the ARPA Network Information Center started as early as 1967 with the mandate to organise the Network Information Center as a depository for information relevant to ARPANET users, including network protocols, and other information pertinent to ARPA resource-sharing.*

But the Bay Area of the 1960s is not only well known for technical ingenuity but also as the stronghold of social movements (anti-Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation), that are often subsumed under the term 'counter culture'? It is sometimes overlooked that there was an intense interaction between these two developments,

There is an impression that Doug goes off in a corner and hatches ideas. People are uncomfortable with all the surprises... Doug does not allow enough control, goal setting, participation for ARC in general.

Wallace's memo achieves one crucial move: it restates and therefore reaffirms the goal of the laboratory and justifies Engelbart in organizing it (or, rather, in disorganizing it) the way he did. The Prophet turned victim reappears as a hero because even if he is blamed, this blame is the necessary price he must pay to carry the Word: the Prophet becomes a tragic hero. The end eventually justifies the means, even if these means 'tamper with the lives of the staff in a very significant way.' Ironically enough, the very word 'breakthrough' was also at the core of the EST gospel, which considered the experience of such a 'breakthrough' as one of the most important goal of the Seminars. Wallace's argument is therefore tantamount to a renewal of faith, if not in the person of the Prophet, at least in his revelation.

To Engelbart, however, his first attempts to do so met a relative lack of interest amongst both his sponsors at the Information Processing Techniques Office and his fellow contractors. His ARPA assignment to establish the Network Information Center was typically vague, and 'contained no specific guidelines as to what form NIC services should take.' On the other hand, when he took the initiative to ask his fellow contractors what services they expected from the NIC, he got another vague and 'often contradictory' response.

[...] The emerging discrepancy between Engelbart's plan to use the NIC as a means for his ambitious goals and the rest of the community's persistent idea of the NIC as a network library became the core of a fundamental crisis when the Network Information Center finally went on-line in late 1971.

Engelbart planned the remote use of his On-Line System over the network, first with a typewriter-oriented version, and later with the display terminal-based On-Line System. From 1969-1971, during the planning stages of the Network Information Center, Engelbart and his staff created several enhancements to NLS to provide these on-line services. In 1969, they worked on the design of a windowing capability for the system, and implemented the Mail and the Journal features of NLS. In 1970 and 1971, these features were in regular use in the laboratory, and they implemented a version of NLS for the then popular PDP-10 TENEX ver in roular use in operating system.

For handling the vast amount of documents (more than 30, 000 entries in five years) the system provided features for the indexing and retrieval of data. At the time of its submission, the Number System automatically transferred a mail message to a read-only file identified by its unique catalogue number. Catalogue indexes based on message identification, name or ident of its authors) and keywords were available. The user could consult such catalogue indexes when editing a message, in order to link it to previous messages. Other features allowed the use of 'irregular Augment files' such as those (text or graphics) that other NLS users were working on but that they had not submitted to the Journal yet, if those people made them accessible. The system also provided a way of analyzing a set of recorded dialogue, such as all the passages relevant to a given issue (identified by keywords or comments).

For Wallace, PODAC was a definite 'experiment' that was aiming at creating conflict inside the laboratory ('no safe heaven in the PODs'). His 'Of Mice and Man' memo gives his own version of how Engelbart was actually "fucking' with his staff members, who were 'the laboratory animals' in his experiments. For him, PODAC was an experiment in creating confusion and chaos in the laboratory: when something started to work Engelbart would change the rules and say that it was not the result that he expected. At the same time, Wallace notes the paradox: the augmentation framework was not changing. For Wallace, Engelbart is indeed the author of the indifferentiating crime that is at the core of the persecutory account. He insists that Engelbart had a problem with sharing the credits or even acknowledging references. For him, 'an awful lot of what was built [at ARC] had the personality of the various individuals who built it.' Engelbart might appear as 'the lone guy who invented all that stuff', when it was really built by all these people (who didn't get any credits), 'almost by accident' in Wallace's mind, 'the best people in the industry at that time'

Kind of leadership that Engelbart exercised on ARC and appeared finally as built-in problems in an organization set up around one man's crusade.

This kind of a 'social experiment' was not new to ARC or Engelbart. As an individual, Engelbart had had some experience with encounter groups and had generally felt that his interaction with these groups had helped him 'to understand himself better, to fully appreciate his attitudes and beliefs and integrate his thinking and opinions, and... to communicate better with the world outside himself.

PODAC Personal and Organizational Development Activity became more personal at first: the personal development side of the activity, at first, took over the organisational side. Topics discussed covered raising kids, philosophies of life, likes and dislikes, funny incidents in our lives, the dope rackets, "hippies" as they are vs. as the general public thinks they are... you name it' " At this level, we can see how the on-line computing culture at ARC was anchored in the general counter-cultural background of the Bay Area of the late 1960s.

We propose to make use of a model that the religious scientist René Girard developed to analyze collective persecutions in times of crises

... Girard suggests that they include three types of stereotypes that help decipher the historical 'truth' behind the text. These stereotypes include (1) a situation of crisis of indifferentiation with its 'simultaneously monotonous and monstrous aspect', which turns into an (2) indifferentiating crime which turns a certain individual or group of individuals into (3) the designated criminals and therefore the designated victims of the persecutions, because they are paradoxically different and undifferentiated at the same time.

The persecutory mechanism of the scapegoat is a social tautology: if there is a crisis, there must be a crime; if there is a crime there must be criminals; if there are criminals, they must be the cause of the crisis (or as Monty Python once genially put it, 'if she burns, she must be a witch'). As we shall now see the collapse of Engelbart's laboratory was a time of scapegoats and a murderous crowd: Vallée's story combines the three main stereotypes of a persecutory text according to Girard.

Success or failure of the technology transfer in such a complex technological system depends on the stabilization of the chain of associations in the social and technological networks involved in the process. Geographical, psychological, and social characteristics of the technology transfer finally sum to the necessary contextual conditions of the process. We conclude that the understanding of the user's need in each phase of the process (from experimental research to widespread diffusion of the technology) is very important for the success of the transfer process.