NLS
On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart took the stage in a San Francisco auditorium packed with 2,000 spectators. For an hour and a half, this quiet man would revolutionize everyone’s vision of computing. His NLS (oN-Line System) unveiled what personal computers would become in the following decades. The mouse, hypertext, videoconferencing, real-time collaborative editing... so many inventions that seemed to appear out of nowhere but which, in reality, had been brewing in his mind for more than twenty years.
In the mid-1940s, Engelbart, an electronics technician in the Navy, came across an article by Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” Bush described the Memex, an imaginary machine capable of organizing and linking all human knowledge. This reading struck Engelbart like a revelation. Back in civilian life, he pondered this idea. Faced with the growing complexity of the world and increasingly difficult problems, he was convinced that tools needed to be created to multiply our capacities for thinking and collaboration.
In 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute as a consultant. There, he matured his vision of computing that augments human intelligence rather than replacing it. Unlike proponents of artificial intelligence who dreamed of thinking machines, he bet on human-machine symbiosis. In 1962, he put his ideas down in a paper that would make history: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” This manifesto earned him support from ARPA, NASA, and other organizations. The following year, he founded the Augmentation Research Center within SRI. The team he assembled would give birth to the NLS system. Bill English joined the adventure and co-invented with Engelbart that small wooden object that would revolutionize the human-machine interface: the mouse. Two orthogonal wheels in a housing, which advantageously replaced the light pen of the era. Other attempts emerged: devices controlled by the knee, by the head, but nothing matched the simplicity of the mouse. The team also developed a chord keyboard that transformed the user into a computing pianist, composing commands with one hand.
NLS transformed how people worked with information. Gone were programs that ran in batch mode; in their place came direct interaction. Documents became structured, linked to each other, modified in real time by multiple users simultaneously. It became possible to view them from different angles, search them, annotate them. Messaging integrated naturally into the system, as did videoconferencing. The screen was divided into windows, objects manipulated directly.
The 1968 demonstration orchestrated all of this with remarkable showmanship. Engelbart sat at his console, connected to a computer 50 kilometers away. His screen and image were projected onto a 6-by-5-meter wall. Behind the scenes, Bill English coordinated a technical team juggling video, sound, and remote connections. The technology of the time made the feat all the more impressive. On stage, he edited text as if it were natural, created hierarchical lists, inserted graphics. Fifty kilometers away, Bill Paxton collaborated with him live. Their two cursors danced together on the giant screen. The video conversation with the Menlo Park team astonished the audience. These actions seemed like magic at the time.
This “Mother of All Demos” planted the seeds of our modern computing. In the audience, Alan Kay and Charles Irby watched attentively. They would later join Xerox PARC, where the first commercial graphical interfaces would be born. Yet immediate success eluded its creator. Renamed Augment in 1978, NLS remained a tool for specialists. The system required expensive hardware and expert users. For Engelbart, power took precedence over ease of use. He compared learning his system to learning a musical instrument. This philosophy clashed with the emergence of personal computers that prioritized simplicity. NLS’s centralized architecture aged poorly in the face of this change. The team dispersed, its members leaving to develop more accessible interfaces elsewhere.
NLS was only a first step toward transforming human collaboration. Engelbart envisioned a process of bootstrapping where each generation of tools spawned the next, in a virtuous spiral between technical progress and the evolution of practices. This legendary demonstration embodied a certain vision of computing as an amplifier of collective intelligence. Our current multimedia practices stem from this performance, blending television, telecommunications, and computing. Above all, it reminds us that the potential for augmenting our cognitive capacities remains largely untapped.
Engelbart would continue until his death in 2013 to explore these questions, notably at the Bootstrap Institute he created in 1989. The Turing Award he received in 1997 crowned a visionary work.