Adaptive Path Blog

Doug Engelbart is a visionary genius. Let’s just get that out of the way. In the 1960s, the guy invented the mouse, hypertext, and parts of what we now know of as the GUI. He was way ahead of his time…until time caught up and surpassed some of his original visions, one of which has now been resurrected: the hyperscope.

Hyperscope is basically a type of document browser. (Longer explanation in an article on Read/Write Web.) Hyperscope, like a lot of Engelbart projects, was focused on an amazing future: imagine linking documents! Jumping to specific paragraphs!

The problem is that Hyperscope is for a world that doesn’t need it any more. Had it been widely available in, say, 1982, perhaps we’d all be using it right now. But I don’t think so. The learning curve (it’s “expert-oriented”) is too high and its features have been distributed elsewhere, to the web and other software.

While it’s great to draw inspiration and ideas from the past, recreating the past in the hope that it becomes the future seems like a futile idea. Does anyone really want to return to a command-line interface to manipulate documents? It’s designing for a past that never happened, one where we all became computer scientists and enjoyed manipulating documents via arcane commands.

Design solutions like Hyperscope only work if they fit their time and place. Recreating the idea as conceived decades ago would be like making a really cool VCR right now–it’s great that you can do it, but don’t expect many people to use it. The solution doesn’t fit the time period it’s in. Which, given that it’s Engelbart, is ironic. It’s the same problem he’s always had, except in reverse. He’s usually out there in front of us all, not 25 years behind.

A better, more productive, use of time would have been to say, what inspiration can still be gained from Engelbart’s ideas? There’s still a lot to be gleaned from his 1962 (!) paper Augmenting Human Intellect. How might some of his thoughts on collaborative intelligence be implemented in our world now, in 2006, within the technology we have now? That’s the question waiting to be solved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 8:56 am and is filed under Interaction Design, What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.