Augmenting Human Intellect - Douglas Engelbart

Augmenting Human Intellect

Douglas Engelbart

I'm going to offer commentary on the Engelbart reading instead of trying to deconstruct it.  The guy is obviously very smart - more than inventing the computer mouse, the word processor, and the document link (not hypertext) (score x 3) - he outlines a conceptual framework for human computer interaction, following up very closely the work of Licklider and Bush.  Extremely impressive stuff.  But here's the comment, and the resulting question.  He describes this system using academic language that drives the reader up a wall.  And we're not talking about comic book readers here, we're talking about college educated students and college graduates who are used to deciphering complex theories, especially people  who've been using "intelligent machines" virtually all their lives.  Personally, reading Engelbart's work makes me feel like I'm trying to squeeze my entire brain through a pin-hole.  Does writing like this serve a functional purpose?  Is it some sort of academic code that must be followed by anyone who wants an academic piece published?  My aim is not to whine and complain, but obviously there's a problem with having to jump through hoops (or pin-holes) to access someone's valuable insight.  I think he might have been better served publishing a "junior edition"  of "Augmenting Human Intellect"  directly to the people in something like Newsweek or Time where it could receive maximum exposure rather than let a few  top scientists pick over it, criticize it, and filter it down to the masses.  Maybe this is why few people remember Engelbart for anything except inventing the mouse (more people credit Apple, who commercialized it).  Contrast that with Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which according to the foreword for that article in the NMR says that Ted Nelson (who took Engelbart's concept of intra-text linking and applied it to inter-document linking with the hyperlink) remembers his grandfather reading it to him aloud at the dinner table from Atlantic Monthly.  Now maybe that's unfair to Engelbart, maybe he couldn't get published by anyone other than the Stanford Research Institute (if that's such a lowly honor), and maybe his work didn't become significant until people realized after the fact how prescient it was.  But idk... it's just wicked hard.