Ebook: Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

Audience: Academics, detail-oriented historians of computer interaction

I bought this book looking for a detailed history of Douglas Engelbart's work and Bardini certainly delivers that. Actually too much detail. The result is a very thorough and detailed history, but one that's not engaging to read and meanders into minutia. As written, it's for only those deeply interested with the NLS system history and patient enough to wade through sub-topics better left to appendices. To be of interest to a wider audience it needs serious editing and rewriting to provide a story arc to the history.

Details:

It's clear that Bardini had unprecedented access to many of the key people from Engelbart's group as well as the archives. This means he had a unique opportunity to write a definitive history. The problem is one of editing; it often feels like having that having all this information at hand he decided to incorporate more of it than appropriate for a story narrative. The result is copiously annotated doctoral thesis and not an engaging (hi-)story.

For example, impact of '60s era movements like est as archived in the SRI logs is extensively tracked including several pages of re-presenting another book's story on the event. The author goes into great details of the group dynamics need to be covered and are worthy of following -as if this was new, unique or special because of the time and place where the group worked. Certainly it had its particular nuances, but it could have been summarized in a just a few pages (or paragraphs) to keep the story moving along.

In contrast to the sidebar topics, the famous 1968 "Mother of All Demos" is presented almost as an afterthought. The author seems to take for granted that the reader has seen the video (something easier to do today than when the book came out in 2000) and does little to really capture the impact it had. There's no description or transcript; just a few photos, some comments and a dry inventory of the major effort it represented. What should be a (even "the") climax to the book seems to pass by with less description and detail than many other lesser sub-topics.

That said, the dedicated reader will get a much deeper understanding of what drove Doug and how his group created the computing experience we now take for granted. It does provide the greater picture of how far advanced the vision was. It clarifies the distinction between "user augmentation" and "user friendly" but doesn't really follow that through to the current day. It stops when the NLS project ends (1974) and doesn't follow anything of Doug's work or the themes forward. The "coda" section makes some effort to put the work into perspective but quickly spins in multiple directions and lacks focus.