ON-Line System
| Developer | SRI International's Augmentation Research Center |
|---|---|
| Type | Concept |
| Release date | December 9, 1968 at The Mother of All Demos |
| Operating system | none |
| CPU | none |
| Memory | none |
| Storage | none |
| Graphics | raster scan video display |
| Connectivity | video input, serial out |
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system from the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force.
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 (instead of OLS) was an artifact of the evolution of the system. His 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 stopgap measure, the team developed a system where off-line users — that is, anyone not sitting at the one terminal available — could still edit their documents by punching a string of commands onto paper tape with a Flexowriter. Once the tape was complete, then an off-line user would 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 then the computer would print out a new paper tape containing the latest version of the document. Without interactive visualization, this could be awkward, since the user had to mentally simulate the cumulative effects of their commands on the document text. On the other hand, it matched the workflow of the 1960s office, since managers would give marked-up printouts of documents to secretaries.
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