welcome back this lecture is the first we're going to do on human computer interfaces and it's about a guy named Douglas engelbart and what we come to be what's come to be known as the mother of all demos now what do we mean by human computer interfaces it's a mouthful of a phrase for a very important and somewhat simple concept and it's simp how do we connect to our computers how do we interact with our computers how do we get our computers to understand what we want and for us to understand what the computer is putting out that's the interface it's how we relate to or connect to our machines now in the beginning there weren't very good ones in the beginning there was a command line and boy that was a really bad human computer interface you had to learn different ways to give instr instructions every time a prompt came up you had to speak in the language of the computer and eventually we get to a really good human computer interfaces where it's pretty intuitive how we're going to react and uh interact with our machines so how do we get from here from the command line and bad human computer interfaces to the ones we have today and how do we imagine the ones we're going to have in the future well part of it comes from video games like at the uh MIT Tech Model Railroad Club where they do space wars and they come up with things like remote controls and ways to point at the screen more importantly there was the air defense systems that were being developed in the late 1940s and 1950s and those use graphical user interfaces so a guy somebody sitting at a computer military officer could intuitively tell the difference they between a passenger plane and a missile that's quite important if you're doing an air defense system and they found ways for the people looking at the computers to interact with it such as this guy here who's using a light pin so those were the early days of human computer interfaces but the way we get to the ones we have today is because of a guy named Doug engelbart and Doug engelbart join the Navy right at the end of World War II from San Francisco and uh in fact just as he's getting on the boat and they're sailing out of San Francisco Harbor the announcement Comes That World War II has ended and all the sailors yell turn back the ship let's go back go back to Port but no they continued on and Doug engelbart got stationed in a naval base in the South Pacific uh but without a war to fight he spent most of his time in the naval based library reading magazines and one of them had in the late 1940s an important article by vver Bush Bena bush is an incredibly important person in the history of the digital Revolution and all of science uh in the modern age he was in charge of scientific research for the government during World War II thus overseeing the bomb project in lasers and radar he also was a dean at MIT and help found graan and he writes an article for the Atlantic Monthly called as we may think it was also excerpted in Time Magazine and in Life magazine and there's Doug engard in the library in the naval base in the South Pacific and he becomes mesmerized by the vision that vver bush comes up with there's the drawing of it V Bush says we will soon have devices and this is before computers were really all that public this is like 1945 1946 eniac hasn't been unveiled of course Bena Bush knew about it because he was partly funding it but vver Bush comes up with this concept of a memory and uh intelligence augmentation tool that's like a personal computer you can enter enter information into it it will store it you'll be able to retrieve information you'll be able to type into it and that's the drawing of what he had in mind it was sort of like an electronic filing cabinet but it had many qualities that make it the sort of concept of what eventually would become the personal computer where you could use a computer to store all your personal information and interact with it so Doug engelbart reads about this and he decides it's his life mission and he comes up in the mid 1960s with all sorts of ways that we can Implement that vision of human computer interface and a computer that will be a personal assistant to you and uh among the things that he conceives of and what he calls his online system is onscreen graphics multiple windows like we have on our computer screens digital publishing blogs uh collaboration tools like Wikipedia is journals um email was one of the big things that is part of his system instant messaging even hypertex like you do in the worldwide web to link around things video conferencing like Skype and zoom formatting of documents all of this becomes part of the concept that Doug engelb bar comes up with in the late 1960s to say here's how a computer can connect with and augment a human brain he even comes up with the best input device as I said back the military was using light pins there were different ways to try to connect you physically to the computer screen I mean people would trying it with a stylus or people were trying it with a joystick or a light pen and there was even a device that they had used where you moved your knee and would move a cursor on the screen duing aart tested all these things out figured out what qualities you need and he comes up with something pretty simple but boy it's really important it's the mouse fact here I am using the mouse to move my cursor around totally intuitively I don't even need to look at it and there's Doug engelbart holding the mouse and here's the first m house that he developed all of this was part of a way to have humans and computers connect more seamlessly human computer interfaces and he showed it all off in December of 1968 and what's called the mother of all demos and it's sort of done on this big screen in front of an audience from two different sites and he talks about how you can type things in and and cut and paste and edit your words his wife calls up and gives him a a grocery shopping list and he types it up for the demo and then moves the things around on it adds things to it and it's really this whole system of being able to create documents collaborate share with other people in fact uh he's sharing it in real time with the people down near Stanford he's doing the demo in San Francisco and they show the screens in both places where they can all collaborate on documents one uh interesting thing is that guy holding the camera right in the middle that's Stuart brand I've talked about him some you'll probably hear a lot about him he's this puckish character that in five or six Decades of the digital Revolution pipes up each decade with some new idea he's the one who created the whole earth catalog the online service called the well and here he is producing the mother of all demos one of the people who went to the mother of all demos was a young student from the University of Utah as I said Utah had a great graphical uh depart computer Graphics Department uh that's where Nolan Bushnell was when he helped uh create uh uh computer space war and uh pong that's where Ivan Sutherland was and that's where this young guy Alan Kay was who was very sick the day of the mother of all demos but he still forced himself out of bed to get down to San Francisco because he knew it was going to be a big deal Alan Kay will go on we'll hear about him in the next lecture he's the one who creates the graphical user interfaces at Xerox Park that became Apple computer interfaces and then Microsoft Windows uh he's sort of the guru ex xerox's part on how we're going to do great interfaces and uh after seeing the mother of all demos he says a quote that's certainly true which is I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug's ideas so the whole point of what doug engart did was find ways that connect us to our computers more intimately so that our computers will not be some artificial intelligence that will act without us but instead they'll augment human intelligence and it'll work both ways the computer will augment our capabilities but we as humans will connect with the computer and will add our creativity our Insight the type of things that the human mind does best and uh it leads to his quote which is sort of the I'll call it the maxim of the digital age that I believe which is it's not about artificial intelligence it's about augmented intelligence connecting humans to computers and that's what human computer interfaces are all about the phrase Doug engelbart used for this partnership or symbiosis was augmented intelligence and as he put it technology should not aim to replace humans rather should aim to amplify human cap abilities next time we'll talk about alen K thanks