Tools For Thought

by Howard Rheingold

April, 2000: a revised edition of Tools for Thought is available from MIT Press including a revised chapter with 1999 interviews of Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, and Avron Barr. ISBN: 9780262681155, 1985 ed, ISBN: 0262681153

The idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry or orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists; their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work. You can't really guess where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from.

- HLR

Chapter Two: The First Programmer Was a Lady

[1] B. V. Bowden, ed., Faster than Thought, (New York: Pitman), 15.

[2] Ibid., 16.

[3] Herman Goldstine, The computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 100.

[4] Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 33.

[5] Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 44.

[6] Ibid., 155.

[7] Morrison and Morrison, Babbage, 251-252.

[8] Ibid., 284.

[9] Bowden, Faster Than Thought, 18.

[10] George Boole, An investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Macmillan, 1854; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 1-3

[11]Leon E Truesdell, The Development of Punch Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890-1940 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 30-31.

[12] Ibid., 31.

Chapter Three: The First Hacker and his Imaginary Machine

[1] Alan M. Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, second series, vol. 42, part 3, November 12, 1936, 230-265.

[2] An amusing example of an easily constructed Turing machine, using pebbles and toilet paper, is given in the third chapter of Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

[3] Turing, "Computable Numbers."

[4] Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 396.

[5]Ibid., 326.

[6] Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and intelligence," Mind, vol. 59, no. 236 (1950).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Hodges, Turing, 488.

Chapter Four: Johnny Builds Bombs and Johnny Builds Brains

[1] Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 371.

[2] C. Blair, "Passing of a great Mind," Life,, February 25, 1957, 96.

[3] Stanislaw Ulam, "John von Neumann, 1903-1957," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 64, (1958), 4.

[4] Goldstine, The Computer, 182.

[5] Daniel Bell, The coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books. 1973), 31.

[6] Katherine Fishman, The Computer Establishment (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1981), 22.

[7] Ibid., 24.

[8] Goldstine, The Computer, 153.

[9] Ibid., 149.

[10] Heims, von Neumann and Wiener, 186.

[11] Goldstine, The Computer, 196.

[12] Hodges, Turing, 288.

[13] Ibid., 288.

[14] Goldstine, The Computer, 196-197.

[15] Arthur W. Burks, Herman H. Goldstine, and John von Neumann, "Preliminary discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," Datamation, September-October 1962.

[16] Goldstine, The Computer, 242.

[17] Manfred Eigen and Ruthlid Winkler, Laws of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1981), 189, 192.

Chapter Five: Ex-Prodigies and Antiaircraft Guns

[1] H. Addington Bruce, New Ideas in Child Training," American Magazine, July 1911, 291-292.

[2] I. Grattan-Guiness, "The Russell Archives: Some New Light on Russell's Logicism," Annals of Science, vol. 31 (1974), 406.

[3] M. D. Fagen, ed., A history of Engineering and science in the Bell System: National Service in War and Peace (1925-1975) (Murray Hill, N.J.: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., 1978), 135.

[4] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948), 8.

[5] Adam Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and John Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology," Philosophy of Science, vol. 10 (1943), 18-24.

[6] Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

[7] Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, vol. 5 (1943), 115-133.

[8] Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think (San Francisco: W. H Freeman, 1979) 66.

[9] Heims, von Neumann and Wiener, 205.

[10] Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT press, 1966), 325.

[11] Wiener, Cybernetics.

[12] Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 21.

[13] Heims, von Neumann and Wiener, 208.

[14] McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 42.

Chapter Six: Inside Information

[1] Claude E. Shannon, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," Transactiona of the AIEE, vol. 57 (1938), 713.

[2] Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Information," Bell Systems Technical Journal, vol. 27 (1948), 379-423, 623-656.

[3] Claude E. Shannon, "The Bandwagon," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 2, no. 3 (1956), 3.

[4] Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

[5] Claude E. Shannon, "Computers and Automata," Proceedings of the IRE, vol. 41, 1953, 1234-1241.

[6] Campbell, Grammatical Man, 20.

Chapter Seven: Machines to Think With

[1] J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, March 1960, 4-11.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 7.

[5] Ibid., 4.

Chapter Eight: Witness to History: The Mascot of Project Mac

[1] Hubert Dreyfus, what Computers Can't Do: a critique of Artificial Reason (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

[2] R. D. Greenblatt, D. E. Eastlake, and S. D. Crocker, "The Greenblatt Chess Program," Conference Proceedings, American Federation of Information Processing Societies, vol. 31 (1967), 801-810.

[3] Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco" W. H. Freeman, 1976), 2-3.

[4] Ibid., 116.

[5] Ibid., 118-119.

[6] Philip Zimbardo, "Hacker Papers," Psychology Today, August 1980, 63.

[7] Ibid., 67-68

[8] Frank Rose, "Joy of Hacking," Science 82, November 1982, 66.

Chapter Nine: The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker

[1] Vannevar Bush, As We May Think," the Atlantic Monthly, August 1945.

[2] Nilo Lindgren, "Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop," Innovation, No. 24, September 1971.

[3] Douglas C. Engelbart, "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of a Man's Intellect," in Vistas in Information Handling, vol. 1, Paul William Howerton and David C. Weeks, eds. (Washington: Spartan Books, 1963), 1-29.

[4] Ibid., 4-5.

[5] Ibid., 5.

[6] Ibid., 6-7.

[7] Ibid., 14.

[8] Douglas C Engelbart, "NLS Teleconferencing Features: The Journal, and Shared-Screen Telephoning," IEEE Digest of Papers, CompCon, Fall 1975, 175-176.

[9] Douglas C Engelbart, "Intellectual Implications of Multi-Access Computing," Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference on Multi-Access Computer Networks, April 1970.

[10] Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive(New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

[11] Peter F Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

[12] Douglas C. Engelbart, R. W. Watson, and James Norton, "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop," AFIPS Conference Proceedings, vol. 42 (1973), 9-21.

Chapter Ten: The New Old Boys from the ARPAnet

[1] J. C. R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, and E. Herbert, "The Computer as a Communication Device," International Science and Technology, April 1978.

[2] Ibid., 22.

[3] Ibid., 21.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Ibid., 27.

[6] Ibid., 30.

[7] Ibid. 31.

[8] David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, and Eric Harslem, The Star User Interface: An Overview," in Office Systems Technology (El Segundo, Calif.: Xerox Corporation, 1982).

[9] Ibid., 25.

Chapter Eleven: The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier

[1] Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution (self-published, 1977), 120-123.

[2] Michael Schrage, "Alan Kay's Magical Mystery Tour," TWA Ambassador, January 1984, 36.

[3] Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 183.

[4] Alan Kay, "Microlectronics and the Personal Computer," Scientific American, September 1977, 236.

[5] Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media," Computer, March 1977, 31.

[6] Alan Kay, "Microlectronics," 236.

[7] Ibid., 239

[8] Ibid., 244

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

Chapter Thirteen: Knowledge Engineers and Epistemological Entrepreneurs

[1] Avron Barr, "Artificial Intelligence: Cognition as Computation," in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. Fritz Machulp.

[2] Katherine Davis Fishman, The Computer Establishment (new york: mcgraw-hill book co., 1981), 362.

[3] Edward A. Fiegenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, and Joshua Lederberg, "On Generality and Problem Solving: A case study using the DENDRAL Program," in Machine Intelligence 6, B. Metzler and D. Michie, eds. (New York: Elsevier, 1971) 165-190.

[4] Fishman, Computer Establishment, 364.

[5] "A rebel in the Computer Revolution," Science Digest, August 1983, 96.

[6] Avron Barr and Edward Fiegenbaum, eds., Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1981).

[7] Avron Barr, J. S. Bennet, and C. W. Clancey, "Transfer of Expertise: A Theme of AI Research," Working Paper No. HPP-79-11, Stanford University, Heuristic Programming Project (1979), 1..

[8] Ibid., 5.

[9] Edward Feigenbaum and J. Feldman, eds., Computers and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963).

[10] Avron Barr, "Artificial Intelligence: Cognition as Computation," 18.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 19.

[13] Ibid., p.22.

Chapter Fourteen: Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond

[1] Ted Nelson, Dream Machines/Computer Lib (self-published, 1974).

[2] Ted Nelson, Literary Machines (self-published, 1983).

[3] Ibid., 1/17.

[4] Ibid., 1/18.

[5] Ted Nelson, "A New Home For the Mind," Datamation, March 1982, 174.

[6] Ibid., 180.

[7] Roy Amara, John Smith, Murray Turoff, and Jaques Vallee "Computerized Conferencing, a New Medium," Mosaic, January-February 1976.

[8] Ibid., p 21.

[9] Sarah N. Rhodes, The Role of the National Science Foundation in the Development of the Electronic Journal(Washington: National Science Foundation, Division of Information Science and Technology, 1976).