Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, coevolution, and the origins of personal computing

"Combining technological, social, and historical perspectives, Bootstrapping traces the genesis of personal computing through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small te...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bardini, Thierry (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Stanford, Calif. Stanford Univ. Press 2000
Edition:Orig. print.
Series:Writing science
Subjects:
Summary:"Combining technological, social, and historical perspectives, Bootstrapping traces the genesis of personal computing through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it - including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Since that time, all these technologies have become so commonplace as to be taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Thierry Bardini analyzes Engelbart's singular achievement through a detailed history of his vision for a human-computer interface in the context of the U.S. computer research community during the 1960s and 1970s." "The book offers a careful narrative of the growth and decline of Engelbart's laboratory at SRI, and it examines the subsequent translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in the less challenging terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies." "At a time when the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web has spawned myriad pronouncements on our social and technological future, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution.""--BOOK JACKET.
Physical Description:XVI, 284 S. Ill., graph. Darst.
ISBN:0804737231
0804738718
9780804738712

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