Engelbart's Violin

8/10/2019 Engelbart's Violin

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Engelbarts Violin

By t nisl v,www.loper-os.org

Computing pioneerAlan Kaytells us that a computer is an instrument whose

music is ideas.This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have

somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To

continue with this analogy, lets imagine that you were a child who loves music. A child

with Mozarts inclinations, if not necessarily the full magnitude of his gifts. Your parents

buy you a toy piano, and you live out what are, unbeknownst to you, the brightest days

of your life. The years go by, adulthood comes, and you become no, not a composer:

an organ grinder. (Or, if you like, a disk jockey.) Or lets say that you were an

extraordinary lucky and dedicated child of music. You manage to enroll in a

conservatory. Or perhaps you dont, but instead you spend your free time away from

your organ-grinding day job as an amateur composer. And yet, in either case, you are

still stuck playing out your original works on a hackedbarrel organ. Why? It is because,

in this imaginary nightmare world, the very idea of a musical instrument has faded

away. If someone wishes to hear music, he turns a crank or listens to the results of

someone else doing so. Or perhaps there areVictrolasin this world and professional

composers, the few which still exist, are expected to compose music by hand-etching

grooves on a phonograph record, as if they were machinists working a peculiar sort of

lathe.

Sadly, the above scenario is more truth than fiction for computer enthusiasts. There

is a particularly cruel discrepancy between what a creative child imagines the trade of a

programmer to be like and what it actually is. When you are a teenager, alone with a

(programmable) computer, the universe is alive with infinite possibilities.You are a god.

Master of all you survey. Then you go to school, major in Computer Science,graduate

and off to the salt mines with you, where you will stitch silk purses out of sows earsin

some braindead language, building on the braindead systems created by your

predecessors,for the rest of your working life. There will be little room for serious, deep

creativity. You will be constrained by the will of your master (whether the proverbial

pointy-haired boss, or lemming-hordes of fickle startup customers) and by the

limitations of the many poorly-designed systems you will use once you no longer have

an unconstrained choice of task and medium. To my knowledge, no child grows up
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playing doctorand still believes as a teenager (or even as a college student) that an

actual medical practice resembles that activity. Likewise, no one has a fully functional

toy legal system to play with as a child, and as a result goes into law. On the other

hand, adultprogramming, seen from afar, is enough like child-programming to set the

computer-enthusiast child up for just this kind of exceptionally cruel bait-and-switch.

Lets say that you were one of the lucky ones those who found a way to pay their bills

via something resemblingcreative programming.Or, far more likely, you inhabit the salt

mines by day, while letting your mind run free in your spare time. Yet in both cases,

you are doomed to work with the instruments of the salt mine! Fortunately, in software

there is room for some liberating deviancy since bits are easy to rearrange and

copy. But as for hardware, you come home to the very same instrument of

tortureandmutilationyou left behind in the cube farm: the typewriter keyboard. (And,

naturally, the C machine.But the latter is an overworked subject on this blog, and

today we speak of other things.)

Virtually every profession has a concept of professional equipment. It tends to be

costlier, sturdier, more solid, more rewarding of dedicated training, more difficult to

obtain, than equipment intended for amateurs. And yet, among the tools of a modern

programmers trade, we find scarcely anything which fits into this category. Perhaps

you are now sitting in front of your lovingly-maintained heirloom IBM Model M

keyboard,but it is still a typewriter keyboardand resembles, in many fundamental

ways, the cheapest piece of disposable trashware found at your local electronics store.

Conventional wisdom in the technology community holds that the personal computer

revolution gave everyoneaccess to professional-grade computing equipment. I hold the

opposite view: that the very notion of professional equipment has been forgotten in our

field (and to my knowledge, in our field alone.)

If the above is a delusion, I am proud to share this delusion with several persons whose

brilliant minds I think of as my guiding lights. Among them wasErik Naggum:

Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp. Feb. 16, 1997.(Emphasis mine.)

And so, here we are, deskilled craftsmen, flippers of bits. Some of us fungibletoday,

some tomorrow. Still performing the same old menial tasks by mouse instead of by
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levertheso-called Computer Revolutionnotwithstanding. Stillturning steam engine

valves by hand.Still writing the same, dreary boilerplate code, again and again.On

QWERTY keyboards

You have probably heard ofDouglas Engelbart:one of the very, very few genuinely great

minds of the computing field. He is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse

but in fact, this man created just about allof the conceptual underpinnings of what

we now think of as the standard human-computer interface. Arguably, he is single-

handedly responsible for the very notion of interactive, visual computing. Engelbart

presented his ideas to the public in one long demo session on December 9, 1968. This

demo is known today, quite appropriately, asThe Mother of All Demos.

If youwatchthe Mother of All Demos which you should you will notice the piano-

like device sitting to the left of the conventional keyboard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JfIgzSoTMOs
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A closer look:


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In use:

The above gadget is known as achorded keyboard,or chorder. In Engelbarts computingenvironment, it supplemented, rather than replaced, the traditional typewriter

keyboard. Most of Engelbarts contemporaries saw the chorder as a somewhat naive

engineering mistake. Among them wasAlan Kay:

Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of

Personal Computing. (p. 215.)(Emphasis mine.)

As far as I can tell, this is still the mainstream view today:

Today, human-computer interaction is focused on ease-of-use and learnability. Ideally,

people should be immediately effective with a computer the first time they use it. The

emphasis is on usability without the necessity of training. The exact opposite of

Engelbarts approach. Engelbarts dilemma is that his philosophy produced some of the

best computer technologies of our age (e.g. mouse, windows, word processing, etc.), but

the full realization of his vision is completely counter to way interaction designers think

of computers systems today. In fact, Engelbarts belief in efficiency over ease-of-use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboardhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboardhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboardhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_kayhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_kayhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_kayhttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&lpg=PA215&ots=218hWczBUl&dq=alan%20kay%20%22learn%20the%20violin%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&lpg=PA215&ots=218hWczBUl&dq=alan%20kay%20%22learn%20the%20violin%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&lpg=PA215&ots=218hWczBUl&dq=alan%20kay%20%22learn%20the%20violin%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&lpg=PA215&ots=218hWczBUl&dq=alan%20kay%20%22learn%20the%20violin%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&lpg=PA215&ots=218hWczBUl&dq=alan%20kay%20%22learn%20the%20violin%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_kayhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard


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places him in the fringe of computer interaction design today. Thats sad considering

hes done more for interaction design than any else I can think of.

Richard Monson-Haefel,Engelbarts Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use.

And yet, there were those who believed that there is something to be gained by breaking

with the typewriter tradition. Why should the mechanical constraints of nineteenth-

century clockwork limit todays user interfaces? Among the few brave souls who put

their money where their mouth is was Cy Endfield American (later, British)

screenwriter, film director, theatre director, author, magician and inventor.Endfield, a

truepolymath,created theMicrowritera pocket word processor equipped with six keys,

intended to be operated with one hand:
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At first glance, this device resembles the familiar stenotype. However, the latter was

never meant to be a general-purpose text entry system. Stenotypes use syllable-basedencodings, narrowly specialized for transcribing human speech. Endfields Microwriter

was something rather different: a genuinely-original, alphabet-based, general-purpose

text entry system.

The Microwriters use of one rather than both hands seems like a shortcoming, until

you realize that the device was designed for maximal portability at the very dawn of

the age of personal computing! It was really intended to replace a traditional paper

clipboard, rather than a typewriter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotypehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotypehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype


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(Source)
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Endfields chording system was of a very elegant design, which balanced ergonomics with

mnemonic simplicity:


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Volume One of the Microwriter User Guidecontains a miniature crash-course in the use

of Endfields writing system. This document is perhaps the cleanest and most

imaginative piece of technical writing that I have ever come across:

There have been other commercial and academic attempts at chorded keyboards, but

this one happens to be the earliest (that I am aware of) which reached actual production

and was placed on the market (however briefly.) It is also the only one which I have

had the good fortune to actually hold in my hands:

This rather unimpressive hello world was achieved after around fifteen minutes of

practice. The speed is a fraction of my QWERTY typing speed, but is a near-match for

my handwriting on a good day. What would it have been like if I had been put in front

of an Endfield keyboard as a small child, instead of a typewriter monstrosity?

And what if you could expect to find (or carry) a decent, non-wrist-destroying chorded

typing device everywhere you go, at work sites, schools, etc.? Clearly, that is not the

kind of world we live in: century-oldtechnological standardsdie hard. But why is thereso little interest among genuinely-professional computer users in an input device which
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maximizes speed and slows the destruction of the hands with which you work? And I

marvel at the absurdity of the miniature QWERTY keypads found on mobile

phones! Surely that is where the supremacy of the chorder would be indisputable.

Fascinating as the chorded keyboard is, its confinement to the ghetto of crackpot

technology is but a symptom of the underlying disease: the total victory of the

technological business model which caters primarily to the unskilled.

Naggum clearly saw the absence of professional computing equipment for what it is: a

result of the erosion of the very concept of the craftsman, the skilled, non-

fungibleprofessional:

something important happens when a previously privileged position in society suddenly

sees incredibly demand that needs to be filled, using enormous quantities of manpower.

that happened to programming computers about a decade ago, or maybe two. first, the

people will no longer be super dedicated people, and they wont be as skilled or even as

smart what was once dedication is replaced by greed and sometimes sheer need as

the motivation to enter the field. second, an unskilled labor force will want job security

more than intellectual challenges (to some the very antithesis of job security). third,

managing an unskilled labor force means easy access to people who are skilled in

whatever is needed right now, not an investment in people which leads to the

conclusion that a programmer is only as valuable as his ability to get another job fast.

fourth, when mass markets develop, pluralism suffers the most there is no longer a

concept of healthy participants: people become concerned with the individual winner,

and instead of people being good at whatever they are doing and proud of that, they will

want to flock around the winner to share some of the glory.

Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp. Jul. 15, 1999.

In the mind of todays technological entrepreneur, the ideal user (and employee) is semi-

skilled or unskilled entirely. The ideal user interface for such a person never rewards

learning or experience when doing so would come at the cost of immediate accessibility

to the neophyte. This design philosophy is a mistake a catastrophic, civilization-level

mistake. There is a place in the world for the violin as well as the kazoo. Modern

computer engineering is kazoo-only, and keyboards are only the most banal example of

this fact. Far more serious though less obvious problems of this kindtie our hands

andwastefully burn ourbrain cycles.
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Professional equipment, whose mastery requires dedication and mental flexibility, may

not be appropriate for casual users. But surely it is appropriate in fact, necessary for

professionals? Just why is this idea confined to crackpots shouting in the wilderness? I

hope to learn a definitive answer to this conundrum some day.

Documents

Engelbart's Violin