The Augmentation Era
The era in which the work of Engelbart and Xerox PARC carried the older cybernetic insights forward into a recognizable tradition of computation built around human cognition rather than against it.
From the demo to the field.
The Augmentation Era opens, by convention, with Engelbart's 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference — the event later called the Mother of All Demos. Engelbart had been articulating intelligence augmentation since 1962, but the seventies were the era in which the work passed from individual articulation into institutional research practice.
Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI carried the program through the early seventies. Xerox PARC, founded in 1970, became the institutional locus of the work — Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Butler Lampson, and a generation of researchers who built the personal computing tradition on the foundation of computation-as-augmentation rather than computation-as-replacement. By the late seventies and eighties, human-computer interaction had emerged as a named field with its own conferences, textbooks, and disciplinary identity.
The tools, and the framing of the tools.
The era produced both artifacts — the mouse, the bitmap display, the windowed interface, hypertext, the personal computer itself — and the framing in which those artifacts were understood. The framing mattered as much as the artifacts. Computation, in this tradition, was not a substitute for human reasoning. It was a substrate on which human reasoning could be extended, recorded, and shared. That framing is the direct ancestor of the philosophical commitments Hi-Centric AI inherits in the present.