Hyperscope Blog

Welcome once again to our blog! We’ve been working for about six weeks now, getting the team together and the process worked out, and we’re now working through the design. So now’s as good a time as any to introduce the project to the wider world.

The Hyperscope is Doug Engelbart’s latest project to bring his ideas to the wider world. But before we can describe the Hyperscope, we must first describe the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS). Doug first conceived of the OHS in the early 1990s as a system that brought the advanced hypertext features of his original hypertext system (NLS/Augment) to the masses. With an OHS, we would be able to use any tool to generate granular links into and apply special “view specs” on any file format. The OHS would give us interoperability between any and all knowledge tools. Moreover, it would serve as a launching point for Doug’s “bootstrapping” ideas — specifically, his strategy for boosting society’s collective ability to solve its most complex problems.

Doug conceived of the Hyperscope in 2000 as an intermediary step towards achieving the vision of an OHS. The Hyperscope would implement basic jumping and viewing capabilities across multiple file formats, using translators to transform existing file formats into the appropriate format. Think of Hyperscope as OHS without editing capabilities.

Thanks to some funding from the NSF, we’re able to start building a Hyperscope. As a first stage, we’re reimplementing Augment’s jumping and viewing capabilities into the Firefox (and perhaps beyond) browser, using AJAX and other modern technologies. Our goal is to have this work complete by the end of 2006. The project is open source and the work will be licensed under the GPL.

The larger goal, however, is not just to generate a piece of code. Our goal is to spread the meme. We want people thinking bigger about how they can improve their own collaborative tools. We want people integrating our code into theirs, and vice versa. Most importantly, we want people to think about how they use tools, about process as well as technology.

In that vein, we’d like to welcome all of you to join our conversation and to participate in the project. The best place to start is to subscribe to this blog, explore and participate on our Wiki, and join our mailing lists.

We’ve got a fantastic core team. First and foremost, there’s Doug, the visionary behind all of this. Brad Neuberg, AJAX superstar, is our main developer. Joining Brad is Jonathan Cheyer, a long-time Engelbart enthusiast and one of the leaders of the NLS/Augment Restoration Project, sponsored by the Computer History Museum. Then there’s me. I buy the pizza for our weekly meetings.

What makes this even more exciting is that this is a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with alumni from Doug’s old Augmentation Research Center (ARC), the place that made all of this possible in the first place. In addition to managing the program, Christina Engelbart (Doug’s daughter) is sharing her deep insight into the tool and its usage. We’ve had conversations with Jeff Rulifson and Charles Irby, the two original software leads at Doug’s lab, as well as with Harvey Lehtman and Raylene Pak, two other distinguished ARC alumni. And, we hope to connect with more of you, so please contact us if you worked with Doug back in the day.

I’m thrilled to be working on this project with these fine folks, and I hope you’ll join us!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.