October 7, 1996

If not for Douglas Engelbart, a great many of the
technical innovations we consider integral to the
personal computer revolution would not exist. While Dr.
Engelbart was working at what was then called the
Stanford Research Institute, during a remarkable run of
creativity that began in the early 1950’s and continued
throughout the 1960’s, he invented many seminal products
and concepts that we take wholly for granted today –
the computer mouse, hypertext, groupware and many
others.

Today, his contributions are more widely recognized, but
for decades the technologies he invented and demonstrated
were largely ignored or misunderstood. And even now, with PC’s and the World
Wide Web as direct descendants of his pioneering work,
these technologies have not had nearly the
transformative effect that Dr. Engelbart had hoped.

Until recently most of his inventions, as the industry
gradually adopted them, were built into stand-alone
computers. But from the beginning Dr. Engelbart
conceived his techniques with networked computers in
mind. His motivating concept, still largely untested
today, was that information technologies could serve as
the connective tissue between people and information.

The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in
what he calls an organization’s “collective I.Q.,” which
would in turn supercharge a group’s ability to improve
itself over time.

In essence, Dr. Engelbart’s theory separates work into
three categories. A-work, as he calls it, is the primary
mission of an organization, like building cars or
operating a health care system. B-work involves ways of
improving A-work, and it is likely to be basically the
same among similar organizations, be they auto makers or
hospitals.

C-work, in turn, is about improving the improvement
process itself. Although an auto maker might be loath to
share information about B-work with its competitors, Dr.
Engelbart’s hypothesis is that much good could come from
their sharing information about C-work — about how to
improve the process of recording and responding to
consumer complaints, for example, which might enhance
processes all the way down the line.

And that exercise might be equally valuable to a
software company, a car maker or a bookstore –
resulting in what he calls “high-performance
organizations” that are much more capable of improving
their work processes quickly and effectively.

Dr. Engelbart’s technology key is a giant hypertext
handbook about a specific problem — a
“collaborative hypertext document,” in his parlance –
in which E-mail, project reports and other relevant data
are linked together electronically, much as they might
be on a Web page. Such a document is built using various
electronic tools, like shared-screen teleconferencing,
sophisticated document repositories and E-mail that
creates its own archive and index.

His strategy for changing how organizations work
includes a company he founded in 1989 and runs with his
daughter, Christina. The Bootstrap Institute
(http://www.bootstrap.org), as this company is called,
makes its money from quarterly seminars and basic
research into technology and organizations.

In addition, the Engelbarts are in the early stages of
forming the Bootstrap Alliance — a group of “thought
leaders” from industry, government and universities.
Such a broad-based initiative is critical because
changing the way people work together is as critical as
the technologies that connect them, according to Ms.
Engelbart, a cultural anthropologist.

“The whole groupware push, for example, has been about
how to simply share a document,” she says. “What’s
missing is how you can work together inside a repository
of information that ties everyone together. That’s what
a lot of our work is about. We’re trying to figure out
how dramatically — and humanely — we can change the
organization.”

And they are getting some powerful assistance: Sun
Microsystems Inc. and the Netscape Communications
Corporation have each assigned a top engineer to help
the Engelbarts get the alliance running.

One is Jeff Rulifson, the director of technology
development at Sun Microsystems who was the system
architect for Dr. Engelbart’s Stanford Research project
in 1966 and who shares credit with him for the invention
of hypertext. Back then, he said, they spent a lot of
time looking at what he calls co-evolution — the way
people change how they do things in response to
technology.

“But the real study of co-evolution never happened,” Mr.
Rulifson said. “Instead, we’ve been evolving technology
and crossing our fingers, hoping that when it comes to
processes and personal interactions and how we organize
ourselves, we’ll figure it out. But now, with the
explosion in the World Wide Web and collaborative tools,
Doug’s wisdom can get out.”

Another of the engineers is Martin Haeberli, a
member of Apple Computer’s original Macintosh team
who has since joined Netscape as director of technology.
He has been helping translate Dr. Engelbart’s academic
constructs into ideas that can be more easily understood
by the wide variety of people whom the Engelbarts hope
to draw into the alliance.

“Doug has made profound contributions, and one of my
assignments is to help him achieve broader recognition,”
Mr. Haeberli said. “His vision is an intellectual
challenge to understand, but it shouldn’t be. We want to
find a larger group of people who are willing to engage
in wrestling with the angel — the angel in this case
being Doug.”

And the benefit of wrestling with the angel would be an
opportunity to be in the first group that helps design
and put into use the tools and systems to make Dr.
Engelbart’s system a reality.

The major obstacle, of course, is that most broad-scale
efforts to get companies and institutions to work
together have been disastrous. Despite the fact that
many consortiums have been formed to solve common
problems, the self-interest of each company almost
always ends up taking precedence and stops participants
from truly contributing.

“Consortiums are tough,” Ms. Engelbart concedes. “But
this whole topic of discussion is exactly what’s needed
to make organizations run better.”

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company