Category: Timeline Stories

The first working hypertext system, named NLS, or the “oN-Line System”, was developed in the early 1960s by the prominent American inventor and computer pioneer Douglas Carl Engelbart (1925-2013). In fact, NLS was a revolutionary computer collaboration system that was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts.

NLS system of Douglas Engelbart
In the late summer of 1945, at the very end of World War II, a young 20 years old US Navy radar technician in the Philippines—Douglas Engelbart, went to the local Red Cross library and picked up a copy of the Atlantic Monthly journal from July 1945. There he stumbled upon an interesting article, namely Vannevar Bush‘s work As We May Think, presenting his “memex” automated library system. The young Douglas was profoundly influenced by Bush’s vision of the future of information technology.

In the 1950s Engelbart started developing Bush’s ideas, extending them to the broader field of something, which he will later on call Augmenting Human Intellect. In 1957 he joined the Stanford Research Institute and in 1962 started work on Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. It was a project to develop computer tools to augment human capabilities, for “boosting mankind’s capability for coping with complex, urgent problems”. In October 1962, Engelbart published his own version of Bush’s vision, describing an advanced electronic information system in the paper “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” (see the paper Augmenting Human Intellect), prepared for the Air Force Office Of Scientific Research and Development.

In this article he mentioned: Most of the structuring forms I’ll show you stem from the simple capability of being able to establish arbitrary linkages between different substructures, and of directing the computer subsequently to display a set of linked substructures with any relative positioning we might designate among the different substructures. You can designate as many different kinds of links as you wish, so that you can specify different display or manipulative treatment for the different types.

Engelbart demonstrated creating links between three sample sentences, mentioning: “Here is one standard portrayal, for which I have established a computer process to do the structuring automatically on the basis of the interword links.”…
He aimed at a term with the light pen and hit a few strokes on the keyset, and the old text jumped farther out of the way and the definition appeared above the diagram, with the defined term brighter than the rest of the diagram. And he showed you also how you could link secondary phrases (or sentences) to parts of the statement for more detailed description. These secondary substructures wouldn’t appear when you normally viewed the statement, but could be brought in by simple request if you wanted closer study…
It proves to be terrifically useful to be able to work easily with statements that represent more sophisticated and complex concepts. Sort of like being able to use structural members that are lighter and stronger—it gives you new freedom in building structures…

In the same 1962, Engelbart hired a small team of researchers to develop a demonstration hyper collaborative knowledge environment system called NLS (for oNLine System), first published (see the article for NLS and mouse) and publicly demonstrated in 1968. The NLS system is difficult to describe since it is a very richly comprehensive environment of tools and practices for facilitating any scale of heavy knowledge work. Engelbart used NLS for all its own knowledge work, from drafting, publishing, email, shared screen collaborative viewing and editing, document cataloging, project management, shared address book, and all source code development and maintenance—all in an integrated hyper groupware environment, filled with many special features for high-performance work.

For example, the user can create a link to any paragraph or line of code or email paragraph, and he can see when paragraphs and lines of code were last edited and by whom, and even view a file filtered by the author since a certain date and time (as in why doesn’t the code work this morning, let’s see who was in there changing what when!), he can browse with outline views, drill down into the structure of a document or source code and fly around with a number of precision browsing features and custom viewing features, and edit the structure as well as the text, within and across files and application domains.

Engelbart continued to evolve NLS under real-world usage with a team of up to 47 researchers in his lab at SRI, cultivating a networked community of early customer IT pioneers via the newly formed ARPANET.

Mouse of Douglas Engelbart

The now ubiquitous computer mouse was conceived of in the early 1960s by Douglas Engelbart as just a tiny piece of a much larger project, started in 1962, aimed at augmenting human intellect. At the time of the invention of the mouse, Engelbart had already been exploring possible ways for people to increase their capability to solve complex problems for almost a dozen years. Engelbart and William (Bill) English (a colleague of Engelbart and the maker of the mouse) envisioned problem-solvers using computer-aided working stations to augment their efforts. They required the ability to interact with information displays using some sort of device to move a cursor around the screen. There were several devices then in use or being considered for use: the light pen, joysticks, etc. The authors however were looking for the best and the most efficient device.
They approached NASA in 1966, and said, let’s test them, and determine the answer once-and-for-all. With NASA funding, the team developed a set of simple tasks and timed a group of volunteers in doing those tasks with the various devices. For example, the computer would generate an object in a random position on the screen, and a cursor somewhere else. They timed how long it took the users to move the cursor to the object. It quickly became clear that the mouse out-performed all the others. Devices like the light pen simply took too much time, by repeatedly requiring the user to pick up the pointer and reach all the way to the screen, which was very tiresome.

In 1964, the first prototype of the computer mouse was made to use with a graphical user interface (GUI) “windows”. The original mouse had the cord in the front, but they quickly moved it to the back end to get it out of the way. It was a simple mechanical device with two perpendicularly mounted discs on the bottom. You could tilt or rock the mouse to draw perfectly straight horizontal or vertical lines. Engelbart applied for a patent in 1967 and received it as an assignor of SRI for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (see U.S. Patent No. 3541541) in 1970, describing it in the patent application as an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” “It was nicknamed the mouse because the tail came out the end,” Engelbart revealed about his invention. His version of windows and GUI was not considered patentable (no software patents were issued at that time), but Engelbart has over 45 other patents to his name.

In early 1967 Engelbart and Bill English published a paper, discussing this test and also referred to an interesting “knee-control” device that appeared promising. That device was based on Engelbart’s observation that the human foot was a pretty sensitive controller of the gas pedal in cars. They discovered that the knee offered even better control at slight movements in all directions. In tests, it outperformed the mouse by a small margin. A sample device was cooked up by Engelbart’s lab for moving the cursor on the display screen (see the nearby photo).

After Engelbart got the idea, he hired Bill English (see the nearby photo), who had been working in another lab at SRI, to make the hardware design. Later on, the group was joined by Jeff Rulifson, who made a big difference in the quality of the software involved.

The first production workstation and mouse were made in 1967 (see the lower photo). The mouse had a plastic casing on a metal base plate. Although the casing was originally designed for the cord to be attached to the wrist side of the device, it is seen here with the cord coming out from the other end.

The mouse, as well as other advanced technologies, were demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in the famous demonstration of experimental computer technologies on 9 December 1968. In the so-called, The Mother of All Demos Engelbart featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.

It is interesting, that the inventor of one of the most popular computer interface devices ever in the world didn’t receive any royalties for his mouse invention. As he received the patent as an assignor of SRI, SRI licensed it to Apple for something like $40000, which was ridiculous. Engelbart received nothing!

The first cordless mouse was shipped in September 1984, with the Metaphor computer of David Liddle and Donald Massaro, former Xerox PARC engineers. The computer also had a cordless keyboard and functional keypad. The mouse was built for Metaphor by Logitech and used infrared (IR) signals to transmit mouse data to the computer. The problem with such devices that used IR technology was that, in order to work, they needed a clear line of sight between the mouse and the computer’s receiver, a potential problem on a cluttered desk. Hence, cordless mice did not get traction until this problem was solved. This was accomplished by replacing IR with radio frequency (RF) communications.

Three people can be credited as inventors of packet-switched networks, thus laying foundations for the Internet: Leonard Kleinrock, Donald Davies, and Paul Baran.

Leonard Kleinrock (born on 13 June 1934, in New York) is a famous American engineer and computer scientist, who made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking. He also played an important role in the development of the ARPANET.

Kleinrock is from a poor family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1951, Kleinrock’s father asked him to stay in New York to help support the family. So Leonard wrote letters to “every chamber of commerce in the country,” and asked for scholarship opportunities in their towns. Kleinrock worked as a technician at a cousin’s shop and spent 5 and a half (instead of 4) years, taking night classes at New York City College, where in 1957 he received his BEE (Bachelor of Electrical Engineering) degree.

In 1958 he went to MIT, to work on his Ph.D. for the best guy at MIT—Claude Shannon, the creator of Information Theory and the mathematical concept of entropy, not to mention the resurrector of Boolean algebra as a useful way for describing data. “Brilliant man,” Kleinrock says. “My role model then and now.”
At MIT Kleinrock received a master’s degree (1959) and a Ph.D. (1963) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1961 he published his first paper on digital network communications, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets. He developed his ideas further in his 1962 Ph.D. thesis (see the Ph.D. thesis of Kleinrock), establishing a mathematical theory of packet networks (packet switching), and then published a comprehensive analytical treatment of digital networks in his book Communication Nets in 1964.

After completing his thesis, Kleinrock moved to UCLA (the University of California at Los Angeles), and later established the Network Measurement Center (NMC), led by himself and consisting of a group of graduate students, working in the area of digital networks.

Many of Kleinrock’s initial ideas came from brainstorming about the best way for students and researchers at MIT to most efficiently share computer time. “Computers burst data, they transmit then they stop a while, while they’re thinking or processing or whatever. And in those days data communication lines were really expensive,” said Kleinrock. “The idea was, don’t dedicate a resource to somebody—when I was sitting there, scratching my head, that machine was idle, I’m not using it. You want to do it in dynamic fashion: whoever needs it gets it now. If you’re not using it, let somebody else in.”

When in 1966, Lawrence Roberts (a colleague of Kleinrock from MIT) joined the project of developing the ARPANET, he used Kleinrock’s Communication Nets to help convince his colleagues that a wide area digital communication network was possible. In October 1968, Roberts gave a contract to Kleinrock’s center as the ideal group to perform ARPANET performance measurement and find areas for improvement.

On a historical day in early September 1969, a team at Kleinrock’s NMC connected one of their SDS (Scientific Data Systems) Sigma 7 computers to an Interface Message Processor (the first switch), thereby becoming the first node on the ARPANET, and the first computer ever on the Internet (see the lower photo).

As the ARPANET grew in the early 1970s, Kleinrock’s group stressed the system to work out the detailed design and performance issues involved with the world’s first packet-switched network, including routing, loading, deadlocks, and latency.

Kleinrock later published several of the standard works on the subject, continued to be active in the research community, published more than 200 papers, and authored six books. His theoretical work on hierarchical routing, done in the late 1970s with his student Farouk Kamoun, is now critical to the operation of today’s worldwide Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock has received numerous professional awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE fellow, and an ACM fellow. He is the recipient of the Marconi Award, the L. M. Ericsson Prize, the UCLA Outstanding Teacher Award, the Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award, the INFORMS Presidents Award, and the IEEE Harry Goode Award. He shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for 2001 with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Lawrence Roberts for their work on the ARPANET and Internet. He was selected to receive the prestigious National Medal of Science, from President George W. Bush in the White House on 29 September 2008.

The USA philosopher, sociologist, and pioneer of information technology Theodor Holm “Ted” Nelson (born on 17 June 1937 to Ralph Nelson, a film and television director, producer, and actor, and his wife—Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm) is a rather controversial figure not only in the computing world. He used to repeat his four maxims by which he leads his life: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

Ted Nelson stated: “In 1960 I had a vision of a worldwide system of electronic publishing, anarchic and populist, where anyone could publish anything and anyone could read it. (So far, sounds like the web.) But my approach is about literary depth—including side-by-side intercomparison, annotation, and a unique copyright proposal. I now call this “deep electronic literature” instead of “hypertext,” since people now think hypertext means the web.

After graduating the Swarthmore college with a BA in philosophy, in 1960, Ted enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. During his first year, he took a course in computer programming using an IBM 7090 computer and began to think about writing a document management system to index and organize his collection of notes. He started a term project for creating a writing system similar to a word processor (essentially it was a word processor capable of storing multiple versions and displaying the differences between these versions), but that would allow different versions and documents to be linked together by association and nonlinearly. He did not complete his first project but continued to work on a system, which was very similar to that, envisioned by Vannevar Bush (see the memex of Bush), but based not on microfilms, as “memex”, but on computer. This idea became the overriding concern of his entire life.

Let’s see what exactly inspiration led Nelson to develop hypertext (excerpt from an interview for Wired magazine):
Well I was always, as a kid, into writing and reading and literature and movies basically, like a lot of people, and I had done a great deal of writing as a youth, and re-writing, and the intricacy of taking ideas and sentences and trying to arrange them into coherent, sensible, structures of thought struck me as a particularly intricate and complex task, and I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential and somehow put them in a row because print as it appears on the paper, or in handwriting, is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had a structure, shall we say, a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. You had two it seemed—and now I’m reconstructing because I don’t know how explicitly I thought this out as a youth—you had to take these two additional steps of deconstructing some thoughts into linear sequence, and then reconstructing them. Why couldn’t that all be bypassed by having a nonsequential structure of thought which you presented directly? That was the hypothesis—well the hyperthesis really—of hypertext, that you could save both the writer’s time and the reader’s time and effort in putting together and understanding what was being presented.

On top of his basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document. At the beginning of 1965, Nelson used for the first time the term “hyper-text”. Later in 1965, he presented a paper on “zippered lists” (key algorithm in his Xanadu system) at a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery, in which he published the term. These “zippered lists” would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named transclusion.

Nelson continued to expound his ideas, but he did not possess the technical knowledge to tell others how his ideas could be implemented, and so many people simply ignored him, but he still persisted. In 1967, he named his system XANADU, and with the help of interested, mainly younger, computer hacks continued to develop it. In his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and in the 1981 Literary Machines Nelson described his ideas.
Xanadu is a high-performance hypertext system that assures the identity of references to objects and solves the problems of configuration management and copyright control. Anyone is allowed to reference anything, provided that references are delivered from the original, and possibly involving micro payments to the copyright holders. Let see which are at the moment the basic objectives of Xanadu, as they were defined on xanadu.com:

• High-power hypertext (much richer structures than “pages”)
• Any number of overlapping, publishable two-way links made by any number of people
• EVERYTHING ANNOTATABLE (a special case of the above)
• VERSION MANAGEMENT, with surviving portions viewable side by side
• RIGHTS MANAGEMENT by:
• Generalized permission for on-line re-use (now called transcopyright)
• Payment by each user for any downloaded quotation
• All quotations back-followable to their original contexts
• EVERYTHING FREELY REPUBLISHABLE

In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralized source of information, calling it a “docuverse”.

In 1979, Nelson formed a strong group of his followers, to hash out their ideas for Xanadu, but with no success. The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983 however, Nelson obtain the support of John Walker, founder of Autodesk, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk’s financial backing.

Xanadu has never been totally completed and is far from being implemented even now. Since 1999 it is an open-source project. In many ways, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is a similar, though much simplified, system. Let’s see what is the opinion of Nelson for WWW (excerpt from the same interview for Wired magazine):
…I think the WWW was a brilliant simplification. As I understand it, and maybe I have this wrong, but Tim Berners-Lee came and we had lunch, in, oh I guess it was 1989, 90, something like that, in Sausalito, and I really liked the guy, and he’d done this very simple thing, and it sounded too trivial to me {laughs} but he certainly was a nice fellow and I expected to keep in touch with him, although I am a very bad correspondent, and the next thing I knew suddenly the thing had caught on. And what it turns out to be is simply an extension of file transfer protocol, in other words it’s saying you can anonymously go in and dip in and take out this file and here is a proposed way to look at it. This is called HTML. You have to understand the HTML/SGML kind of format where you’ve got all these warty little knobs and boogers in it that are formatting codes—this is absolutely contrary to the Xanadu idea that you have clean data undefiled. However, it works, it’s very simple, and you can always take those things out, so that’s OK. But all it is is FTP with lipstick so that you can look at these things and the jump addresses are hidden and the formats and you have paragraph levels and stuff and it’s basically what people needed and frankly I think it’s much better than word processing. I’m really happy now that I’m planning to switch from Microsoft Word to HTML just because there’s no need not to. It’s a perfectly good format, and it makes everything simpler to browse in.

Murray Leinster (1896-1975) was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, a famous American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

In the March 1946 issue of the American science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction was published Murray Leinster’s short story “A Logic Named Joe”. The story actually appeared under Leinster’s real name, Will F. Jenkins, since that issue of Astounding also included a story under the Leinster pseudonym called “Adapter”. In this story, Leinster made one of the first descriptions of a personal computer (called “logic”) in science fiction. Moreover, in the story, Leinster imaged a global network, connecting logics, a real forerunner of the now ubiquitous Internet.

Leinster envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called “tanks”), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and even commerce. One of his characters says that logics are civilization.

The story’s narrator is a logic maintenance man, working for the Logics Company, nicknamed Ducky. In the story, a logic named Joe develops some degree of sapience and ambition. Joe proceeds to switch around a few relays in the tank (tank one of a distributed set of central information repositories, something similar to the web servers on the World Wide Web), and cross-correlate all information ever assembled (massive data-mining)—yielding highly unexpected results. Joe then proceeds to freely disseminate all of those results to everyone on demand (and simultaneously disabling all of the content-filtering protocols). Logics everywhere begin offering up unexpected assistance, offering to solve generally all human problems—from designing custom chemicals to alleviate inebriation, to giving sex advice to small children, to plotting the perfect murder. Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds to have attempted. Societal chaos quickly ensued, and the situation became critical.

And finally, what Ducky was supposed to do in this situation? Neither more nor less than to save civilization, disconnecting Joe and putting the logic down in the cellar. It was a simple and effective solution, wasn’t it? Sometimes I wish we had a similar solution 😉

The idea of 3D printing also came to Leinster in 1945, when he described the technology with surprising accuracy in his short story “Things Pass By”. He envisioned a machine that could take his drawings and replicate them with a moving arm, using melted plastic to form 3D objects.

A general concept of and procedure to be used in 3D printing was next described by Raymond F. Jones in his story, “Tools of the Trade,” published in the November 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. He referred to it as a “molecular spray” in that story.

In 1971, Johannes F. Gottwald patented the Liquid Metal Recorder (see US pat. Nr. 3596285), a continuous Inkjet metal material device to form a removable metal fabrication on a reusable surface for immediate use or salvaged for printing again by remelting. This appears to be the first patent describing 3D printing with rapid prototyping and controlled on-demand manufacturing of patterns.

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) was an American engineer, policymaker, and science administrator, known primarily for his work on analog computing and his political role in the development of the atomic bomb. In 1945, in the article, As We May Think (the paper was originally written in 1939, but was published in the July 1945 issue of the magazine The Atlantic Monthly) Bush proposed a theoretical proto-hypertext system (an electromechanical device, called memex), which has influenced the development of subsequent hypertext and intellect augmenting computer systems.

Bush was inspired by perceptions of need that are, similar to those that inspired Paul Otlet, Herbert Wells, and Emanuel Goldberg. Following the expansion of scientific activity, he had come to believe that our methods for transmitting and reviewing the results of the research were no longer adequate. As the scientific specialization needed for progress increases, the investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. It seemed to him that publication has been extended beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
In his view, as an engineer and scientist, the answer was to be found in harnessing technology to provide a sophisticated mechanical solution to the problem. Bush’s idea should be viewed from the historical perspective of microfilm technology developed prior to 1945, as Bush was involved in the development of this technology and directed the creation of a photoelectronic microfilm rapid selector at MIT during 1938-1940.

Extrapolating from the technology of his time, Bush described a new kind of device which was a sort of mechanized file and library. He called it a “memex” (from “memory extender”):
A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise, it looks like an ordinary desk (see the lower illustration from the September 1945, issue of Life magazine).

All of the documents used in the memex would be in the form of microfilm copy acquired as such or, in the case of personal records, transformed to microfilm by the machine itself. Memex would also employ new retrieval techniques based on a new kind of associative indexing the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another to create personal “trails” through linked documents. The new procedures, that Bush anticipated facilitating information storage and retrieval would lead to the development of wholly new forms of encyclopedia.

The most important mechanism, conceived by Bush and considered as closed to the modern hypertext systems is the associative trail. It would be a way to create a new linear sequence of microfilm frames across any arbitrary sequence of microfilm frames by creating a chained sequence of links in the way just described, along with personal comments and side trails.
The essential feature of the memex [is] the process of tying two items together… When the user is building a trail, he names it in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each, there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined… Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space.

The article of Bush has not described any automatic search, nor any universal metadata scheme such as a standard library classification or a hypertext element set. Instead, when the user made an entry, such as a new or annotated manuscript, or image, he was expected to index and describe it in his personal code book. Later on, by consulting his code book, the user could retrace annotated and generated entries.

In 1965 Bush took part in the project INTREX of MIT, for developing technology for the mechanization of the processing of information for library use. In his 1967 essay titled “Memex Revisited”, he pointed out that the development of the digital computer, the transistor, the video, and other similar devices had heightened the feasibility of such mechanization, but costs would delay its achievements. He was right again.

Ted Nelson, who later did pioneering work with the first practical hypertext system and coined the term “hypertext” in the 1960s, credited Bush as his main influence. Others, such as Licklider and Douglas Engelbart have also paid homage to Bush. The modern Internet, the development and proliferation of high-density storage media, and the critical dependence of computer users on searching are resounding testimonies to Vannevar Bush’s foresight.

In the 1920s the German scientist Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970) of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, pioneered electronic retrieval technology and library automation. Goldberg designed, built, and demonstrated a “photoelectric microfilm selector” which contained many, if not all, of the concepts history of science professionals now associate with Vannevar Bush. It seems this was the first practical application of electronics to the selection of data on film.

In 1914, Emanuel Goldberg developed a machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code (early OCR). Later (by May 1927) Goldberg designed a photoelectric microfilm selector, which he called a statistical machine. Two prototypes were built at Zeiss Ikon by 1931 and, perhaps, constitute the first successful electronic document retrieval.

During the International Congress of Photography in Dresden in 1931, Goldberg presented his “Statistical Machine,” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents.

The Congress of Photography in Dresden in 1931, must be regarded as a peak in Goldberg’s career. It was the proposal presented on behalf of the Committee for Sensitometry by Goldberg and his professor Robert Luther for a standard measure of film speeds that became the principal topic of discussion. This proposal led to the adoption of the familiar DIN and ASA film speed ratings. At the Congress Goldberg gave extremely interesting lectures and was awarded the prestigious Peligot medal of the French Society for Photography and Cinematography.

These events seem to have overshadowed a paper that Goldberg presented at one of the technical sessions entitled “Neue Wege der photographischen Registertechnik” (New Methods of Photographic Indexing). It was a clear and concise paper describing the design of a microfilm selector using a photoelectric cell. It is, perhaps, the first paper on electronic document retrieval and describes what seems to have been the first functioning document retrieval system using electronics. A prototype was also demonstrated.

In the 1920s microfilm had become popular as a storage medium for records (e.g. in banks), and all kinds of people were busily inventing microfilm equipment. Microfilming saved storage space and banks found that microfilming canceled checks was a useful measure against fraud. But, since the documents were unlikely to have been microfilmed in an order that was convenient for identifying individual records, the question became how to search for any given document.

Obviously, the best solution was to have an integral retrieval system (one which combined the index and the document). There are two logical possibilities. One could attach frames of microfilm to the card (“aperture cards”) or one could record the logical equivalent of a punched card onto the microfilm alongside the image of the document. One might punch holes in the film or arrange opaque and translucent spots on the film to denote hole or no-hole. Each of these techniques was tried. The usual form of microfilm selector technology is to create a “search card” (a punched card) or template, bearing the coding pattern sought, and align it and the coded areas on the microfilm between a light source and a photoelectric cell.

In the nearby picture, you can see the Statistical Machine’s sensing mechanism. Rays from the light are blocked by the search card except for the holes for the code being sought.

As the microfilm bearing codes move past the search card (see the nearby picture), the coincidence of a pattern on the microfilm matching the pattern on the search card would affect the flow of light from the light source to the photocell and, thereby, the flow of electric current from the photocell. In this way, the desired record is identified and appropriate action, such as the creation of a copy, is triggered.

When Goldberg’s U.S. patent appeared in 1931 (see the patent No. 1838389), IBM promptly acquired a license for it. James Bryce, the Chief Scientific Director of IBM, monitored new developments in electronics and was interested in microfilm as a data storage medium. Later in 1936, Bryce himself applied for a patent for an advanced microfilm selector.

Note: For more information on Emanuel Goldberg, see Prof. Michael Buckland’s book “Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine” or his web page http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html.

Biography of Emanuel Goldberg

Emanuel Goldberg was born as Эмануэль Гольдберг on 31 August 1881, in Moscow, in the Russian Jewish family of Colonel Grigorii Ignatievich Goldberg (полковник Григорий Игнатьевич Гольдберг), a high-ranking officer in the Tsar’s military medical corps and his wife Olga Moiseevna Grodsenka (Ольга Мойсеевна Гроценко).

Grigorii Goldberg (born 1853) was a distinguished and decorated Colonel in the Medical Corps at Tsar’s Army, later a Court Counselor (in the Russian Empire it was very unusual for a Jew to obtain such positions, so Grigorii Goldberg must have been a remarkable man). In 1879 Grigorii Goldberg married Olga Grodsenka (born 1859), from Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania).

The first child in the family was Raphael (b. 1880), then Emanuel (1881), and Tamara (1884).

Emanuel began his life and was educated in the cultured, cosmopolitan world of the upper middle classes in late 19th-century Moscow. His teachers were German.

The young Emanuel was not a fast learner, had difficulty memorizing, and was late in beginning to talk, but he was, by his own admission, a man with an obsession: At the age of six, I was shown by a friend of the family how a lever can be used to lighten work. Since then I have been obsessed with the idea that, by using a tool, life can be made more pleasant. To be an engineer seemed to me the highest goal. It was not easy for s Jewish boy in Czarist Russia to reach this goal. Instead of playing with my tools, I had to learn the irregular verbs of Russian, German, French, English, Greek, Latin, [Church] Slavonic, and, last but not least, Hebrew for the Bar-Mitzva. I hated learning languages…

Emanuel was also interested in the natural sciences, especially geology and zoology. His secondary school (3rd Moscow Gymnasium) leaving certificate record primarily “excellent” grades, and he ranked second in his class. He then applied to the engineering degree program at the Imperial Technical School of Moscow. However, the Imperial Technical School had a restrictive admission quota for Jewish, meaning in practice, that no more than one Jewish student would be admitted. Despite performing excellently in the entrance examination, Goldberg was not accepted (there was another Jewish with the same result, and the choice was made by a lot, Goldberg wasn’t the lucky fellow.)

Deeply disappointed by this discrimination, Goldberg enrolled instead at the University of Moscow to study Chemistry. He was an exceptional student and collaborated in research in electrochemical reactions with Alexander Speranskii, a faculty member, who specialized in physical chemistry. In 1903 Goldberg received his first patent and earned some money. He remained in Moscow until 1904, although spending quite some time also abroad at German and English universities. In 1904 he enrolled at Leipzig University for a doctoral dissertation.

In April 1906, Goldberg received a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig, awarded with highest honors, summa cum laude. After a year as assistant to Adolf Miethe in the Photochemistry Laboratory at the Technical University in Charlottenburg, Berlin, he became head of the photographic department of the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookcraft, in Leipzig from 1907 to 1917.

In 1917 Goldberg was recruited by the Carl Zeiss firm in Jena to become a director of its photographic products subsidiary ICA (Internationale Camera Aktien Gesellschaft) in Dresden where he introduced the spring-driven Kinamo movie camera. In 1926 four leading photographic firms formed Zeiss Ikon under Goldberg’s leadership until he was kidnapped by Nazis in 1933 and fled to Paris. After four years working for Zeiss subsidiaries in France, Goldberg moved to Palestine in 1937 where he established a laboratory, Goldberg Instruments, which became the Electro-Optical Industries (“El-Op”) in Rehovot.

On 28 June 1907 Goldberg married Sophie Posniak (28 August 1886-10 December 1968). They had a son, Herbert Goldberg (b. 20 November 1914), and a daughter Renate Eva, now Chava Gichon (b. 19 September 1922).

Goldberg retired in 1960 but continued his research and died in Tel Aviv on 13 September 1970.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932) was a famous German chemist, one of the founders of the field of physical chemistry, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria, and reaction velocities.

In 1910 Ostwald was in Brussels, where he met Paul Otlet, and they discussed the methods of organization of knowledge. Ostwald had a long-standing interest in the organization of science, the relationship between science and society, and the effective publication and use of scientific literature. He was very interested in the efforts of Otlet and his partner Henri LaFontaine to create their Universal Decimal Classification and Universal Bibliographical Repertory, a catalog of all documents of all kinds, including images.

Ostwald was so inspired by Otlet’s institute, that he decided to establish a similar initiative in Germany. He invited Adolf Saager (1879-1949), a German writer, and Karl Wilhelm Bührer (1861-1917), a Swiss businessman, and in June 1911, using Ostwald’s Nobel Prize money, they founded in Munich “The Bridge: International Institute for the Organizing of Knowledge Work”. The founders believed, that scientific and intellectual work was more the result of the efforts of individuals, who are geographically and otherwise isolated from each other, so bridges are needed to connect them. Ostwald, just like Emanuel Goldberg and Paul Otlet, believed in the need for creative interaction between science and society. Soon they published in German and in Esperanto the manifesto of The Bridge, entitled, “The Organizing of Intellectual Work” (see the nearby image).

Ostwald and his friends advanced a modernist approach to the management of knowledge by seeking to atomize literature into small components of recorded thoughts, much smaller than books, articles, and reports. They believed these individual single chinks of knowledge could be arranged and linked in multiple ways, using the expanded decimal classification for the especially important and difficult task of linking each chink with other chunks on the same and related topics. They intended to use as units of recorded knowledge sets of printed cards.

A complete set of all cards would provide a comprehensive, dynamically updated, easily distributed encyclopedia of all recorded knowledge, which in 1912, Ostwald described as a “world brain”. Anyone could then assemble, selectively, the set of cards, that would constitute a concise summary of any field of interest.

Ostwald and his friends called their approach to manipulate and rearrange knowledge das Monographprinzip (monographic principle). Their use of this principle was a form of hypertext and the sophisticated structure of links between documents. Of course, prior to the use of digital computers, hypertext was cumbersome and laborious.

Unfortunately, after a brief but vigorous existence and after publishing numerous pamphlets, in 1913, the Bridge collapsed when the Ostwald’s prize money ran out.

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) is an internationally famous English author, and a prolific writer in many genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary, best known however for his work in the science fiction genre. Wells is often referred to as The Father of Science Fiction. Everybody knows his The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, etc.

Approaching the end of his life, in 1938, Wells published a book of essays, called World Brain (some of the essays were first presented with great success as speeches in 1937), which he later on described as a book quite bold and uncompromising in substance, but still with a distinctly propitiatory manner. In several instances throughout the book, Wells presents his idea of a universal, evolving encyclopedia, that would help people become better-informed citizens of the world.

The essay The Brain Organization of the Modern World lays out Wells’s vision for …a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. Wells felt that technological advances, such as microfilm, could be used towards this end so that any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica.

In the essay, titled The World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia (see the essay) Wells explains how then-current encyclopedias failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. Wells asserted the need for an entirely new world organ, that should be created for the collection, organization, and release of knowledge. This he called the Permanent World Encyclopedia, and it would include everything from the practical needs of society to general, global education. In addition, he explained the importance of workers whose job it would be to continually update and maintain this index of knowledge.

Admittedly, Wells was a writer, not a technical genius, so he couldn’t imagine what could be the technological base of such a World Encyclopedia. According to him, micro-photography would also be vital, as it could provide a visual record of the knowledge it contains.

The great inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was also a great dreamer. In 1893, he started his wireless investigations and several years later he described his futuristic vision: a means of tapping the sun’s energy with an antenna, the possibility to control the weather with electrical energy, outlined machines that would make war an impossibility and proposed a global system of wireless communications.

In a 1900 issue of the Century Magazine (June 1900; page number(s): 175-211), Tesla published a sensational article—”The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”.

In this article among many other things, Tesla proposed to use stationary waves in the earth for telegraphy without wires to any distance:
With these developments, we have every reason to anticipate that in a time not very distant most telegraphic messages across the oceans will be transmitted without cables. For short distances, we need a “wireless” telephone, which requires no expert operators. The greater the spaces to be bridged, the more rational becomes communication without wires. The cable is not only an easily damaged and costly instrument, but it limits us in the speed of transmission by reason of a certain electrical property inseparable from its construction. A properly designed plant for effecting communication without wires ought to have many times the working capacity of a cable, while it will involve incomparably less expense. Not a long time will pass, I believe, before communication by cable will become obsolete, for not only will signaling by this new method be quicker and cheaper, but also much safer. By using some new means for isolating the messages which I have contrived, an almost perfect privacy can be secured.
I have observed the above effects so far only up to a limited distance of about six hundred miles, but inasmuch as there is virtually no limit to the power of the vibrations producible with such an oscillator, I feel quite confident of the success of such a plant for effecting transoceanic communication. Nor is this all. My measurements and calculations have shown that it is perfectly practicable to produce on our globe, by the use of these principles, an electrical movement of such magnitude that, without the slightest doubt, its effect will be perceptible on some of our nearer planets, as Venus and Mars. Thus from mere possibility, interplanetary communication has entered the stage of probability. In fact, that we can produce a distinct effect on one of these planets in this novel manner, namely, by disturbing the electrical condition of the earth, is beyond any doubt. This way of effecting such communication is, however, essentially different from all others which have so far been proposed by scientific men. In all the previous instances only a minute fraction of the total energy reaching the planet—as much as it would be possible to concentrate in a reflector—could be utilized by the supposed observer in his instrument. But by the means I have developed he would be enabled to concentrate the larger portion of the entire energy transmitted to the planet in his instrument, and the chances of affecting the latter are thereby increased many millionfold.

The article caught the attention of one of the world’s most powerful men at the time, John Pierpont Morgan, who invited the inventor to his home.

Tesla proposed to Morgan a scheme that must have sounded like science fiction: a world system of wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean; to broadcast news, stock market reports, private and military messages and communications, and even pictures and music to any part of the world. When wireless is fully applied the earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts,…

Tesla asked Morgan for the money he needed to start his project, but Morgan turned him down. Then Tesla offered him 51% of the patent rights to his inventions for $150000 and Morgan accepted. It seems, however, in spite of what Tesla told Morgan, his actual plan was to make a large-scale demonstration of electrical power transmission without wires, and this turned out to be a fatal mistake.

By 1901 the so-called Wardenclyffe project was well under construction, the most challenging task being the erection of an enormous tower, rising over 60 meters in the air and supporting on its top a 55-ton steel sphere. Beneath the tower, a well-like shaft plunged 40 meters into the ground, and 16 iron pipes were driven 90 meters deeper so that currents could pass through them and seize hold of the earth. As Tesla explained—In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver.

As Wardenclyffe tower’s construction slowly increased, it became evident that more money was needed. Tesla pleaded with Morgan for more financial support, but he refused. To make matters worse, the stock market crashed and prices for the tower’s materials doubled. High prices combined with Tesla’s inability to find enough willing investors eventually led to the demise of the project in 1905, after some amazing electrical displays.

Tesla was also a pioneer in the area of remote control (as he demonstrated to the crowd of people his remotely-guided boat in Madison Square Garden in 1898), but he considered also the systems endowed by their own intelligence. About all these things he wrote:
I treated the whole field broadly not limiting myself to mechanics, controlled from a distance but to machines possessed of their own intelligence. Since that time I had advanced greatly in the evolution of the invention and think that the time is not distant when I shall show an automaton which left to itself, will act as though possessed of reason and without any willful control from the outside. Whatever be the practical possibilities of such an achievement it will mark the beginning of a new epoch in mechanics.

The great American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called “the Great American Novel”. In 1898 Twain met Jan Szczepanik (1872–1926) (see the image below), a young and very capable Austrian-Polish inventor, with several hundred patents and over 50 discoveries to his name, many of which are still applied today.

Some of Szczepanik’s concepts helped the future evolution of TV broadcasting, such as the telectroscope (an apparatus for distant reproduction of images and sound using electricity) or the wireless telegraph, which greatly affected the development of telecommunications. Szczepanik invented also a submarine, a colorimeter, an electric rifle, a color image weaving method, a moving wing aircraft, a duplex rotor helicopter, a dirigible, etc.

The term “telectroscope” was devised by the French writer and publisher Louis Figuier (1819–1894) in 1878 to popularize an invention wrongly interpreted as real and incorrectly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell. Figuier’s “telectroscope” was a fictional device, the first prototype television, capable to transmit pictures and sound anywhere.

Later the word “telectroscope” was widely accepted by several 19th-century inventors like George Carey, Constantin Senlecq, Adriano de Paiva, and Jan Szczepanik, who (together with the Viennese banker Ludwig Kleinberg) applied for a British patent for his device (Method and Apparatus for Reproducing Pictures and the like at a Distance by Means of Electricity) in 1897 (see British Patent N°5031). Szczepanik’s telectroscope was covered in the New York Times in April 1898, where it was described as a scheme for the transmission of colored rays.

In 1898 Twain described Szczepanik in two of his articles: “The Austrian Edison keeping school again” and “From The Times of 1904“.

In “From The Times of 1904” (it is a fictional criminal short story) Twain dreamed up for a telelectroscope (he called it telectrophonoscope), which used the existing phone system to create a worldwide network of information-sharing. In Twain’s short story, as early as 1904, telectrophonoscopes are spread all over the globe, and every man can get one and exchange visual and sound information with all other owners of telectrophonoscopes.