Chapter 1 - Technical Evolution

Summary

How does one write the story of a computer system? To trace a technical history, one must first assume that there is a technical ‘object’ to trace – a system or an artefact that has changed over time. This technical artefact will constitute a series of artefacts, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, technical ‘evolution’ seems obvious in the world around us; we can see it in the fact that such lineages exist, that technologies come in generations. Computers, for example, adapt and adopt characteristics over time, ‘one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete’ (Guattari 1995, 40). But are we to understand this lineage from a sociological, an archaeological or a zoological perspective? And what is a technical artefact?

I need to address these questions here for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend, augment or ‘boost’ our capacity as a species, is integral to the history of hypertext and the NLS system in particular.

Traditionally, history has ignored the material dimension of technical artefacts. Historians are interested in tracing cultural formations, personalities and institutions, and especially the social ‘constructions’ they erect around themselves. Technical artefacts don't have their own history; they are perceived as the products of culture.