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CHAPTER 5

Productivity Applications

But Engelbart stayed true to his vision of using shared technology to solve our shared problems. He founded the Bootstrap Institute, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to helping organizations solve problems using a strategic bootstrapping approach for accelerating progress toward goals. (The term bootstrapping, also used to describe a computer startup, refers to a process that builds on itself that pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.) Today Engelbart is Founder Emeritus of the Doug Engelbart Institute, an organization he created with his

Doug Engelbarts visionary 1968 presentation showed the world how computers could be used as collaborative tools.

FIGURE 5.2

daughter, Christina Engelbart. In a world where automation can dehumanize and eliminate jobs, he and his institute are stiff committed to replacing automation with augmentation. But they focus more on the human side of the equation, helping people chart a course into the future guided by intelligent, positive vision. He talks about turning organizations into "networked improvement communities" and explores ways of raising our collective IQ. If anyone understands how to build the future from a vision,

FIGURE 5.1

Doug Engelbart.

Doug Engelbart does.

Doug Engelbart was one of the first people to recognize that computer technology could be used to augment human capabilities. Thanks in large part to his visionary work, people all over the world use computer applications to enhance their abilities to write papers and articles, publish periodicals and books, perform complex calculations, conduct scientific research, and even predict the future. In this chapter we survey a variety of applications that people use to manipulate words and numbers. We consider software tools for working with words, from outliners to sophisticated reference tools, and numbers, from spreadsheets to statistical packages and money managers. We look at how digital technology has transformed the publishing process and provided more people with the power to communicate through written words. We examine how scientific visualization software can help us understand relationships that are invisible to the naked eye and how computers simulate reality for productivity and pleasure.

The Wordsmith's Toolbox

I... cannot imagine now that J ever wrote with a typewriter.
Arthur C Clarke, author and scientist

In a single human generation the writing process has been transformed by word processing software. Instead of suffering through the painful process of writing and rewriting (or typing and retyping) in pursuit of a "clean" draft, a writer can focus on developing ideas and let the machine take care of laying out words on the page.