Jeff Rulifson

When people describe the 1968 demonstration, they describe Douglas Engelbart â the headset, the calm voice, the mouse. But the thing he was operating had to be written by someone, and for the seven years the oN-Line System was alive, that someone was largely Jeff Rulifson.

Rulifson joined SRI’s Augmentation Research Center in 1966 and led the software team that implemented NLS until he left in 1973. He wrote its command language — the vocabulary through which a person told the system what to do, at a moment when almost no one had thought hard about what that vocabulary should be. Hardware gets the credit in this story because hardware is photogenic. The mouse sits on a desk and can be held up to a camera. A command language cannot.

The face on the screen

During the demo, Engelbart was on stage in San Francisco. The machine — an SDS 940 — was thirty miles south in Menlo Park. So were his colleagues. Two microwave links carried video back north, and at intervals Rulifson and Bill Paxton appeared in a window on the twenty-foot screen, editing the same document Engelbart was editing, talking to him and to the audience.

This was the part the audience found hardest to place. A mouse is a new object; you can understand a new object. Two people in different cities working inside one live document, seeing each other while they did it, was not a new object but a new relation — and there was no word for it yet. Video conferencing and shared-screen editing were both demonstrated that afternoon, decades before either had a market.

The other thread

Rulifson was SRI’s representative to the Network Working Group in 1968, the loose committee of graduate students that worked out how the first ARPANET hosts would talk to each other. He authored RFC 5, describing the Decode-Encode Language: small programs would be shipped to a remote machine so it could interact locally rather than waiting on every keystroke.

DEL was never used. Sun Microsystems shipped essentially the same idea as Java applets about thirty years later. That gap — the correct idea, described precisely, arriving before anything could carry it — is the recurring shape of this whole lab’s history.