We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.

One of the things we're really bad about is, because of our eyes, you can't get the visual point of view we want. Our eyes have a visual point of view of like 160 degrees. But what I've got here is about 25, and on a cellphone it's pathetic. So this is completely wrong. 100% wrong. Wrong in a really big way. If you look at the first description that Engelbart ever wrote about what he wanted, it was a display that was three feet on its side, built into a desk, because what is it that you design on? If anybody's ever looked at a drafting table, which they may not have for a long time, you need room to design, because there's all this bullshit that you do wrong, right?

I think of civilization as being a set of processes trying to invent things that mediate, deflect, turn away, and modify most of the things that are wrong with our brain. Again, the problem is that we can't change our brain. We can only change some of the processes in it through training. Democracy is one of these things. It has an idea lurking in it that is still one of the hardest ideas for people to learn, which is the idea of equal rights. This is very hard to teach and most people don't believe it for a second.

And the way we made it intimate is that, like when we were dragging a file folder, the inertia on that file folder was proportional to how many files are in the folder. We could feel the weight.” And we did that by making a mouse that had differential breaks in it. So you could run the thing over a line and you feel a little bump. So it introduced tactility into the thing. We made a mouse actually, they had motors in it.

It's a little known fact that the very year the first mouse was invented by Engelbart in English in '64, the first tablet was invented. A tablet that you would not feel bad about using today. Not with a screen, but something that was down here and had a stylus. And they had the best gesture recognizer that's ever been done by around '66.

And then they made a system that in every way is an interesting parallel to Engelbart's system because it also had hyperlinking. This system was completely graphical. It was called graphical interaction language. And these guys did not have the scope of use in min Engelbart had. They were trying to improve programming, but they really wanted the people at RAND Corporation. And they had a level of aesthetics that nobody else in the ARPA community did. They just kicked the shit out of stuff.

And so, I had already used the Engelbart system, and really liked it, it had many, many important features. And I went down to RAND in '68, and tried Grail, the first seconds of it was, I had one of these hits that, "Oh, this is not even remotely like using a mouse. And it's not like using a stylus to use a mouse-oriented interface," because the whole thing was that the thing did not even have a keyboard. That is how good the gesture recognition was, but it also recognized symbols and other things. So you built systems on it as fast as you could draw, and you could pop on a box, and it would take you down to another hyper level. I felt intimate; on this system, there was no glass. And I instantly realized that using the mouse on Engelbart's system felt like I was doing an experiment in radioactive chemistry. If you've ever seen there's this Waldo.

The ideation for these world-class mathematicians was mostly visual. And for 20% of them, including Einstein, Einstein said, "I have sensations of a tactile and muscular kind," by the way, Feynman was too young for this, he missed out. But he literally wrestled with problems. He would occasionally be found under his desk, rolling around, holding onto himself. But Einstein would have sensations along his forearms, and his stomach muscles when he was thinking.

Our modern versions of democracy and science both started their invention in the 17th century. Part of what catalyzed those inventions was people gradually being able to give up on story forms

I served on some museum advisory boards, and one of the key phrases museums have is called release time. Release time is the maximum time anybody can be allowed to look at a particular exhibit. Because you got all these other people. So it's usually about two minutes. How much are you going to learn about something you don't know about in two minutes? Because a museum can't be anything else, but a commercial. And the real question is what is the commercial for?

Writing allows ideas to be thought about and organized differently, and most importantly it allows the reading ideas, the receipt of the ideas, to be done independently of response. The biggest problem with oral...

Lisa wasn't really viewed to be a platform for third parties. The concept with Lisa was Apple would write all the applications itself. Maybe eventually have third parties write software, but at least for the initial launch of Lisa, seven applications, all developed by the Lisa team.

You're not really doing something very revolutionary if you're not running into some dead ends. Yeah, things could work out differently. If I started the same thing again, it might turn out different from the paths I've gone down.

he team didn't know what the Macintosh would become. Rather, obsession and excitement to see where they'd end up drove them to expand the boundaries of what was possible.

We figured, in a few years we’d make something a lot better. We didn’t realize the architecture we were putting in place could last five years, let alone 10, 20, 30 years.