NLS (oN-Line System) was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. It was designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It was the first computer system to employ the practical use of hypertext links, a computer mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the US Air Force.

The NLS was demonstrated in "The Mother of All Demos".

Development

Douglas Engelbart developed his concepts while supported by the US Air Force from 1959 to 1960 and published a framework in 1962.

The strange acronym, NLS (rather than OLS), was an artifact of the evolution of the system. Engelbart's first computers were not able to support more than one user at a time.

First was the CDC 160A in 1963, which had very little programming power of its own.

As a short-term measure, the team developed a system that allowed off-line users—that is, anyone not sitting at the one available terminal—to edit their documents by punching a string of commands onto paper tape with a Flexowriter. Once the tape was complete, an off-line user would then 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 the computer would print out a new paper tape containing the latest version of the document.

The design continued to support this "off-line" workflow, as well as an interactive "on-line" ability to edit the same documents. To avoid having two identical acronyms (OLTS), the Off-Line Text System was abbreviated FLTS and the On-Line Text System was abbreviated NLTS. As the system evolved to support more than just text, the "T" was dropped, and the interactive version became known as NLS.

Robert Taylor, who had a background in psychology, provided support from NASA. When Taylor moved to the Information Processing Techniques Office of the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, he was able to provide additional funding to the project.

NLS development moved to a CDC 3100 in 1965.

In 1968, NLS development moved to an SDS 940 computer running the Berkeley Timesharing System.

One of the most revolutionary features of NLS, "the Journal", was developed in 1970 by Australian computer engineer David A. 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.

The Journal was used to store documents for the Network Information Center and early network email archives.

Most Journal documents have been preserved in paper form and are stored in Stanford University's archives; these provide a valuable record of the evolution of the ARC community from 1970 until the advent of commercialization in 1976. An additional set of Journal documents exists at the Computer History Museum in California, along with a large collection of ARC backup tapes dating from the early 1970s, as well as some of the SDS 940 tapes from the 1960s.

The NLS was implemented using several domain-specific languages that were handled using the Tree Meta compiler-compiler system. The eventual implementation language was called L10.

In 1970, NLS was ported to the PDP-10 computer (as modified by BBN to run the TENEX operating system). These features therefore supported a full-interaction paradigm with rich interaction possibilities for a trained user, rather than what Engelbart referred to as the WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get) paradigm that came later.

  • The computer mouse
  • 2-dimensional display editing
  • In-file object addressing, linking
  • Hypermedia
  • Outline processing
  • Flexible view control
  • Multiple windows
  • Cross-file editing
  • Integrated hypermedia email
  • Hypermedia publishing
  • Document version control
  • Shared-screen teleconferencing
  • Computer-aided meetings
  • Formatting directives
  • Context-sensitive help
  • Distributed client-server architecture
  • Uniform command syntax
  • Universal "user interface" front-end module
  • Multi-tool integration
  • Grammar-driven command language interpreter
  • Protocols for virtual terminals
  • Remote procedure call protocols
  • Compilable "Command Meta Language"

Engelbart said: "Many of those firsts came right out of the staff's innovations — even had to be explained to me before I could understand them. [The staff deserves] more recognition."

Some of the "full-interaction" paradigm lives on in different systems, including the Hyperwords add-on for Mozilla Firefox. The Hyperwords concept grew out of the Engelbart web-documentary Invisible Revolution.

Visicalc

Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first spreadsheet program, Visicalc, saw Doug Engelbart demonstrate the oN-Line System, which was part of Bricklin's inspiration to create Visicalc.

See also

  • File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS)
  • ENQUIRE

Notes

References

Further reading

  • On the Doug Engelbart Institute website see especially the 1968 Demo resources page for links to the demo and to later panel discussions by participants in the demo; About NLS/Augment; Engelbart's Bibliography, Videography; and the Engelbart Archives Special Collections page.
  • The original 1968 Demo as streaming RealVideo clips
  • HyperScope, a browser-based project to recreate and extend NLS/Augment Douglas Engelbart himself is involved in this project
  • NLS documents at bitsavers.org
  • OpenAugment, another now defunct NLS/Augment implementation