The NLS workstation showing the CRT display, keyboard, pushbuttons, and mouse

NLS, or the "oNLine System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. The NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse (co-invented by Engelbart and colleague Bill English), raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, computer presentation (such as PowerPoint), and other modern computing concepts. Image File history File links File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Multi-user operating systems allow multiple users to utilise the computer and run programs at the same time. ... Douglas Engelbart Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Norwegian descent. ... Stanford Research Institutes Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. ... SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ... The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ... Hypertext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ... Bill English is a computer engineer who contributed to the development of the computer mouse while working for Doug Engelbart at SRI. He left SRI in 1971 and headed to Xerox Parc where managed the Office Systems Research Group. ... Nineteen inch (48 cm) CRT computer monitor A computer display, monitor or screen is a computer peripheral device capable of showing still or moving images generated by a computer and processed by a graphics card. ... Gui is a French form of the male name Guy. ... Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program developed for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. ...

Funded by ARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force, NLS was designed around a Scientific Data Systems SDS 940 time-sharing computer with an approximately 96 MB storage disk. It could support up to 16 workstations, which were composed of a raster-scan monitor, a three-button mouse, and a device known as a chord keyset. The input of typed text was sent from the keyboard to a specific subsystem that relayed the information along a "bus" to one of two Display Controllers and Display Generators. The inputted text then was sent to a 5 inch (127 mm) cathode ray tube (CRT), which was enclosed by a special cover and a "superimposed" video image was then received by a professional-quality black-and-white TV camera. The TV camera information was then sent to the closed-circuit Camera Control and Patch Panel, and, finally, displayed on each workstation's video monitor. As for the software side, NLS incorporated all the features mentioned above and more (the implementation details are beyond the scope of an encyclopedia article). The lead programmer was Jeff Rulifson. The acronym ARPA has several meanings: It is the former abbreviation of a U.S. military organization now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established in 1958, is the agency responsible for the public space program of the United States of America. ... Seal of the Air Force. ... A 1990 Honeywell-Bull DPS 7 mainframe CPU Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for mission critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing. ... Nineteen inch (48 cm) CRT computer monitor A computer display, monitor or screen is a computer peripheral device capable of showing still or moving images generated by a computer and processed by a graphics card. ... Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ... The chord keyset is a small computer keyboard with a look and feel similar to those of a piano. ... Cathode ray tube employing electromagnetic focus and deflection The cathode ray tube or CRT, invented by Karl Ferdinand Braun, is the display device used in most computer displays, video monitors, televisions and oscilloscopes. ... Johns F. (Jeff) Rulifson (born August 20, 1941) is a computer scientist largely known for his involvement at the Augmentation Research Center, at then-named Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in implementing the On-Line System (NLS), a system that foreshadowed many future developments in modern computing and networking. ...

The strange acronym, NLS (instead of OLS) arose from the fact that Engelbart had been unable to get all the funding he needed at once; he had been forced to develop his system incrementally while he fought the federal government for more money. His first two computers (before the SDS 940) were not able to support more than one user at a time. The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789 by a constitutional convention, sets down the basic framework of American government in its seven articles. ...

As a crude stopgap measure, he developed a system where off-line users -- that is, anyone not sitting at the one terminal available -- could still edit their documents by punching a string of commands onto paper tape with a Flexowriter. Obviously, without WYSIWYG, this was very awkward; the hapless user had to monitor the cumulative effects of his commands on his document in his own head. An analogous, though slightly less painful, system is the standard UNIX text editor, ed. A roll of punched tape Punched tape is an old-fashioned form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data. ... The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter based on a 1940s IBM product that was spun off as an independent company and later sold to the Friden Corp. ... WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzy-wig, wuzzy-wig or wissy-wig) is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used in computing to describe a seamlessness between the appearance of edited content and final product. ... The text editor ed was the original standard on the UNIX operating system. ...

Once the tape was complete, then the user would feed into the computer the paper tape on which the last document draft had been stored, followed by the new commands to be applied, and then the computer would print out a new paper tape containing the latest version of the document. This bizarre system was first called the Z-Code System, because the commands all began with the letter Z, and later, the Off-Line System (OLS). When the funding finally materialized for an advanced SDS 940 where multiple users could be on-line simultaneously, the acronym OLS was already taken, so Engelbart settled for NLS.

Keyboard, pushbuttons and mouse used at presentation in San Francisco

Development of NLS was more or less finished in late 1968 and was demonstrated to a small crowd of technology specialists in San Francisco on December 8, 1968. It has since been dubbed "The Mother of All Demos" as it demonstrated the important features of NLS in a way never done before. NLS was linked via leased telephone lines to ARC members in Menlo Park, California and the main display of the presentation was on a large 20 foot diagonal projection screen with Douglas Engelbart addressing the audience wearing a headset. Image File history File links File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... 1968 was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... The downtown San Francisco skyline, looking east from the central part of the city. ... December 8 is the 342nd day (343rd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1968 was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Cafe Borrone, adjacent to Keplers Bookstore in the Menlo Center, is a popular lunch spot in downtown Menlo Park. ... Douglas Engelbart Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Norwegian descent. ...

One of NLS's most revolutionary features, the Journal, was developed in 1970 by David Evans as part of his doctoral thesis. The Journal was a primitive hypertext-based groupware program which can be seen as a predecessor (if not the direct ancestor) of all contemporary server software that supports collaborative document creation (like wikis). It was used by ARC members to discuss, debate, and refine concepts in the same way that wikis are being used today. Most Journal documents have been preserved in paper form, and are stored in Stanford University's archives; they are a valuable record of the evolution of the ARC community from 1970 to its collapse in 1976. Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations (see also Computer supported cooperative work). ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Wiki Science A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. ... For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ...

The downfall of NLS, and subsequently, of ARC in general, was the program's difficult learning curve. NLS was not designed to be easy to learn, it employed the heavy use of program modes, relied on a strict hierarchical structure, did not have a point-and-click interface, and forced the user to have to learn cryptic mnemonic codes to do anything useful with the system. The chord keyset, which complemented the modal nature of NLS, forced the user to learn a 5-bit binary code if they didn't want to use the keyboard. Finally, with the arrival of the ARPA Network at SRI in 1969, the time-sharing technology that seemed practical with a small number of users became impractical over a distributed network; time-sharing was rapidly being replaced by individual minicomputers (and later microcomputers) and workstations. Attempts to port NLS to other hardware, such as the PDP-10 and later on the DEC 20, were successful but did nothing to spread NLS beyond SRI. The point is that hypertext technology (later popularized by the World Wide Web) was available on ARPANET at the very beginning, but only in a very limited sense, both geographically and practically (for example, most other ARPA sites did not have mice). ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... 1969 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1969 calendar). ... A computer network is a system for communication among two or more computers. ... The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many... Hypertext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ...

Frustrated by the direction of Engelbart's "bootstrapping" crusade, many top SRI researchers left, with many ending up at the famed Xerox PARC, taking the mouse idea with them. SRI sold NLS to Tymshare in 1977 and renamed it Augment, and Tymshare was, in turn, sold to McDonnell Douglas in the early 1980s. The HyPerform program sold by NDMA Inc. is a descendant of NLS/Augment. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ... This article needs cleanup. ... 1977 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1977 calendar). ... DC-10, retired from American Airlines fleet at gate McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturer, producing a number of famous commercial and military aircraft. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ...

External links

• The original 1968 Demo as streaming RealVideo clips