This chapter tackles the notion of the digital interface as a meshing of, even a friction between, human and machine. The degree to which a GUI masks the digital machine for the sake of a more human-like experience is the degree to which users no longer have access to (understanding) both the mechanisms and the flow of information underlying the machine.

We can think of the interface as a complex philosophical entity whose translation mechanism is not so much related to natural-language translation as it is to a threshold, along the lines of Matthew Fuller’s definition of an interface as containing elements of “the underlying structure of [both] the program and the user.

In this way, we can look back and see the philosophy of computing embodied by the early experiments and writing of Doug-las Engelbart, Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and (even) Steve Wozniak as weighted toward a precise midpoint between computer/program and user, a balance that then irrevocably shifted to the user by 1984 with the release of the Apple Macintosh and its icon-based GUI.

The earliest example of a GUI-like interface whose philosophy was fundamentally different from that of the Macintosh was Douglas Engelbart’s oN-Line System (NLS), which he began work on in 1962 and famously demonstrated in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. While his “interactive, multi-console computer-display system” with keyboard, screen, mouse, and something he called a chord handset (which allowed the user to issue com-mands to the computer by pressing different combinations of the five keys) is commonly cited as the originator of the GUI, Engelbart wasn’t interested in creating a user-friendly machine so much as he was invested in “augmenting human intellect.”9As he first put it in 1962, this augmentation meant “increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

Designed to have a keyboard, an NLS-inspired chord keyboard, a mouse, a display, and windows, the Dynabook would have allowed users to realize Engelbart’s dream of a computing device that gave them the ability to create their own ways to view and manipulate information.

Rather than the overdetermined post-Macintosh GUI computer, which has been designed to preempt each user’s every possible need through the creation of an overabundance of ready-made tools and whose underlying workings are now utterly black-boxed such that, as homebrewers protested in the mid-1970s, “those who wish to do something different will have to put in considerable effort,” Kay wanted a machine that was “designed in a way that any owner could mold and channel its power to his own needs . . . a metamedium, whose content would be a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.

Clearly, Kay wanted thought patterns to move toward a literacy that involved reading and writing in the new medium instead of the unthinking consumption of ready-made tools, for he wrote, “The ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.

Smalltalk designers did not completely reject the notion of ready-made software so much as they sought to provide users with a set of software building blocks that they could combine and/or edit to create their own customized systems.

Canadian experimental writer bpNichol not only promptly purchased an Apple IIe the year it was released but also began work on one of the first published works of digital literature, First Screening, a series of twelve kinetic poems written in the Apple BASIC programming language (see Figure 15).4¹ Given his typewriter-based experiments with highly visual, permutational, DIY-oriented, and processual concrete poems, which I discuss in chapter 3, coupled with his McLuhan-inspired under-standing of writing tools as extensions of the writer, it is not surprising that Nichol’s writing experiments extended to the computer, exploited the possibilities of a screen-based medium, and so resulted in the creation of these twelve kinetic, cinematic poems.

This work is, again, not an example of activist media poetics in the sense that becomes more preva-lent once the model of the closed computer with an invisible GUI is ubiquitous but rather, given the homebrew-inspired open architecture of the Apple II, of writing as DIY tinkering.