Bootstrapping

Engelbart’s central idea, and the one he returned to for the last three decades of his life. Most tools make a task easier. A bootstrapping tool makes you better at improving your tools — which makes the next improvement cheaper, and the one after that cheaper still. The output is not a product. It is a more capable version of the people using it, compounding.

The ABC structure

Engelbart gave the idea a working shape. A-level activity is the organization doing what it exists to do — building the cars, teaching the students. B-level activity is improving how the A work gets done: better tools, better processes. C-level activity is improving how you improve.

His claim was that B-level work yields only mild gains, and that the exponential returns live in C — the level almost no organization staffs, because improvement is rarely treated as a discipline in its own right.

Why it mattered to him

This is what augmenting human intellect always meant. Not faster typing and not prettier windows, but a feedback loop with human intelligence on both ends. Engelbart built NLS so his own lab could use it to build the next version of NLS — the tool and its makers co-evolving, which is why the Augmentation Research Center produced so much so fast.

Beneath the loop on his slide he wrote a second line, addressed to whoever was building: and just think of the important role for technologists.