antipopper

I’ve heard that during his Etech conference presentation this week, Alan Kay showed video excerpts of Doug Engelbart’s mindboggling demonstration, in 1968, of a system of information technology that included a mouse, hypertext and video collaboration tools. I’ve been hearing about this for years, but never knew that bits of the demonstration were available as streaming video on the web. The stuff is uncanny. Reading about the history of hackerdom is all well and good, but actually watching the buttoned-down Engelbart explain in antique, clipped tones as he uses a mouse to cut and paste text on a metaphorical “sheet of paper” is another thing altogether. I feel as if I’m looking into a bizarre alternate universe, almost as strange as the one in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, or more recently, Warren Ellis’ Ministry of Space comic, which charts the history that could have developed if the dying British Empire, and not the Americans, had stolen the Nazi rocket scientists at the end of World War II. If MoS is, as Ellis perversely asserts, “the story of how we could have gone to space… maybe the way we should have gone to space,” then what is the spectacle of Douglas Engelbart’s largely unfulfilled vision? Perhaps something like an issue of Ellis’ Planetary, in which the secret history of the 20th Century, so full of heart-rendingly hidden inventions and weird supermen, is excavated piece by piece.