Computers and the development of Interactivity
Whilst it is obviously possible to trace current creative activity in interactive multimedia from the history of avant-garde art and its aesthetics, many of the issues in contemporary art and life can be traced more directly to the evolution of computers and attempts to facilitate and theorise relationships between people and machines. |
|||
Calculation was a need from the earliest days when it was necessary to account to others for individual or group actions, particularly in relation to maintaining inventories (e.g of flocks of sheep) or reconciling finances. Early humans counted by means of matching one set of objects with another set (e.g. stones and sheep). The operations of addition and subtraction were simply the operations of adding or subtracting groups of objects to the sack of counting stones or pebbles. Early counting tables, named abaci, not only formalized this counting method but also introduced the concept of positional notation that we use today. The next logical step was to produce the first "personal calculator" -- the abacus -- which used the same concepts of one set of objects standing in for objects in another set, but also the concept of a single object standing for a collection of objects -- positional notation. This one-for-one correspondence continued for many centuries even up through the many years when early calculators used the placement of holes in a dial to signify a count -- such as in a rotary dial telephone. Although these machine often had the number symbol engraved alongside the dial holes, the user did not have to know the relationship between the symbols and their numeric value.  Only when the process of counting and arithmetic became a more abstract process and different sizes of groups were given a symbolic representation so that the results could be written on a 'storage medium' such as papyrus or clay did the process of calculation become a process of symbol manipulation. The bits and pieces of a computer (including the software) came together over many centuries, many people each adding a small contribution. One of those that was not recognized for many years was that of Mukhammad ibn Musa Al'Khowarizmi, a Tashkent cleric who in the twelfth century developed the concept of a written process to be followed to achieve some goal, and published a book on the subject that gave it it's modern name -- algorithm. |
|||
|
Mukhammad ibn Musa Al'Khowarizmi |
|||
|
|
The computer as we know it is generally considered to have its genesis in the early 19th century, when a well-connected but disorganised mathematician, Charles Babbage, returned to his adolescent fantasy of an automatic servant to prepare logarithmic tables for him -- then an arduous task much liable to miscalculations and copying inaccuracies. In his twenties Babbage worked as a mathematician, principally in the calculus of functions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1816, and played a prominent part in the foundation of the Astronomical Society (later Royal Astronomical Society) in 1820. It was about this time that Babbage first acquired the interest in calculating machinery that became his consuming passion for the remainder of his life. | ||
|
Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing
|
Recreation of the Difference Engine |
||
| In 1823 he presented the Royal Society with the Difference Engine, basically a mechanical adding machine, but he never finished his life's work, the Universal Analytical Engine. Stymied by the state of machine tooling and other technology of the time and, despite thousands of pounds which his collaborator Ada Lovelace aided him in obtaining from the government, the project was too expensive to be realised. However what was important was two things; his concept of the Analytical Engine as a universal computer with potentially unlimited functions, and Lovelace's understanding of the necessity and structure of programming the machine. Although the machine was by necessity entirely mechanical, he envisaged it as having a complex system of gear trains arranged to give it a memory facility and provision was to be made for what we know call 'conditional branching'. Despite his many achievements, the failure to construct his calculating machines, and in particular the failure of the government to support his work, left Babbage in his declining years a disappointed and embittered man. Few understood the potential of the Analytical Engine and although it was not entirely forgotten it was not until the early 20th century that technologies had advanced enough to make his dream begin to be a real possibility. | |||
| In the 20th century two major forces contributed to the early development of the electronic computer; the improvement and proliferation of office machines, and advances in electrotechnics, particularly radar, spurred by the two world wars. It was perhaps the military motives which were most influential; the need to calculate ballistic tables for the artillery, the decryption of coded enemy messages, and the design of high speed and more lethal weapons. | |||
|
|
|||
| Konrad Zuse is generally credited as being the producer of the first modern computer, producing his Z2 during 1936 using electromagnetic relays, similar to those used in telephone exchanges. Z3 was a program controlled machine which gained the support of the German government and was used to help design V2 rockets as well as aircraft development. | |||
|
|
In America, three years after Zuse began work, Howard Aitken published a specification for a computing machine which was built by International Business Machines (IBM) resulting in a huge machine some 16 meters long and run by a 4 horsepower motor. As always IBM remained conservative, building what was essentially a mechanical computer with no capacity for conditional (branching) logic. | ||
| It was the second world war which spawned the first great computer theoretician, Alan Turing, who had been co-opted into aiding the British forces in deciphering the Enigma code. Turing is best known for the 'Turing Test' -- a test for intelligence in artificial systems, but also developed concepts relating to self-programming machines and laid the ground work for information theory. | |||
| In the late 1940's and early 1950's the air was buzzing with new scientific ideas having to do with what had not yet come to be called 'information theory' whose chief theorists and implementers were Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann. In a 1948 publication, "A Mathematical Model of Information,'' Claude Shannon showed, through a series of theorems, that "any message can b transmitted with as high a reliability as one wishes, by devising the right code. The limit imposed by nature is concerned only with the limit of the communications channel." Howard Rheingold pointed out, "The key to life itself proved to be information theory . . . information- and communication-based models have proved enormously useful to the sciences because so many important phenomena can be seen in terms of messages. Human bodies can best be understood as complex communications networks than as clock-like machines ". Norbert Weiner coined the term 'cybernetics', based on the Greek word for "steers man," to describe the new field, and cybernetics were "the science or mechanism of maintaining order in a disorderly world." | |||
| It was less than thirty years ago when the term interactive was first used in reference to computers, and it was used to describe the then breathtaking but now humble function of being able to interrupt a computer run. Computers were primarily thought of as number crunchers in the 1950's, and programming consisted of converting information into boxes of cardboard punched with holes (IBM cards) These cards were ''batch processed" by a computer the size of a room and you received a printout of the information several hours later. In the late 1950's, Dr. J.C R. Licklider discovered, while working on a mathematical of electronic model of the brain to simplify the task of understanding the complexities of the brain, that he spent more time gathering information than using it He began to imagine a sort of electronic servant who could take over these tasks and not only calculate but also formulate models for him. In 1960 Licklider got to try out his ideas for the first time on the Digital Equipment Company's new PDP-I, a minicomputer (a fast, compact computer the size of a refrigerator). Instead of programming via boxes of punchcards over days, the data was be fed into the machine by high speed tape and it was possible to change the tape while the machine was running, "allowing the operator to interact with the machine for the first time." From this small beginning Licklider and others focused on interactivity as the way to achieve a partnership between people and computers that will produce computers capable of learning and, in Doug Engalbart's words, "augmenting man's intellect". | |||
 The United States government has been in the information business since the late eighteenth century when the first patent act established a governmental committee to review and grant patents in 1790, and the Library of Congress was established in 1800. In the 1950S the government was concerned with how the huge quantities of new technical information being generated could be made quickly and easily available to increase US scientific and military capabilities The Soviet Union's launch of sputnik in 1957 made the government realise the inadequacies of the current system of information storage and retrieval. The Soviet Union's scientific prowess was a attributed to the superiority of their educational system (Why Ivan can read and Johnny can't) and their All-Union Scientific Technical Information Apparat, (VINITI). The first reason spawned the 1958 Defense education Act, which authorised a Science Information Service and Council in the the National Scientific Foundation (NSF) The same year the National Aeronautics and Space Agency was established and NSF established the Office of Science Information Service, (OSIS). Beginning with the Baker Panel's 1958 report to President Eisenhower's Scientific Advisory Committee, which urged a large research and development program in information sciences and technology be mounted by the federal government, some thirty-five studies, reports, and congressional hearings have attempted "to create VlNlTI-on-the-Potomac ." The Department of Defense began to extensively fund both applied and basic work in the computer field The development of greater interactivity was given priority because the ability to have a dialogue between user and computer increased the user's productivity and facilitated the development of ever more sophisticated machines and software. |
|||
| In the days before personal computers, a significant obstacle to developing a fruitful human-computer symbiosis was the lack of easy and flexible access to computers. A key element of the development of interactive computing was the concept of time-sharing, computer systems capable of interacting with many programmers at the same time. Time sharing gives each of 20, 30, of l,000 people the illusion that he or she has the computer's exclusive attention, while the computer is actually switching from one user's task to another. Programmers were able to submit their programs a piece at a time and receive their responses in the same way. By eliminating the "wait and see" aspect of batch processing, time sharing made it possible for "programmers to treat their craft as a performing art "The first time sharing computers were primitive, but soon individual keyboards and simple forms of graphic display made interacting with computers more comfortable, or user friendly, a term coined in the 1980's. | |||
| In the late 1960's and the early 1970's the way individuals shared information in time-sharing communities (a group of people using the same central computer) was seen as a model for a global network of computers connected by common carriers (telephones) interacting freely with each other, united by a commonality of interest even before they existed. It was believed that the dialogue caused by the free exchange of information would lead to the rapid development of new ideas because, as Licklider and Taylor have pointed out, "When minds interact, new ideas emerge.'' A few people realised that instead of being more democratic, computers might simply substitute one kind of power for another and create a new subclass of people made up of those who did not have access to information. | |||
| The utopian dream of a world united in an egalitarian web of free flowing information has not materialised. The passage of the Mansfield Amendment in 1970, which stated the government would only spend money on technology that had a direct military application, ended the days of free-form experimentation. As the government withdrew from the business of information and reduced or abolished dissemination mechanisms and increased the cost for the information it continued to supply, the information business was taken over by the private sector Unlike the public library system, which is equally accessible by rich and poor alike, there is always a user fee for computer information, and that information became a commodity that was bought and sold like any other. Even in 1988, media philosophers like Gene Youngblood continued to imagine a world where global communications networks made possible by computers would allow people to communicate with each other freely. The reality IS different In our society power lies in the hands of those who control information and, since the government went out of the information business, information is an expensive controlled substance. Aspects of computer~era networks have become an integral part of society from electronic mail to the folk culture that has sprung up around bulletin hoard and electronic magazines. | |||
|
ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine |
Fundamental to the evolution of the computer from a number-crunching tool to a dynamic medium for creative thought was the ability to talk to the computer in a version of human language rather than the programmers' mathematical hieroglyphics. If you can type a command in simple English and receive a reply from the machine or it prompts you with a question, you feel as if you are dealing with a person and not a thing and this in turn fosters greater involvement with the computer. One of the first steps toward creating "a genuine language understanding program" was the program Joseph Weizenbaum created for ELIZA at MIT in 1964. This program and a later variant called DOCTOR mimicked human interaction and created the illusion of being ''a wise, all knowing computerised psychiatrist." The program encouraged people to talk to the machine by playing the user's thoughts back to them Weizenbaum was surprised that even sophisticated people were drawn into conversations with the machine about their lives." | ||
|
|
Over the period 1945-1985 a number of visionary thinkers, artists and writers (a list headed by Vannever Bush, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart) had mapped out the possibilities of a singular medium that combined all the other media in such a way that people could control it using natural language and gesture. | ||
| The vision that brought about the genesis of multimedia was elaborated by the American computer scientist Vennevar Bush, in an article entitled 'As we may think", published in the Atlantic Review in July 1945. Bush's credentials were impeccable. From as early as 1912, he had patented a series of devices that were key steps on the road to the modern computer - and by 1941 Bush had been appointed by the Roosevelt administration to coordinate scientific research. | |||
| 'As we may think" was a prescient article. In it Bush elaborated a most complete vision of a "memory extension" system he named "Memex", a system that allowed the operator to input text, drawings end notes through an early form of dry photocopier or through head mounted stereo camera spectacles: to store this information in a microfiche filing system: to display several such microfilm files simultaneously, and to link related files together with a simple code. Bush envisaged a photographic (microfilm) data compression system: a method of exchanging information with other Memex users: the use of voice transcription by means of voice recognition technologies: automatic character recognition, and much else that characterises the desktop hypermedia systems that were to emerge fully fledged some 40 years later. Bush defined the Memex system in terms of the photo-mechanical technologies available in the mid 40s, with his informed guess as to how these technologies could be extended and optimized. He also mentioned the possibilities of electromagnetic memory cards, and hinted at the potential of using television to provide network links between several Memex users. | |||
| The essence of the Memex system was the associative indexing': the ability to link the microfilm information together in ways which were meaningful to the user. In his official capacity, Bush was in a unique position to foresee the consequences of the information explosion. He realised that contemporary indexing techniques were imposing artificial constraints on the retrieval of information, forcing researchers to trace their requirements by following rigid alphabetical or numerical classifications. As he noted: 'The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item ion its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain." Bush talked about the possibilities of mechanising this process of "selection by association", and went on to develop systems to do so. | |||
| In Memex, microfilm "files'' are retrievable in three distinct ways: they can be called to the screen by means of a conventional index (which is itself a microfilm file that can be projected on demand): they can be displayed sequentially, (using a "joystick" to control the frame rate), slowly for browsing, and fast for speedy location of an item; and most importantly, they can be viewed by 'trails of association' that the user or author has established by linking together one card with another The resulting trails can be followed by other users and they too can make annotations or create further links. Leaping ahead in his imagination to the 1990s, Bush commented: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified" | |||
| The Memex system was never implemented using the technologies that Bush envisaged, but the idea of an interactive desktop ' hypermedia ' system was to resonate through the next 40 years, inspiring several of the individuals who were to make important contributions to the hypermedia revolution of the 90s. | |||
|
Douglas Engelbart read Bush's article "As we may think" towards the end of the War while he was still an army radar technician. Within 20 years or so, at his laboratory at the Stanford Institute, he had developed his own contributions to hypermedia: the idea of the mouse and windows, electronic mail and teleconferencing. All these components formed part of Engelbart's "Augmentation" project - a project that provided much of the framework for both the development of the personal computer and for hypermedia. Engelbart conceived the idea of a computer-based system for the 'augmentation of men's intellect" in the early 6Os:
|
|||
|
|
|||
| By 1968 Engelbart had produced the NLS (oN Line System) which embodied features that were to become prototypes for all the hypermedia systems we have now. These features, ranging from the mouse, windows and electronic mail to word processing and hypertext, were all steps on the road towards an "Augmentation" system that would marry contributions from a human user (the ability to organise, a knowledge of procedures, customs, methods and language, and skills, knowledge and training) with a "tool system" This would include capabilities for communicating with other users, for 'traveling' through an information space, for viewing information in a variety of ways, and for the retrieval and processing of information in a number of media. Today, Engelbart believes that such a system creates a synergy between the user and the computer that will amplify the user's intellectual capabilities. As a graphic demonstration of what happens when tools handicap our thinking, instead of augmenting it, Engelbart has suggested that we try to write with a pencil tied to a brick Such a poor tool "disaugments" our intellect. | |||
|
Professorial Home Page of Ted Nelson Audio Excerpt Generalized Links, Micropayment and Transcopyright Ted Nelson Orality and Hypertext: An Interview with Ted Nelson
|
Ted Nelson coined the term 'hypermedia' in the in the 70s in order to describe a new media form that utilised the power of the computer to store retrieve and display information in the form of pictures, text, animations and sound. He had already used the prefix "hyper" to describe a system of non-sequential writing: "text that branches and allows choices to the reader". In "hypertext" textual material could be interlinked. Providing a system which would breakdown traditional subject classifications and allow non-computer-literate users to follow their own lines of inquiry across the whole field of knowledge. The principles of hypertext have since been embodied in several software products aimed at the general public. Nelson's own Xanadu project is the most ambitious of these, aiming to integrate the entire library collections of the world into a seamless electronic system where, for example, the hypertext reader might start by consulting a modern edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth, diverge sideways to explore medieval witchcraft, look at the original first folio or access any of the thousands of critical essays on the play, all by simply selecting different keywords from the texts displayed on a computer monitor. | ||
| Echoing Vannevar Bush's comments on Memex, Nelson points out that the value of hypertext is that (compared with normal 'sequential" reading) it more closely models the way we think, allowing us to explore a subject area from many different perspectives until we find an approach that is useful for us. Using hypertext, authors would no longer have to write for a specific "average" reader. They could include any level of detail, and allow the reader to decide how deep into the subject matter they wanted to go. | |||
| In a series of seminal articles and books, including Computer Lib and Dream Machines, Nelson develops the idea of "fantics" (the "showmanship of ideas"), "thinkertoys"(computer systems for helping to visualise "complex alternatives"), and "supervirtualities" (the conceptual space of hypermedia). These Ideas encapsulate his vision of hypertext and hypermedia, and explore the nature of how these media could be used for both education and entertainment. Nelson has mapped out much of the theoretical territory that is now being explored by practicing multimedia designers, and has stressed the point that ''Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch-type has to do with writing poetry." Creating successful hypermedia, like creating feature movies, depends on applying the arts of communication design to both the content and the structure of the programme. | |||
| By the time the first desktop computers were produced in the late 60s, much of the theoretical and practical infrastructure of hypermedia was in place. But Engelbart's NLS system had been designed for use on workstations attached to large mainframe computers, and the arrival of the small "personal" computer opened up an entirely new possibility -- portable hypermedia systems more like 'super books' than computers. | |||
|
"Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." |
In 1968 Alan Kay built a cardboard model of a portable hypermedia system he called the 'Dynabook'. This prototype was designed to have a flat screen display (a technology then in its very earliest stages) and a graphic interface, and would be capable of handling large quantities of text. It would be a read/write medium for children, with an easy to use 'development environment' (or programming language called 'Paintbrush', that children could use to create and animate pictures. Kay proposed that the Dynabook would link (via phone lines and/or wireless means) to other Dynabooks and to library resources, and should be produced for under $500 so that it could be made available to every schoolchild. Over 20 years later. The Dynabook has still to be implemented as it was originally conceived. | ||
|
"[That's when I realized that] the computer was like paper, except with extensions into time and into other dimensions. Paper can hold the same kinds of marks that computers can. But it«s hard to have a piece of paper that can look at the marks and do what they say. All the newness of the computer comes from its dynamic qualities - that«s why I called it the Dynabook. The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay |
 Much of Kay's subsequent work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) was driven by the Dynabook vision. The spin-offs were considerable: in particular, the development of software that allowed users to control the Dynabook by means of a 'graphical user interface", that included many of the features later developed by Apple for their Macintosh computer, such as menus and icons. They also included a new kind of programming language (Smalltalk, the precursor of Apple's Hypertalk), and an expansion of the Dynabook idea to include intelligent 'software agents' which are specialised computer programs to which mundane or time consuming tasks can be delegated, and which have enough 'intelligence' to learn about us (our tastes, requirements, priorities and plans) in order to help us deal with the ever increasing information overload that characterises the Late twentieth century |
||
|
|||
| As Ted Nelson says: ''To see tomorrow's computer systems, go to the videogame parlors! Go to the military flight simulators! Look there to see true responsiveness, true interaction." | |||
|
n e x t :: The Internet and How it Grew... |
|||
|
|
On-line Sources (not credited within the text) Argumentation on the Web: Challenging Traditional Notions of Communication, Tom Formaro Hypertext and Hypermaps (Resources) Visible Language Workshop, MIT Griffin University Dead Media Project Persistence of Vision: Animation Technologies and concepts A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N D 'Brenda and the Future Squad' Tools For Thought: The People and Ideas of the Next Computer Revolution By Howard Rheingold (re Brenda Laurel) Babbage's Dancer by Simon Schaffer |
||
|
return to hypertext essays index :: return to main index Shiralee Saul: Originally authored 1999, last updated February 2001 This page is found at http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~saul/essays/02computer.html |
|||
|
|||
