Combining technological, social, and historical perspectives, Bootstrapping traces the genesis of personal computing through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it - including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Since that time, all these technologies have become so commonplace as to be taken for granted, but the assumptions and rnotivations behind their invention are not, Thierry Bardini analyzes Engelbart's singular achievement through a detailed history of his vision for a human-computer interface in the context of the US computer research community during the 1960s and 1970s. Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving them increasing short. What was needed. he determined, was a system to augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which radical technological improvement could lead to radical improvements in people's capacities to work effectively. Engelbart's project involved not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans. acting together, to manage complex, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." Ultimately he envisioned a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form. The book offers a careful narrative of the growth and decline of Engelbart's laboratory at SRI, and it examines the subsequent translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in the less challenging terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time when the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web has spawned myriad pronouncements on our social and technological future, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution."

Bootstrapping - Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing

Thierry Bardini & Dominique Lestel élaborent de concert depuis le début du nouveau millénaire une conception positive et créative des phénomènes posthumains. Lestel pense depuis vingt ans les communautés hybrides homme-animal-machine et Bardini travaille durant la même période à une histoire de la cyberculture contemporaine, autant dans ses devenirs informatiques que biologiques. Bardini est l'auteur de Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000) et Junkware (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) et Lestel de Les origines animales de la culture (Flammarion, 2001), L'animal singulier (Seuil, 2004) et L'animal est l'avenir de l'homme (Fayard, 2010)... Après la Singularité, Homo sapiens n'est plus qu'un état par défaut. Qui le peut doit se perdre dans le posthumain. Pour l'aider, un manuel au statut ambigu et à la parole souvent elliptique, parasitée d'images décalées. Thierry Bardini et Dominique Lestel proposent ici le décryptage d'une copie en ASCII et JPEG du Manuel des Métamorphoses Singulières, bouffé par les champignons, et trouvé dans une Oldsmobile 1973 échouée dans un bois aux confins du Québec. Une intelligence indéterminée y commente des fragments de l'histoire du post-humain, dans une anthologie de combat et de formation qui commence à la Renaissance, et peut être même avant. Dans leur introduction, Bardini et Lestel mettent le lecteur en garde : " Nous sommes devenus humains par accident et nous en sortirons par défi ".

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