A short passage about the recently deceased computer pioneer, Douglas Engelbart, from the landmark 1972 Rolling Stone tech article, “Spacewar,” written by Stewart Brand, who attended the “Mother of All Demos”:

“In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console – affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to ‘fly’ formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it’s changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend’s file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.”