The story of my involvement with on-line workstations begins in early 1951, with a vision and a life-time professional commitment. Over thirty-four years of pursuit have created a lot of personal history, and the object of this historical exercise, the workstation, occupies a unique place in it.

For me, a workstation is the portal into a person's "Augmented Knowledge Workshop" -- the place in which he finds the data and tools with which he does his knowledge work, and through which he collaborates with similarly equipped workers. And further, I consider that the large system of concepts, skills, knowledge, methods, etc. on the human side of the workstation has to be taken into account, in a balanced way, when pursuing increased human effectiveness. So, my workstation-history story embraces a rather large sphere.

The task of writing an historical piece is unfamiliar enough to cause me difficulty by itself, but the associated stirring of old records and old memories has added near overwhelming burden -- dreams, events, people, stresses, pleasures, disappointments, the firsts and the failures. Now, what from all of this -- and how to organize it -- will make an appropriate "history" paper?

I could provide a solid measure of objective reporting -- events and dates, etc. Regarding the general environment that is relevant to the workstation topic, I have been an involved observer of related computer history since 1951. I watched and experienced the supportive hardware, languages and architecture evolve, witnessed the people and efforts that brought timesharing into being, and was even more closely involved with the emergence of computer networks. Through all of this, I was wholly focused on what these things could do for people at workstations. And then there was office automation and personal computers: you don't have to be an old guy to have watched these emerge, but I'm sure they looked different to me than to most.

I could also provide lots of objective reporting about the events and dates associated with the things I have caused or had a direct hand in. There seems to be a lot there that is quite relevant to this "history of the workstation" theme. It was dusty, laborious work, this process of brainstorming for candidates, culling and ordering and trying to describe them in some reasonable sequence and context.

But what I came to realize is that there is one, clearly dominant factor that underlies essentially every cause for any uniqueness that I might list for historical record. It isn't a technology, it isn't a science, and it isn't a marketing or business model. And I am going to give it dominant coverage in this paper.

As explained below, it is what I call my "Framework." It is based upon an intuitive conviction, emplanted in my head (apparently permanently) over thirty years ago, that the gains in human knowledge-work capability which we will achieve by properly harnessing this new technology will be very large. Metaphorically, I see the augmented organization or institution of the future as changing, not as an organism merely to be a bigger and faster snail, but to achieve such new levels of sensory capability, speed, power and coordination as to become a new species -- a cat.

Based upon this conviction about huge potential gains for mankind, my Framework explains for me generally where such gains are going to come from, and provides strategic principles that can help guide a conscious pursuit of these gains.

I was several years out of school, possessing a B.S. in EE and two years' experience during WWII (halfway through college) as an electronic technician. I was doing odd-job electrical engineering work at Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California, with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, forerunner of NASA). For several months I had been devoting most of my spare time to searching for professional goals; for some reason I wanted to invest the rest of my heretofore aimless career toward making the most difference in improving the lot of the human race.

I had initially dashed off in many fanciful directions, but yet managed enough interludes of reasonably sober thinking to build up some useful, strategic generalizations:

Suddenly, up through all of this delightful, youthful abstraction bobbed the following clear realization:

Well, the imagery of FLASH-3 evolved within a few days to include mixed text and graphic portrayals on the CRT, and on to extensions of the symbology and methodology that we humans could employ to do our heavy thinking; and also, images of other people at consoles attached to the same computer complex, simultaneously working in a collaboration mode that would be much closer and more effective than we had ever been able to accomplish.

Within weeks I had committed my career to "augmenting the human intellect." In a few months, I left the NACA and enrolled as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where Professor Paul Morton had started a computer science activity (although it would be many years before universities began calling it that), and was several years along in developing the CALDIC.

Within a few years I had to accept the fact that research on any kind of interactive computer applications just wouldn't provide me with a program acceptable to the university community for PhD and later faculty pursuit. So, I settled for something else, got my PhD and went to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where I hoped ultimately to promote support for an augmentation program.

That was 1957. By 1959 I was lucky enough to get a small grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR, from Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson) which carried me for several years -- not enough for my full-time work, but by 1960 SRI began pitching in the difference.

It was a remarkably slow and sweaty work: I first tried to find close relevance within established disciplines. For a while I thought that the emergent AI field might provide me with an overlap of mutual interest. But in each case I found that the people I would talk with would immediately translate my admittedly strange (for the times) statements of purpose and possibility into their own discipline's framework -- and when re-phrased and discussed from those other perceptions, the "augmentation" pictures were remarkably pallid and limited compared to the images that were driving me.

Then I discovered a great little RAND report written by Kennedy and Putt <Ref-A> which described my situation marvelously and recommended a solution. Their thesis was that when launching a project of inter- or new-discipline nature, the researcher would encounter consistent problems in approaching people in established disciplines -- they wouldn't perceive your formulations and goals as relevant, they would become disputative on the apparent basis that your positions were contrary to "accepted" knowledge or methods, etc.

The trouble, said these authors, was that each established discipline has its own "conceptual framework." The enculturation of young professionals with their discipline's framework begins in their first year of professional school. Without such a framework, tailored for the goals, values and general environment of its respective discipline, there could be no effective, collaborative work. Furthermore, if such a conceptual framework did not already exist for a new type of research, then before effective research should be attempted, an appropriate, unique framework needs to be created. They called this framework-creation process the "Search Phase".

So, I realized that I had to develop an appropriate conceptual framework for the augmentation pursuit that I was hooked on. That search phase was not only very sweaty, but very lonely. In 1962, I published an SRI Report entitled, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," <Rpt-62J>. With the considerable help of Rowena Swanson, this was condensed into a chapter of a book published in 1963 <Pub-63-Frame>

I can appreciate that these framework documents appear to many others as unuseably general and vague, but for me the concepts, principles and strategies embodied in that framework look better and better every year.

The genesis of most of what was/is unique about the products of the augmentation work can be traced back to this framework.

I submitted many proposals before getting support to pursue the augmentation program outlined in the framework report. Among the stream of politely phrased regrets, there was one which in contrast to today's environment can provide useful perspective on the environment of 1961.

When J. C. R. Licklider came from Cambridge to take over ARPA's newly formed Information Processing Techniques Office in late 1962, I was figuratively standing at the door with the Conceptual Framework report and a proposal. There the unlucky fellow was, having advertised that "man computer symbiosis," computer time-sharing, man-computer interface etc. were the new directions -- how could he in reasonable consistency turn this down, even if it was way out there in Menlo Park.

Lick moved very swiftly; by early '63 we had a project. But whereas I had proposed using a local computer and building an interactive workstation, Lick asked us instead to connect a display to the System Development Corporation's (SDC's) AN/FSQ32 computer, on site in Santa Monica, to do our experimenting under the Q32's projected new time-sharing system. (Converting the Q32 to be a time-shared machine was SDC's IPTO project.)

Later that year, our project was modified to include an online data link from Menlo Park to Santa Monica, with a CDC 160A mini-computer at our end for a communication manager, supporting our small-display workstation. For various reasons, not uncommon in pioneering ventures, that first year was very unproductive relative to the purposes and plan of our project. Lick was willing to put some more support into the direct goal (more or less as originally proposed), but the support level he could offer wasn't enough to pay for both a small research staff and some interactive computer support.

Mind you, the CDC 160A, which was the only commercially suitable mini-computer that we knew of, even though having only 8K of 12-bit words, and running at about 6 microseconds per instruction, cost well over $100K (1963 dollars). Paper tape in and out; if the system crashed, you had to load the application program from paper tape, and the most recent dump of your working file (paper tape), before you could continue. A crude, industry-standard Flexowriter (online typewriter) could be driven; otherwise it was paper-tape in and out.

What saved my program from extinction then was arrival of an out-of-the-blue support offer from Bob Taylor who at that time was a psychologist working at NASA Headquarters (then in Washington, D.C.). I had visited him months before, leaving copies of the Framework report and our proposal, and I had been unaware that meanwhile he had been seeking funds and a contracting channel to provide some support. The combined ARPA and NASA support enabled us to equip ourselves and begin developing Version 1 of what evolved into the NLS and AUGMENT systems.

Paul Fuhrmeister, and later Eugene Gribble of NASA's Langley Research Center, had to stick out their necks as successive heads of Langley's large computational division to support the direction and supervise NASA's support for our program, which continued several years after Taylor left NASA to join ARPA's IPTO office.

Our ARPA support grew and was fostered by Lick's successors -- Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts. Meanwhile, the Air Force's Rome Air Development Center, at Rome, New York, began to supply supporting funds. By 1967, it was recognized that the respective contributions from ARPA, NASA and RADC represented significant parts of a coordinated program, and the other agencies began funneling their funds through RADC, which served for many years both with monitoring and managing our contracts, and providing their own significant share of support funds. Duane Stone and John McNamara provided strong support and contract liaison from RADC.

NASA support ended by 1969, and ARPA and RADC provided significant support until 1977, although from 1974 the support became ever more for supporting applications and developments for other organizations for targets formulated by others (e.g. the National Software Works) -- and the continuing pursuit of augmentation along my strategic vector virtually stopped.

An historically important organizational cluster emerged at Stanford Research Institute in the sixties, peaked about 1974, and was scattered in 1977 -- with a small core carrying forth in a commercial (and then industrial) environment to the present.

It grew by ones and twos from 1963, as it collected "permanent" members from the SRI technical staff, and recruited new ones from the outside. By '69 I believe we were about 18 strong; and this grew steadily until by '76 we totalled about 45. In 1973 we made two explicit sub-groups, one headed by Dick Watson doing development of software (and some hardware), and one headed by Jim Norton handling operations and applications support.

SRI was organized by divisions, each containing a group of laboratories: the hierarchy being formed according to the associated disciplines. ARC grew to laboratory size and status, but it became something of a problem for SRI.

Other laboratories (at least in science and engineering) operated more or less as a "farmers' market," where small and changing clusters of researchers promoted and conducted research projects as a loose federation. The management structure, budgeting, accounting and financing for the Institute had evolved to support this kind of business.

But ARC was driven by a coherent, long-term pursuit. This involved the continuing evolution of an ever-larger and more sophisticated system of hardware and software. It also came to involve delivering solid support service to outside clients to provide meaningful environments for learning about the all-important co-evolution processes in human organizations (human system & tool system).

It didn't seem unreasonable to me to pursue this course: things similar and on a grander scale are common for other researchers. E.g., it is taken for granted for funding agencies to build and operate accellerators and observatories in support of research in nuclear physics and astronomy -- or to outfit ships and airplanes to support research expeditions. But whatever my perception, there were some significant problems and stresses for which our over-all environment didn't have effective ways to cope.

In the particular dynamics involved here, there were probably seven relevant parties: me; the ARC staff; other SRI researchers; SRI management and administration; ARC's sponsors; ARC's utility-service clients; and other groups of researchers outside of SRI.

It would be an interesting historical study to try to understand the diversity of perception that must have existed among this set of players. What did the different parties perceive for the future of workstations, for the range of function and application that would come about, for the systems architectures and standards that must emerge, and for the impact on the organizations that learned how to harness these most successfully?

Even as a central party in what happened, I've not understood the dynamics. But I am pretty sure that disparities among the perceptions of all of the above parties had a major part in what to me was the "great collapse of SRI-ARC." Even if I had done everything right over the years (a laughable hypothesis), it is now fairly clear to me that it isn't the market's fault if someone fails in trying to sell it something that it isn't ready for. In other words, I can't blame those other groups. (Which of course makes for a personal problem, since during those times of black discouragement when one wants desperately to blame someone, there is only one candidate -- that guy at the head of the list).

In 1977, SRI judged it better to move our large-system development and external-service activities out from the research institute environment and into a suitable commercial environment. They advertised, entertained prospective bidders, made a selection, and negotiated a transfer of the business to TYMSHARE, Inc., of Cupertino, California. The system was renamed AUGMENT, and marketed as part of TYMSHARE's integrated Office Automation services. In 1984, McDonnell Douglas Corporation acquired Tymshare, and the small AUGMENT business is now operated as the Augmentation Systems Division of the Computer Systems Company within the MDC Information Systems Group.

I hadn't realized just how much history there is back there in my past. I wish that I could have done a more uniform job of digging and organizing for this paper. Oddly enough, a major problem is that I am quite distracted by the needs and opportunities for working on tomorrow's history -- there is still such a large "unfinished agenda" stemming from my compulsive commitment to the Augmentation Framework.

Re-living the past during this history exercise has left me with a feeling of having re-visited the Dark Ages. Paper tape, expensive technology, and years of frustrations with flaky, first-of-a-kind systems -- thank God that we have now emerged into the Rennaisance.

But another side of my experience has been with what people perceive about the possibilities stemming from these new technologies. And I am not so sure that we have moved all that far out of the Dark Ages in that regard.

I still don't see clear perceptions about what we humans can gain in new capabilities, or about how this may come about. There are constant, echoing statements about how fast and smart the computers are going to be, but not about how the enhanced computer capabilities will be harnessed into the daily thinking and working life of our creative knowledge workers.

I guess what I am hoping to see is the emergence of professional societies concerned with something like what I call a whole Augmentation System. And I'd like there to be special conference sessions and research efforts focused on pursuit of very high performance for teams of people equipped with integrated new technologies AND with new concepts, methods, roles, skills etc.

And I'd like to hear people begin talking about the new OPPORTUNITIES to change their ways and skills so that they can more EFFECTIVELY HARNESS the new tools, in pursuit of their own INCREASED EFFECTIVENESS. I very much look forward to harnessing smarter and smarter computer processes within my working domain, but I would like to hear less about making computers very smart so that (apparently) the user won't have to learn new things.

We recently had a reunion of all the people that had worked with NLS/AUGMENT over the years. We found about 150 names when we dug back in records and people's memories. Many of those people gave spirited support and since have gone on to work at other kinds of jobs. And many have stayed in a similar job area and have continued to contribute elsewhere -- publishing, developing, entrepreneuring and consulting.

Here is an alphabetic listing of some of these latter, stemming from the more historical era:

NOTE: Arrangements are being made to collect all of the records and films from the SRI-ARC era and store them in the History-of-Science archives at the Stanford library. This will include all of the Journal items generated by ARC staff, which is a very unique collection of detailed history beginning in 1970. These archived records will be available to qualified researchers; access will be controlled by the library archivist.

RPT: Some Relevant SRI-ARC Reports

PUB: Open-Literature, "Augmentation" Publications

REF: Other-Author Publications