Date: December, 10, 1968

It's the day after the demonstration of the oNLine System or NLS at the “MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS”. NLS is a full-fledged  intelligence augmentation system. It utilizes many advances in computer technology such as the mouse, on-screen graphics, multiple windows on a screen, digital publishing, journals, collaborations, document sharing, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, videoconferencing, and the formatting of documents. The ninety minute demonstration of NLS was held in a standing-room-only crowd of close to a thousand at a computer industry conference in San Francisco. The computer terminal was projected onto a twenty-foot screen behind me. At that demo I told the crowd that if you in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that? And so I told them the following would all go very interesting, or at least thats what I thought.

       A camera was mounted on the terminal to provide a video stream of my face while another camera overhead show my hands controlling the mouse and keyboard. Meanwhile Bill English sat in the back selecting which images were projected onto the screen. Thirty miles from the conference at my lab near Stanford, generating computer images and working cameras was Stewart Brand. We had two leased microwave lines and a telephone hookup transmitted to the lab. The audience watched as I collaborated with distant colleagues to create a document, different people made edits, added graphics, changed the layout, built a map, and embedded in audio the visual elements in real time. We were even able to create hypertext links together. Next door was a different conference that was being held  showing a video that was about a robot which acted like it was able to hear and see things. Today the San Francisco Chronicle’s headline was “Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s Computer. ” It was about the NLS and not the robot. That definitely means NLS was a success.

Date: October,4,1962

I’ve just published my paper “Augmenting Human Intellect”. It's about the ways a computer could interact with people, instead of making computers as intelligent as people. It all started when I was in the Navy around 1944 on Leyte Gulf and I read Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article, “As We May Think,” where he envisioned the memex personal information system. The whole concept of helping people in that way excited me. The next event that led to my paper was that on the the day after my engagement, as I was driving to work, I realized I didn't have any more life goals. 

For the following two months I tried to find a worthy life goal. What struck me was that any effort to improve the world was complex. I thought about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poorer areas but I found that solutions led to other issues such as overpopulation or soil erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project you had to assess all the intricate ramifications, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more. 

Then one day it dawned on me that the complexity was the fundamental thing and if you could create something to help with the way humans handle complexity and difficulty, then that would be instantly helpful. A good way to accomplish that would be along what Bush said in his paper. I tried to imagine sitting in front of a big screen with all kinds of symbols and  operating all kinds of things to drive the computer. In the paper I stated that the intuitive talents of the human mind should be combined with an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human feel for a situation usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high power electronic aids.

Date: February, 24,1961

At my Augmentation Research Center at SRI with Bill English, we decided to research a way to make it easier to interact with machines. We decide to research some screen select devices, with the goal of finding the easiest way to point and select on the screen. We created a chart that listed all the advantages and disadvantages of each device. For example, one of the advantages and disadvantages of the light pen was that it was simple to use, but the problem was you had to pick it up and put it down and that became tiresome.

This was similar to how the periodic table’s rules led to the discovery of unknown elements since it helped us define the ultimate desirable characteristics for a device that didn’t exist. One day when I was in a conference I started to daydream about a device from high school called a Planimeter that calculated the area of a space by being rolled around its perimeter. The way the Planimeter works is it  has two wheels, one horizontal and one vertical, to add up the distance it was rolled in each direction. Thinking about that made me start to sketch out how a screen select device could work in the same way. The device could roll around a desktop on two wheels, and depending on the direction of the roll, it would either register high voltages or low voltages.

I gave the sketch to Bill English who carved out a piece of mahogany to make the first model. I wanted to put up to ten buttons on the mouse but the optimum number of buttons for the mouse turned out to be three. There were two reasons we decided to call it a mouse, one was because we tried having the cord come out of the front but then we moved it to the back since that worked better and so that made it look like mouse. Reason two was because Bill said the term for cursor used to be CAT but he couldn't remember why, but it seemed the cursor was chasing the mouse. The mouse was our optimal choice for computer interaction since it made excellent work of hand eye coordination.