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weaving the web

Doug Engelbart, a researcher at Stanford University, demonstrated a collaborative workspace called NLS (oN Line System) in the 1960s. Doug's vision was for people to use hypertext as a tool for group work. In order to help himself steer his computer's cursor across the screen and select hypertext links with ease, Doug invented a wooden block with sensors and a ball underneath, and called it a mouse. In a now-famous video, which I didn't see until 1994, Doug demonstrated using electronic mail and hypertext links with great agility with his homemade mouse in his right hand and a five-key piano-chord keyboard in his left hand. The idea was that a person could interface with the machine in a very close, natural way. Unfortunately, just like Bush and Nelson, Doug was too far ahead of his time. The personal computer revolution, which would make Engelbart's "mouse" as familiar as the pencil, would not come along for another fifteen years. With that revolution, the idea of hypertext would percolate into software design.

Of course, the next great development in the quest for global connectivity was the Internet, a general communications infrastructure that links computers together, on top of which the Web rides. The advances by Donald Davis, by Paul Barran, and by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and colleagues had already happened in the 1970s, but were only just becoming pervasive.

I happened to come along with time, and the right interest and inclination, after hypertext and the Internet had come of age. The task left to me was to marry them together.