuries access to the written word was confined to the very few illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages were priceless one had the value of a farm scholars wishing to study had to come to places like this and to get past an attendant priesthood three canons with separate keys were needed to open the high-security chests where books were kept at Hereford Cathedral after printing was introduced books remained large and
expensive it seemed unlikely there would ever become available to a wider public the latest technology that came in at the end of the sixteenth century was the idea of a chained library whereby books could be instantly accessible to anybody who visited the library and by simply extracting a book with the the chain just long enough for the book to be lowered from the case onto the desk in front of the reader and the other person could study the book as much as they wanted with no fear of them being able to remove it for books
to become generally available they would have to lose their chains and become smaller and more affordable today books are everywhere written in hundreds of languages about thousands of subjects once the exclusive property of a small educated class they have become the foundation of modern culture in the past few years a competitor to the book has begun routing itself in the culture of the young but when the ancestors of the modern computer first appeared they too were fabulously expensive and they too would in the hands of a mathematical priesthood forty-five years ago the idea that computers
would ever play a popular role seemed even less likely than that illuminated manuscripts could lead to the paperback book even mathematicians found computers very difficult to use they had to prepare their programs in the arcane language of the computer punch them onto tape or cards and bring them to a computer center to be run and it rarely worked first time hey what's going on here nothing must be wrong with the oscilloscope I found programming on the old big machines to be unbelievably frustrating and I used to get really angry about it because I couldn't understand
why the things weren't easier to use I think it was bleak human being having to punch holes and lots of cards can keep these cards all straight and then take this deck of what might be hundreds and hundreds of cards to a computer and you go away and you come back the next day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then it's stopped because you left out a comma so you take your deck of cards do you go back and you fix that and you go back to the computer again
and this time it the program got two card four thousand and six and it stopped because you forgot to punch a oh in stead of a zero or some other stupidly I think it was bleak I think it was dehumanizing a group of Stanford students filmed their experience perhaps a little exaggerated if programmers were driven to suicide by computers what chance was there for ordinary people ever to use them yet within a few decades the image of the computer would change like the book it would get smaller cheaper and becomes so easy to use that
millions would become literate in the new medium we're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer in a way far different than it's ever been possible to do before surely not with his voice no he's going to be talking graphically he's going to be drawing and the computer is going to understand his drawings and the man will be using a language of graphical language that we call sketch pad that started with Island Sutherland some years ago when he was busy working on his doctoral degree in an era when almost everybody thought that
computers were only for crunching numbers a young graduate student ivan sutherland had used clever software to make the computer manipulate engineering drawings with sketch pad Sutherland had created the field of computer graphics and almost 30 years ago demonstrated the power of a whole new way of talking to the computer interactive computing but would anybody listen we were off to a fabulous start in 1960 with uh Ivan Sutherland sketchpad one of the most extraordinary programs ever written and the amazing thing to me is that this did not start a vast movement in fact it just stood
there's an example that people would gaze at they'd look at the movie and say yeah gee well that's very inspirational and then go back and do exactly what they were doing which had nothing to do with interactive computing because there wasn't any interactive computing if everyone was does our job well along feel very interesting a few years later another visionary Doug Engelbart appealed to his colleagues to change the way they thought about computers in a spectacular demonstration he showed off a series of brilliant innovations including a pointing device called a mouse I don't know why
they call it a mouse sometimes I apologize it started that way and we never did change it Doug Engelbart is the single most important person in the history of computing and it's shocking how few people have actually heard of him it would be as if we all use electricity light bulbs but nobody had heard of Thomas Edison 25 years later Doug Engelbart walks unrecognized on the Stanford campus his bold gamble didn't come off we just thought order then within a year or two there'll be all sorts of people joining us pursued in it become more
of an acceptable activity and you know it seemed in what I hear from various places is that it's stimulated motivated some people but it didn't seem to connect us to something that was a viable strand of pursuit for people to pick up and it just didn't commercial computer makers were slow to see that computers might become a tool for ordinary people and just didn't get the point of what angle Bart and Sutherland were saying because the establishment never gets it that's how it is with paradigm shift the establishment does not see where the next wave
is coming from and even if they hire somebody to tell them where the next wave is coming from they never believe them which is exactly what happened with Xerox and Xerox PARC one of the implications of Engelbart's demonstration was paperless communication and that did not go unnoticed in one quarter Thank You Debbie that was fast which is the original oh you've just seen the Xerox nine the Xerox Corporation owed its prosperity to pay for kotti a minute if one day paper was to be outdated and they wanted to be part of the new electronic world
so in a visionary act they set up a Research Center at Palo Alto in California Xerox PARC and they agreed to fund it for ten years as a function of spatial frequency they gathered together the brightest young computer scientists they could find and gave them a challenge make computers easier to use the reason that most of us went to work there was that we felt that this would be a an opportunity to bring computing to everyone remember a computer at that time was thought of something that was very forbidding difficult highly technological you had to
be a real expert and a doctorate to understand you know that was kind of the public image and we somehow had to humanize computers and make them a common object that anyone could use in the years ahead this unconventional group of young scientists sought a different way of interacting with a computer that they knew they had far too much technical knowledge to understand the problems of the ordinary user technical people live in this tiny little world actually we like to think it's a big world it's actually a tiny little world and it's full of phrases
that we learned when we're taking math classes and it's it's hermetic and it's full of people who like to learn complicated things they delight in it and so what you need to have is some way of constantly shocking yourself into realizing that the users are not like us and children do it really well because they don't care about the same kinds of things that adults do and they can always go out and play ball they didn't they haven't learned to feel guilty about not working yet it forced us to start thinking about how human mentalities
might work
