NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary
computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
and implemented by researchers at the
Augmentation Research Center
SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing.
The main product to come ...
(ARC) at the
Stanford Research Institute
SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...
(SRI), the NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
links, the
mouse
A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
,
raster-scan
A raster scan, or raster scanning, is the rectangular pattern of image capture and reconstruction in television. By analogy, the term is used for raster graphics, the pattern of image storage and transmission used in most computer bitmap image ...
video monitors, information organized by relevance,
screen windowing,
presentation program
A computing, a presentation program (also called presentation software) is a software package used to display information in the form of a slide show. It has three major functions:
* an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted
* a ...
s, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
),
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
, and the
US Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal ...
.
Development
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
developed his concepts while supported by the US Air Force from 1959 to 1960 and published a framework in 1962.
The strange acronym, NLS (rather than OLS), was an artifact of the evolution of the system. Engelbart's first computers were not able to support more than one user at a time.
First was the
CDC 160A
The CDC 160 series was a series of minicomputers built by Control Data Corporation. The CDC 160 and CDC 160-A were 12-bit minicomputers built from 1960 to 1965; the CDC 160G was a 13-bit minicomputer, with an extended version of the CDC 160-A i ...
in 1963, which had very little programming power of its own.
As a short-term measure, the team developed a system that allowed off-line users—that is, anyone not sitting at the one available terminal—to edit their documents by punching a string of commands onto
paper tape
Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape
Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop
Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage ...
with a
Flexowriter
The Friden Flexowriter produced by the Friden Calculating Machine Company, was a teleprinter, a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct atta ...
.
Once the tape was complete, an off-line user would then feed into the computer the paper tape on which the last document draft had been stored, followed by the new commands to be applied, and the computer would print out a new paper tape containing the latest version of the document.
Without
interactive visualization
Visualization or visualisation (see spelling differences) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and c ...
, this could be awkward, since the user had to mentally simulate the cumulative effects of their commands on the document text. On the other hand, it matched the workflow of the 1960s office, where managers would give marked-up printouts of documents to secretaries.
The design continued to support this "off-line" workflow, as well as an interactive "on-line" ability to edit the same documents. To avoid having two identical acronyms (OLTS), the Off-Line Text System was abbreviated FLTS and the On-Line Text System was abbreviated NLTS. As the system evolved to support more than just text, the "T" was dropped, and the interactive version became known as NLS.
Robert Taylor, who had a background in psychology, provided support from
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
. When Taylor moved to the
Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...
of the US Defense Department's
Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
, he was able to provide additional funding to the project.
NLS development moved to a
CDC 3100 in 1965.
Jeff Rulifson
Johns Frederick (Jeff) Rulifson (born August 20, 1941) is an American computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of ...
joined
SRI
Shri (; , ) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific.
The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Marathi, Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanes ...
in 1966 and became the lead programmer for NLS until leaving the organization in 1973.
In 1968, NLS development moved to an
SDS 940 computer running the
Berkeley Timesharing System
The Berkeley Timesharing System was a pioneering time-sharing operating system implemented between 1964 and 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed as part of Project Genie and marketed by Scientific Data Systems for the S ...
.
It had an approximately 96 MB storage disk and could support up to 16 workstations, each comprising a
raster-scan
A raster scan, or raster scanning, is the rectangular pattern of image capture and reconstruction in television. By analogy, the term is used for raster graphics, the pattern of image storage and transmission used in most computer bitmap image ...
monitor
Monitor or monitor may refer to:
Places
* Monitor, Alberta
* Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States
* Monitor, Kentucky
* Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States
* Monitor, Washington
* Monitor, Logan County, West ...
, a three-button
mouse
A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
, and an input device known as a
chord keyset
A keyset or chorded keyboard (also called a chorded keyset, ''chord keyboard'' or ''chording keyboard'') is a computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a " c ...
. Typed text was sent from the keyset to a specific subsystem that relayed the information along a
bus
A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
to one of two display controllers and display generators. The input text was then sent to a 5-inch (127 mm)
cathode ray tube
A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms ( oscilloscope), pictu ...
(CRT), enclosed by a special cover, and a superimposed video image was received by a professional-quality black-and-white TV camera. The information was sent from the TV camera to the closed-circuit camera control and
patch panel
A patch panel is a device or unit featuring a number of jacks, usually of the same or similar type, for the use of connecting and routing circuits for monitoring, interconnecting, and testing circuits in a convenient, flexible manner. Patch ...
, and finally displayed on each workstation's video monitor.
NLS was demonstrated by Engelbart on December 9, 1968, to a large audience at the
Fall Joint Computer Conference The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield ...
in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
. This has since been dubbed "
The Mother of All Demos
"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Compu ...
", as it not only demonstrated the groundbreaking features of NLS, but also involved the assembly of some remarkable state-of-the-art video technologies. Engelbart's onstage terminal keyboard and mouse were linked by a homemade
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...
at 2400
baud
In telecommunication and electronics, baud (; symbol: Bd) is a common unit of measurement of symbol rate, which is one of the components that determine the speed of communication over a data channel.
It is the unit for symbol rate or modulatio ...
through a
leased line
A leased line is a private telecommunications circuit between two or more locations provided according to a commercial contract. It is sometimes also known as a private circuit, and as a data line in the UK. Typically, leased lines are used by ...
that connected to
ARC's SDS 940 computer in
Menlo Park, 48 kilometers southeast of San Francisco. Two
microwave links carried video
[ from Menlo Park back to an Eidophor video projector loaned by NASA's ]Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
, and, on a 22-foot-high (6.7 m) screen with video insets, the audience could follow Engelbart's actions on his display, observe how he used the mouse, and watch as members of his team in Menlo Park joined in the presentation.
One of the most revolutionary features of NLS, "the Journal", was developed in 1970 by Australian computer engineer David A. Evans as part of his doctoral thesis. The Journal was a primitive hypertext-based groupware program, which can be seen as a predecessor (if not the direct ancestor) of all contemporary server software that supports collaborative document creation (like wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
s). It was used by ARC members to discuss, debate, and refine concepts in the same way that wikis are being used today.
The Journal was used to store documents for the Network Information Center
The Network Information Center (NIC), also known as InterNIC from 1993 until 1998, was the organization primarily responsible for Domain Name System (DNS) domain name allocations and X.500 directory services. From its inception in 1972 until Oc ...
and early network email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
archives.
Most Journal documents have been preserved in paper form and are stored in Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
's archives; these provide a valuable record of the evolution of the ARC community from 1970 until the advent of commercialization in 1976. An additional set of Journal documents exists at the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
in California, along with a large collection of ARC backup tapes dating from the early 1970s, as well as some of the SDS 940 tapes from the 1960s.
The NLS was implemented using several domain-specific languages that were handled using the Tree Meta
The TREE-META (or Tree Meta, TREEMETA) Translator Writing System is a compiler-compiler system for context-free languages originally developed in the 1960s. Parsing statements of the metalanguage resemble augmented Backus–Naur form with embedde ...
compiler-compiler system. The eventual implementation language was called L10.
In 1970, NLS was ported to the PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
computer (as modified by BBN to run the TENEX operating system). By mid-1971, the TENEX implementation of NLS was put into service as the new Network Information Center, but even this computer could handle only a small number of simultaneous users. Access was possible from either custom-built display workstations, or simple typewriter-like terminals which were less expensive and more common at the time.
By 1974, the NIC had spun off to a separate project on its own computer.
Firsts
All of the features of NLS were in support of Engelbart's goal of augmenting collective knowledge work
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "thin ...
and therefore focused on making the user more powerful, not simply on making the system easier to use. These features therefore supported a full-interaction paradigm with rich interaction possibilities for a trained user, rather than what Engelbart referred to as the WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get) paradigm that came later.
* The computer mouse
* 2-dimensional display editing
* In-file object addressing, linking
* Hypermedia
* Outline processing
* Flexible view control
* Multiple windows
* Cross-file editing
* Integrated hypermedia email
* Hypermedia publishing
* Document version control
* Shared-screen teleconferencing
* Computer-aided meetings
* Formatting directives
* Context-sensitive help
* Distributed client-server architecture
* Uniform command syntax
* Universal "user interface" front-end module
* Multi-tool integration
* Grammar-driven command language interpreter
* Protocols for virtual terminals
* Remote procedure call protocols
* Compilable "Command Meta Language"
Engelbart said: "Many of those firsts came right out of the staff's innovations — even had to be explained to me before I could understand them. he staff deservesmore recognition."
Decline and succession
The downfall of NLS, and subsequently, of ARC in general, was the program's difficult learning curve
A learning curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between how Skill, proficient people are at a task and the amount of experience they have. Proficiency (measured on the vertical axis) usually increases with increased experience ...
. NLS was not designed to be easy to learn; it employed the heavy use of program modes, relied on a strict hierarchical structure, did not have a point-and-click interface, and forced the user to have to learn cryptic mnemonic codes to do anything useful with the system. The chord keyset, which complemented the modal nature of NLS, forced the user to learn a 5-bit binary code if they did not want to use the keyboard. Finally, with the arrival of the ARPA Network at SRI in 1969, the time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1
Its emergence a ...
technology that seemed practical with a small number of users became impractical over a distributed network
Network, networking and networked may refer to:
Science and technology
* Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects
* Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks
Mathematics
...
; time-sharing was rapidly being replaced with individual minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
s (and later microcomputer
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...
s) and workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...
s. Attempts to port NLS to other hardware, such as the PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
and later on the DECSYSTEM-20
The DECSYSTEM-20 was a 36-bit Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computer running the TOPS-20 operating system (products introduced in 1977).
PDP-10 computers running the TOPS-10 operating system were labeled ''DECsystem-10'' as a ...
, were successful, but did nothing to spread NLS beyond SRI.
Frustrated by the direction of Engelbart's "bootstrapping" crusade, many top SRI researchers left, with many ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Sta ...
, taking the mouse idea with them. SRI sold NLS to Tymshare
Tymshare, Inc (Matthew Heyer-Baker) was a time-sharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company competing with companies such as CompuServe, Service Bureau Corporation and National CSS. Tymshare developed or acquired various technolog ...
in 1977 and renamed it Augment. Tymshare was, in turn, sold to McDonnell Douglas
McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produ ...
in 1984.
Some of the "full-interaction" paradigm lives on in different systems, including the Hyperwords
Hyperwords or liquid information refers to text that can be sent to programs or services (such as emails, dictionaries, online translators) through a simple set of commands. It is a selection-based interface which can be used for references, sea ...
add-on for Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and a ...
. The Hyperwords concept grew out of the Engelbart web-documentary Invisible Revolution. The aim of the project is to allow users to interact with all the words on the Web, not only the links. Hyperwords works through a simple hierarchical menu, but also gives users access to keyboard "phrases" in the spirit of NLS commands and features Views, which are inspired by the powerful NLS ViewSpecs. The Views allow the user to re-format web pages on the fly. Engelbart was on the Advisory Board of The Hyperwords Company from its inception in 2006 until his death in 2013.
From 2005 through 2008, a volunteer group from the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
attempted to restore the system.
See also
* File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS)
* ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in ...
Notes
References
Further reading
*{{Cite book , title= Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing , author= Thierry Bardini , author-link= Thierry Bardini , year=2000 , publisher=Stanford University Press , location=Stanford , isbn=978-0-8047-3723-4 , url= https://archive.org/details/bootstrapping00thie , url-access= registration
External links
* On th
Doug Engelbart Institute website
see especially th
for links to the demo and to later panel discussions by participants in the demo
Engelbart'
and th
page.
A high-resolution version of the 1968 Demo video
HyperScope, a browser-based project to recreate and extend NLS/Augment
Douglas Engelbart himself is involved in this project
NLS documents at bitsavers.org
OpenAugment
another now defunct NLS/Augment implementation
Hypertext
History of human–computer interaction
SRI International software