When presenting the keynote address at the World Library Summit in Singapore in 2002, Doug Engelbart remarked on his impression of the computer when he first came across it. This was in the era when computers were still used simply to compute, to crunch numbers. He said: symbols “I saw that we have a tool that does not just move earth or bend steel, but we have a tool that actually can manipulate symbols and, even more importantly, portray symbols in new ways, so that we can interact with them and learn. We have a tool that radically extends our capabilities in the very area that makes us most human,…
