It's only been three-quarters of a century since the Bush paper. So many of the things he postulated have already come true, and many more probably will before a century is up. And yet, we still have global disasters like climate change.

Doug always emphasized the importance of coevolution. Re-reading this paper is a celebration of his technological foresight and the concepts underlying that, but it's also a sobering reminder of how much we've failed on the human side of coevolution. There's still time — not much, it feels like — but we need to start emphasizing this side of things more.

Nice acknowledgement of human irrationality here, well before the rise of behavioral economics.

The essence of Doug's bootstrapping approach.

This, in contrast to my previous comment, is a great example of Doug acknowledging the non-linearity of complex problem-solving. He's also foreshadowing Agile and Lean processes and highlighting the importance of continuous, fast learning.

The other thing that makes me cringe a bit when re-reading this paper is how hierarchically he frames everything, which of course is indicative of how he thought. He does make several references to how interwoven and connected and emergent everything actually is, but it's not the predominant frame.

How have they? This is a hard passage to read 60 years later, because it is so very easy to look things up, but that hasn't made us collectively smarter, and it hasn't changed the educational system at all. That's not to say that it hasn't impacted individuals or that there aren't amazing educational impacts to highlight, but systems are complicated, and as Howard Rheingold has noted in other annotations, culture is a powerful beast, sometimes in good ways, other times not.

One of Doug's classic metaphors, one that he still used often when I worked with him in 2000. He had a brick pencil on his desk in his office.

However, this metaphor feels like it has taken on new significance in today's world of social media, where speed has clearly discouraged thinking rather than emphasized it. So much of Howard Rheingold's work around crap-detection literacy and Mike Caulfield's work around fact checking simply starts by slowing down. It feels like we would be better served with the equivalent of brick pencils on the Internet!

The first time I read this paper, I remember being surprised by this reference to Whorf. Language was such a thing for Doug at so many levels.

This excerpt is so indicative of how Doug thought and his systemic / root-cause approach. Keep going deeper, keep looking for the sub-process underlying all other sub-processes, until you find the most impactful leverage point. This is, in essence, what his bootstrapping strategy was, and it's the heart of good systems thinking as well.

This reminds me so much of my favorite Doug story, which I wrote about here after he passed away. Doug loved bicycles, and so many of his great metaphors involved them, including this one:

As a kid, he and his brother used to challenge neighborhood kids to see who could perform the most difficult tricks. Doug had a trick that always worked. He would challenge the other kids to ride their bikes with their arms crossed.

What was so hard about this? Riding straight with your arms crossed was easy. The only tough part was turning. If you wanted to turn right, you’d have to move your left arm. If you wanted to turn left, you’d have to move your right arm. In other words, you simply had to do the opposite of what you normally had to do.

Two rules easily grasped, yet none of the kids could ever do it without falling off their bikes. Why? Because learning, in order to be applied, needs to be embodied. We need to build that habit and, sometimes, that means changing old habits.

This is hard, but it’s not impossible. That was the other key lesson of this story. Doug could do the trick, not because he was smarter or more physically gifted than the other kids, but because he had trained his body to do it through lots and lots of practice.

I appreciated that he emphasized "goal-centered" here! Very design-y!

As noted here, there's not a strong race or gender lens in this paper, as you might expect from a white male scientist writing in the early 1960s. Some of the examples (like this one) might feel a little cringe-worthy.

In fairness to Doug, I think he was very conscious of how privilege impacted worldview. Rather than use this as a metaphor, he could very easily have shared the story he told me and others repeatedly about hiking in the thick, Oregon woods with his brother when he was younger. His brother suddenly told him to stop and to stay still. Doug stopped, and peered carefully at his surroundings, trying to understand what made his brother want to stop. Finally, a deer emerged from the complex patterns that were in front of him. Doug was only able to see the deer when it moved, and he always marveled at how his brother was immediately able to recognize the deer out of all that noise.

Interesting to note in retrospect what felt "quickest" back then.

This jumped out at me when I re-read this paper — a reminder of how far ahead Doug was thinking and how open he was to what he might learn along the way. I was reminded of that evolution throughout the whole paper. For example, while he talks extensively about H-LAM/T in this paper (see http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/#2a14 for the first mention), I'm not sure he ever referred to it in the time that I worked with him (starting in 2000). I can guess as to why, but I wished I had asked him. :-(

I'm struck by how much Doug is empathizing with "you" here. I feel like it speaks to how self-aware Doug was of the other person's experience as he spoke to them and the delicate balancing act he was doing as he tried to explain concepts. I'm not sure I felt that self-awareness (at least at this level) when we worked together.

Doug really understood how huge of a barrier a lack of shared language was. It was a huge challenge for him personally. I think him highlighting this example speaks to how important he thought it was to have shared language, although I don't know if experience has shown that this feature addresses the problem to the extent he speculates that it does here.

This helps reinforce what he writes in his introduction about going after the "quickest gains first." It seems like a little thing, but all of these little things together add up to something much bigger. These details matter when it comes to the overall experience.

One reason I like this storytelling technique is that it helps pull out important qualities that may not be evident from a mere description of the system. In this case, it's how fast the system works, and the implications of that speed. One of my big takeaways from working with Doug was the importance of reducing latency. I remember Jeff Rulifson talking about how Doug would constantly harp on how the system was not fast enough, how technically challenging it was to meet his demands, and yet how critically important it was in the end to the overall experience.

I love that Doug named this intention. He had to practice this his whole career, and I think it was challenging, although he does it nicely in this paper.

Couldn't help but chuckle at this. "So often been told"?! I don't think anyone has ever told me this, including Doug. I think it's okay that this hasn't manifested. :-)

I love this little description of Doug prototyping Bush's ideas and sharing what he learned from actual experimentation.

More on the power of externalizing.

More emphasis on externalizing what we're already doing when we're sensemaking. If the different connections and re-structuring we're making and doing in our heads is externalized, now we can easily build on them. Furthermore, others (including computers) can also look at them and do the same. If it's all versioned, we can easily re-trace our steps.

I am struck by how the Neo-Whorfian hypothesis described by Doug above starts to play out here. Bush is describing the memex in terms of concrete things he knows and understands — furniture, photos, newspapers, index cards, etc. It is tangible and inspiring, but as Doug starts to translate this into the language of digital computers below, it takes on new meaning.

On the one hand, all of Bush's technology examples are so out-dated. On the other hand, Bush isn’t totally constrained by them. There's enough there for Doug to start taking them somewhere new.

I'm also struck by how the descriptions in the "old language" remind me of how much has been lost in today's technology. We're going too fast, not taking the time to slow down, to zoom in and out, to make meaning of things together.

I don't remember Bush's metaphor of the "trail" jumping out so vividly the first time I read the paper. It's wonderful to see it today, as I think about how stigmergy (i.e. collaboration via leaving and following trails, e.g. ants) has become such a central concept in my work.

This is hard to read today, 74 years after Bush published this. We not only haven't addressed this today, we seem to have made it worse. Obviously, technology enables us to generate information even faster, as cogdog notes above. But the right technology could also encourage us to slow down, review, synthesize, and build on these ideas. As human beings, we already do this. Doug (and to some extent, Bush) was positing a system where we can externalize the meaning we make, which would allow us to do much more with it. I think a lot of folks have missed this.

It's amazing to be reminded of how strongly Doug was influenced by Vannevar Bush's paper, so much so that he devoted this much time to it. It speaks to the critical importance of vision.

I think Doug severely undervalued his own role as a visionary. He was a doer, as is so clear from this paper, where he moves so easily from big picture to the micro-weeds. But his vision was the guiding force that encouraged people to revisit and explore these weedy ideas over and over again.