The central mission of the Stanford University Libraries is development and management of collections that support teaching and research. The Stanford Silicon Valley Archives is a dynamic and significant component of the Libraries' collecting program. The Archives seeks to identify, preserve, and make available the documentary record of science, technology, and related business and cultural activities in Silicon Valley. The preservation of these records not only makes possible historical writing, but provides a rich context for the continuing evolution of ideas and innovations. The Archives include the papers of Douglas Engelbart, William Shockley, Donald Knuth, Frederick Terman, George Forsythe, John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum, Charles A. Rosen, and many others active or influential in the development of computers and computing, as well as the Stephen Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, the historical collection of Apple Computer, and records of Fairchild Semiconductor and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, to name only a few examples.
Archives are preserved records of the activities of organizations or individuals, professionally organized, cataloged, and stored in acid-free containers in a secure facility under environmentally controlled conditions. (Without such intervention, these records are usually dispersed, discarded, weeded, or lost.) The Stanford Silicon Valley Archives also provide special attention to the long-term preservation needs of computer hardware and software, as well as other forms of digital information.
Inquiries about the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives should be directed to:
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of
Science & Technology Collections
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford, CA 94305-6004
lowood@leland.stanford.edu
650-723-4602
MouseSite: Archiving the Community Memory of a
Milestone in the Computer Revolution
The MouseSite,http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite, is a resource funded by Stanford University's Silicon Valley Archives Project and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Doug and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1960s.
As a young radar technician in World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screen of a cathode ray tube and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces. For two years beginning in 1959 at SRI in Menlo Park, Engelbart was provided the opportunity to pursue his visionary ideas further into the formulation of a theoretical framework for the co-evolution of human skills, knowledge, and organizations. At the heart of this vision was the computer as an extension of human communication capabilities and resource for the augmentation of human intellect. By 1968 Engelbart and a group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers he assembled in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI were able to stage a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system. This was the world debut of the computer mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, hypermedia--including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing.
The aim of this site is to provide a resource for expanding our current understanding of the development of the path-breaking ideas connected with the mouse, hypertext, windowing, and networked collaborative workspaces, the individuals who worked with Engelbart in bringing them to light, the computer systems that came to embody them, and the dissemination of these ideas and devices beyond the original group at SRI to the world. The site contains a portion of the archival materials in the Douglas C. Engelbart Papers in Stanford University Library Department of Special Collections, drawn from the period of Engelbart's work at SRI from 1959 through the first public demonstration of the NLS (oNLine System) in 1968.
To date the history of these important developments has been captured primarily in retrospectives, such as the important ACM conference and subsequent volume on the personal workstation organized by Adele Goldberg in 1988, in which Doug Engelbart has reminisced about the motivations and development of his work. Our goal in this site is to add to our online archive and to multiply the points of view by tapping the community memory of the participants in these events, encouraging them to expand our understanding by contributing their own stories to the archive and commenting upon and adding to the views of other participants in these events. We understand "participants" to include not only the original group of the Augmentation Research Center, which eventually grew to include 47 members, but also others not directly part of this group, but who were working on other related areas of computer science and communications, and at other sites. Our goal is to include this wider community in the construction of the archive and in the writing of the history. Doug Engelbart has called this style of collective work "bootstrapping." We are engaged in bootstrapping the history of human-computer interaction.
FORUM
We will solicit and collect materials in several areas to expand our archive:
Persons
Who were they? What did they do on the project? What were the courses of their subsequent careers? Where are they now? We will contact as many of the original group as possible, asking them to contribute their autobiographies to our archive and to discuss their role in the development of the NLS, Augment, and subsequent projects. We want to construct a genealogy of the group.
Devices
We are collecting stories about the development of different hardware and software components, such as the mouse, the chord keyset, keyboards, lightpens, windowing, hypertext, graphical displays, and many others.
Culture
We are interested in collecting stories about the life of the group, including stories about the daily life of ARC, visits of outside reviewers from ARPA, Air Force, the group's seminars on ways to improve the performance of organizations through improved communications, and their developing views on human-computer interaction.
Wider Social and Historical Context
We are interested in situating the development of these technologies in the context of other events of the time and the work of other groups, such as Project Mac at MIT and other projects supported by ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). In light of the recent take-off of the Internet and the growing demand for networked resources, the question leaps out: Why did it take so long? What conditions in the cultural environment prevented the immediate adoption of ideas presented in the 1968 demo? What changes have occurred in technology and the perception of users that have launched this revolutionary turn?