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8%OFFThierry Bardini - Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing - 9780804738712 - V9780804738712
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Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing

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Description for Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing Paperback. This tells the story of Douglas Engelbart's revolutionary vision, reaching beyond conventional histories of Silicon Valley to probe the ideology that shaped some of the basic ingredients of contemporary life. Series: Writing Science. Num Pages: 312 pages, 50 line drawings. BIC Classification: 1KB; 3JJP; HBJK; HBLW3; JH; PDX; UBJ; UKP. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 5969 x 3963 x 21. Weight in Grams: 470.

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Bootstrapping establishes Douglas Engelbart's contribution through a detailed history of both the material ... Read more

Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart's project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." What he ultimately envisioned was a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form.

The book also offers a careful narrative of the collapse of Engelbart's laboratory at Stanford Research Institute, and the further translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time of the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution."

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Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2000
Publisher
Stanford University Press United States
Number of pages
312
Condition
New
Series
Writing Science
Number of Pages
312
Place of Publication
Palo Alto, United States
ISBN
9780804738712
SKU
V9780804738712
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50

About Thierry Bardini
Thierry Bardini is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal.

Reviews for Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
"Bootstrapping fills an important gap in the story of personal computing."—Technology and Culture "Thierry Bardini particularly explores the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of Engelbart's book. . . . Indeed, the breadth of Engelbart's contributions and influence, documented in meticulous detail, are astonishing. . . ."—Enterprise & Society "Anyone who has worked in computer-human interface or in and around Silicon Valley ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing


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