Revisiting Geddes' Outlook Tower

In 1935, Paul Otlet published the specifications for what he called the Mondotheque (mawn-do-tek).

It was, essentially, a workstation. With it, Otlet hoped that an individual would find all the information he or she might desire right at their fingertips.

Here is a carefully built reproduction based on his specifications.

You’ll notice drawings on the top based on Geddes' Think Machines (because the two had been collborating for quite some time). You’ll notice numerous card drawers. Otlet was the first person to begin to codify books and other periodicals using index cards. You’ll also notice a microsope, several others tools and, in the center a broadcast receiver. Otlet was already imagining how a personalized receiver might be able to play back news and other important information, on-demand.

There was even allowance for a mirofilm reader.

That might remind you of this drawing from ten years later:

This is the Memex as it was described by Vaneaver Bush…

Yes, Otlet had been thinking about this problem and many others for quite a while and even described his workstation in great detail more than ten years before Bush.

Otlet, who was born in 1863 and died in 1944, spent most of his life working on problems like this at his Palias Mondial — World Palace — where dozens of individuals worked to categorize and organize all the books, papers, and documents they could get thier hands on.

At on point the collectoin held more than 12 million index cards.

All organized using Otlet’s Universal Decimal Classification or UDC based, largely on the system created by Melvil Dewey a few years earlier — the Dewey Decimal System.

It’s difficult to see from this example, but Otlet expanded on the Dewey system to include diacritical marks such as colons, parens, and other characters in order to indicate hierarchies, relationships, and cross-referencing. All in a single identifier.

As noted Otlet biographer, Boyd Rayward has pointed out, Otlet’s advanced classification system looks and behaves much like the RDF triplestores of the Semantic Web

Otlet saw a day when the book was a dynamic collection of information available and customizable for each and every person.

Another man who spends a great deal of his time empowering individuals is Alan Kay.

Born in 1940 — he was four years old when Otlet died — Kay learned to read by the time he was three years old.

He graduated from UC Boulder w/ degress in mathematics and molecular biology. He later earned his PhD in engineering.

He started out as a full time professional jazz musician, but gave it up in the late 60s when his ARPA research (Advanced Research Projects Agency) got to be too much.

He met Seymour Papert…

It was a PARC that Alan key invented the Smalltalk language and the concept of Object-Oriented Programming or OOP.

But the thing that really fascinates me about Kay is the idea he had in 1968 — the DynaBook — a computer for every child.

Now, in 1968, the only workable computers filled a single room.

But Kay’s idea looked like this:

here’s a mock up he created in 1972

BTW - here’s today’s Surface Pro:

In 1968 Alan Kay envisioned what computing would look like in fifty years into his future!

For the last fifteen years, Kay has devoted his time to his Viewpoints Research Institute where continues to work on creating computers for children to use for learning.

He’s created the Squeak Language based on Smalltalk and helped design machine used in the One-Laptop-Per-Child program and continues to assist it today.

When asked how he could so accurately predict the future of computing he has a simple answer.

Another man at Xerox PARC at the same time as Alan Kay was Douglas Engelbart.

Born in Oregon in 1925, Engelbart grew up in the great outdoors and mostly coasted through life. His college studies were interrupted by WWII which he spent staffing a radar station in the Phillipines. There he stumbled upon Venaever Bush’s article on the Memex and he resolved to return home to finish college.

When he returns home and settles down, he realizes he doesn’t really have any goals. So, decides to set out his life’s goal and this is what he comes up with:

Like Kay, Engelbart saw the future of computing in a unique way. In the early sixties, he was one od the first to talk about interactive computing.

At a time when computers were carefully programmed over days and weeks to solve a single math problem, Engelbart was talking about real-time computing and using television screens to interact with computers — all wild stuff back in those days.

In fact, Engelbart had a terrible time getting people to pay attention to his ideas. Finally, he hit on the idea to put on a show — in a large hall with a big screen — in order to demonstrate the reality of what he wanted to do.

Engelbart invented the Demo!

So, in 1968 — the same year Alan Key describes the DynaBook — Engelbart rents out this huge hall in San Francisco in conjunction with a computer show

and proceeds to give a live 90-minute demonstration of a few of his (and his teams) ideas on what interactive computing looks like.

Here he is editing a shopping list live on stage

something that was — to this point — unheard-of.

He called is system NLS or oNLine System. And I looked up the new ideas that were shown in this demo:

All in a single installed system! People didn’t actually belive it.

Here’s another view of what his workstation looked like

This event was dubbed "The Mother of All Demos" and you can find it online today. It’s amazing to watch.

And all this work came out of the drive and determination of one man to help people, teams, no matter how far apart work better together. This idea was first written up by Engelbart in his 1962 research summary "Augementing Human Intellect."

Engelbart continued his work to improve human intellect using computers for sevearl decades. Even though many didn’t understand his work or appreciate the possibilities. Along the way he turned down opptys to work on things like the personal computer thinking it was too limiting and took away from his mission to help communities, not just create personal devices.

He had a phrase for his work — Bootstrapping. Thinking better in order to design things that make you think better which in turn… Well, you get the idea.

He died in 2013. He spent his remaing years working on his Douglas Engelbart Institute always working on projets that fostered his original mission — helping people work together.

In 1937, just two years after Otlet describes his Mondotheque. almost the same time Alan Kay is born, Ted Nelson is born in Chicago IL but soon moves to Greenwich Village in California.

Greenwish Village in the 1950s is a "Happening Place, Man…" as they might say back then. and Nelson drinks it all up.

Unlike his contemporary, Alan Kay, Nelson goes to school to study liberal arts at Swarthmore College in PA,

producing a student film and completes a masters degree in 1963 in sociology — the same field as Sir Patrick Geddes.

1963 is the year after Engelbart publishes "Augmenting Human Intellect"

and just a few years before Engelbart and Alan Kay will meet at Xerox PARC.

Nelson had been frustrated when writing his movie and keeping track of various cuts and edits. He wanted a better editing system — one, he says, that should be done from a computer. So, around 1960, he starts his Project Xanadu to help creating this computer. This is eight years before Engelbart does his Mother of all Demos.

His vision of how content is linked together starts to look a lot like Otlet’s diagrams, too.

Another things Nelson starts doing is creating a massive and complex linked file referencing system — physical files and index cards to match!

Along the way Nelson invents new words for his ideas such as

Much of this shows up in his 1974 double-book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines"

One of the key ideas in that book is that computers should be for everyone, not just for military, companies, etc.

One of the his common quotes is "The purpose of computers is freedom."

Ted Nelson never worked at Xerax PARC or on the ARPAnet project. Instead, he was working with writers and artists to help him craft his vision of the computer.

he was working to visually link documents

in ways that our current WWW still does not do. One that always has two-way links, that always shows provenance, and allows readers to virtually travel forward and backward in time to see all the versions of all the linked documents.

It turns out Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart are kindred spirits in many ways. They both had visions of what computers could be well beyond the narrow implementations around them. They even thought about linking in the same way — that links should be separated from the text, not embedded as they are in HTML.

And they both worked tirelessly for many years, even when people didn’t understand or appreciate thier work.

Nelson gave a very passionate eulogy at Engelbarts Remembrance last year. One of may favorite lines from Nelsons remarks — one that captures the unfulfilled promise many think of when they think of Engelbart is:

Ted is still around, still kicking, and still making noise. For instance, last year he claimed to know the true identity of the Bitcoin Creator online persona Satoshi Nakamoto and did a video about it.

There’s been renewed interest in Nelson’s Xanadu as young students are actually making much of it a reality. Who knows maybe we will reach Nelson’s Computer Lib in his own lifetime.

Otlet was an early backer of the League of Nations

and he corresponded directly with US President Woodrow Wilson

and noted US industrialist, Andrew Carnegie…

All this, in order to promote the idea that the League should have it’s headquarters in Brussels as part of his overall dream of a "Universal City"

BTW - note the ocean-going vessels in this depiction. See them, there? The tiny things in the upper right? This vision of Otlet’s "City of Bibliologists" — a place where domain experts from every nation of the world would team up with resident bibliographic professionals to categorize the worlds information — was created by his long-time friend, Hendrik Andersen.

Otlet eventually parted from Andersenwhen Andersen became enamoured with Italy’s Benito Mussolini in the run-up to WWII.

Later drawings for the World City …

…were created by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier.

whose design style is a hallmark of 20th centry architecture.

Le Corbusier and Otet grew to be close friends and it was Le Corbusier’s designs that suited Otlet best.

Another man with a grand vision of the future was JCR Licklider, or "Lick" as he was called by his colleagues and friends.

Licklider was a quiet, unassuming man but dogged in his determination.

He was born in 1915, the son of a Baptist Minister in St. Louis, MO…

…and before he reached 30 years old, he’d earned degrees in physics, mathematics, and psychology from the University of Washington at St. Louis.

He later earned a deree in PsychoAcoustics and taught and experimented in this field at Harvard University until 1950.

However, it was a year, later while at MIT, that he published his paper A Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception.

He modeled hearing using analog electronics and, leaning on the work of Wiener and Claude Shannon — both instrumental in the start of the computer age — become fascinated with computing in general and it’s possiblities for the future.

Since the early computers where analog, not digital — they did math computations using frequencies, not registers — Licklider fit well into this entirely new field.

By the late 50s Licklider was at BBN a US military contractor and used some available funds to purchase the first PDP-1 computer for his own experiments.

This led to his work creating the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which as later renamed ARPA (dropping Defense from the name). So "Lick" was one of the founders of the Internet we all use today.

As cool as that is, one of the things he is most remembered for today is a short memo he dashed off in 1963 about how we might eventually get computers to "talk" to each other over a general network.

The memo was adressed to…

"Members of the Intergalactic Computer Network"

Now that’s big thinking for 1963!

In this memo he actually talks about the problem of communicating with aliens from another planet. He refers to them as "uncorrelated sapient beings." There were a number of ideas going around the US military in the 1960s related to alien invasions so, as odd as it might seem today, Licklider was only doing what he did best — thinking ahead to a day when our computers would talk to computers from other worlds.

In fact, there is a protocol named after him - the LTP or Licklider Transmission Protocol.

What was it designed to do? it’s part of the backbone of the new "Internet of Space" which is overseen by the CCSDS — the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems.

And behind all the work Licklider did was the notion of creating a better world for everyone. He had to fight constantly to get funding for non-military uses of computers. He worked diligently to fund such things as Xerox Parc

where Engelbart invented the mouse, Alan Kay created Smalltalk, and eventually all our current computing and programming paradigms come from.

All thanks to grand vision of JCR Licklider.