# Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology *By Howard Rheingold. Simon & Schuster, 1985 (first edition); MIT Press, 2000 (revised edition).* > I did not read the whole book. The author hosts the 1985 text on his own site, and I opened all fourteen chapter pages and the footnotes page. For the chapter outline below I read each chapter's opening and closing passages and skimmed parts in between, not every page. The 2000 MIT Press edition has a revised last chapter that I did not read. Everything else comes from the author's own pages, Open Library catalog records, a Wikipedia stub, and the interviews linked below. I read page text, not audio or video. The source that mentioned the book, a biography page on Doug Engelbart, names it only in passing. ## 1. Book facts | | | |---|---| | Title | *Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology* (MIT Press subtitle). The 1985 Simon & Schuster edition's subtitle in catalog records is "the people and ideas behind the next computer revolution" | | Author | Howard Rheingold | | Publishers | Simon & Schuster (Computer Book Division), New York, 1985, hardcover, ISBN-10 0671492926, 335 pp. (Open Library); Prentice Hall Computer Publishing, Dec 1986, paperback, ISBN 9780139251085 (Open Library); MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., April 2000, revised edition, ISBN 9780262681155 (ISBN-10 0262681153), paperback, 359 pp. (Open Library lists 360 on one record) | | First published | 1985. The author's own bio page dates it "1984" in one line and "1985" in another; his book page and Wikipedia say 1985 | | Language | English | | Audiobook | I found none. I could not parse Audible's search page, so this is unconfirmed | **What changed in 2000.** The author's book page says the MIT Press edition includes "a revised chapter with 1999 interviews of Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, and Avron Barr". His site's online text is the original 1985 text (Wikipedia says the same). **Where it came up.** One mention: - [Doug Engelbart - Biography](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/183/) (Doug Engelbart Institute). My vault note lists M. Mitchell Waldrop's *The Dream Machine* (Viking, 2001) and this book (1985) as "two other standard accounts" and says I had not re-read them for the note. The page itself does not discuss the book. Vault note: [[Video Summaries/Doug Engelbart/Doug Engelbart - Biography]]. (The spelling is Engelbart, not "Englebart".) ## 2. Book resources **Free (legal).** - **The author's own site: [full 1985 text, chapter by chapter](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/).** Howard Rheingold hosts it himself, with a table of contents, fourteen chapters, a footnotes page and an index link, and a copyright line, "1985 howard rheingold, all rights reserved worldwide". Wikipedia's article for the book and his Wikipedia page both point to it as the original text online ("free in HTML form"). I treat it as an author-provided free copy; the page does not state a license. Chapter pages: [1](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/01.html), [2](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/02.html), [3](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/03.html), [4](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/04.html), [5](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/05.html), [6](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/06.html), [7](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/07.html), [8](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/08.html), [9](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/09.html), [10](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/10.html), [11](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/11.html), [12](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/12.html), [13](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/13.html), [14](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/14.html), [footnotes](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/15.html). - **Internet Archive controlled lending.** [1985 Simon & Schuster scan (toolsforthoughtp0000rhei)](https://archive.org/details/toolsforthoughtp0000rhei) and [a second 1985 scan (toolsforthought00howa)](https://archive.org/details/toolsforthought00howa). Open Library marks the 1985 work as borrowable. The [2000 MIT Press scan (toolsforthoughth00rhei)](https://archive.org/details/toolsforthoughth00rhei) is flagged print-disabled only. The pages load; I did not open the borrow flow or check availability. - **Libby/OverDrive.** I could not parse OverDrive's search page from my box, so I have not confirmed whether a library ebook exists. Check your own library's catalog. - **Hoopla.** Its [search page](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=tools+for+thought) loads, but I could not see results from my box. - **Open Library:** [work OL16028822W (1985, six editions)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16028822W); [MIT Press record OL24931535M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24931535M); a separate [2000 ebook-only work record](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL39138069W) with no ebook access. - **Project Gutenberg.** Not available; the book is in copyright. **Paid.** - Publisher: the MIT Press page for the 2000 edition returned a 403 to my box, so I have not linked it. - Amazon and Kindle: the Amazon pages for the [MIT Press paperback (ISBN 0262681153)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262681153) and the [1985 Simon & Schuster edition (ISBN 0671492926)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671492926) respond, but I could not parse price, stock or format, so I have not checked Kindle availability. - Audible: no audiobook found (see above). **Cover:** [Open Library cover image](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6875189-L.jpg) (MIT Press edition record). ## 3. Author biography Howard Rheingold (born July 7, 1947, in Phoenix, Arizona; Wikipedia) is an American writer, critic and teacher on the cultural and social effects of communication media. He graduated from Reed College in 1968. His own bio page says he "fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981" and "plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983", and that in the early 1980s he talked his way into writing work at Xerox PARC (from his interview with Ross Dawson, linked below). Before this book he wrote *Talking Tech* (1982, with Howard Levine) and *Higher Creativity* (1984, with Willis Harman). After it he wrote *Virtual Reality* (1991) and *The Virtual Community* (1993), which grew from his time on the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system he joined in 1985. He edited the *Whole Earth Review* and was editor in chief of the *Millennium Whole Earth Catalog* (1994), was founding executive editor of HotWired (1994), and founded Electric Minds (1996). Later books include *Smart Mobs* (2002) and *Net Smart: How to Thrive Online* (2012). He has taught at Stanford and UC Berkeley and was the Institute for the Future's first research fellow (2008, per Wikipedia). His site is [rheingold.com/howard](https://www.rheingold.com/howard); his [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Rheingold) lists the bibliography. ## 4. Author interviews and talks - **Untangling the Web, Episode 33 (Web Science Trust / Northwestern, posted Feb 8, 2021).** [Transcript](https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/02/08/episode-33-transcript/). I read part of it. He says Time magazine's person of the year (the personal computer, in 1982 by his other interview, "1983, I think" here) made him think "there's a much bigger story here to be told", so he wrote this book and a chapter "about what was happening online", and then found the WELL. - **The Informed Life, Episode 94: "Howard Rheingold on Tools for Thought" (Aug 14, 2022).** [Page and show notes](https://theinformed.life/2022/08/14/episode-94-howard-rheingold/). I read the transcript excerpt. He says he talked his way into writing for Xerox PARC, started the book in about 1983, and that it was published in 1985 and "sank like a stone", which he says had nothing to do with him. He says he is gratified that readers say it influenced how people thought about computers. The episode covers Engelbart's "unfinished revolution" and the book's resurgence. - **Humans + AI podcast with Ross Dawson (AC Ep3, July 25, 2023).** [Page](https://humansplus.ai/podcast/howard-rheingold-human-cooperation-origins-technology-enabled-mind-consciousness-amplification-ac-ep3/). I read part of the transcript. He describes calling PARC every Friday for freelance work until he got assignments there, and says the book's core question was what happens when hundreds of millions of people have these machines connected to each other. - **Intuition Network, "Computers and the Mind" with Jeffrey Mishlove.** [Transcript page](http://www.intuitionnetwork.org/txt/rheingol.htm). It returned a 500 to my box on my last try, so I only saw a search snippet: Mishlove introduces him as author of *Tools for Thought*, and Rheingold says the "universal computer that everyone can use ... really hasn't come along yet". I did not date the interview. ## 5. Summary **What the book is.** The author's own description is that it is "an exercise in retrospective futurism": he wrote it in the early 1980s, "attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like". Wikipedia uses the same phrase. He says the idea that people could use computers "to amplify thought and communication" did not come from the mainstream computer industry or homebrew computerists, but from J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay, whose work "was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work" by Boole, Babbage, Turing and von Neumann. His thesis, quoted from the same page: "You can't really guess where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from." **Chapter outline.** Titles come from the author's contents page. I did not use page numbers: no published table of contents with page numbers was available to me (Open Library's records for these editions have none), so the outline is by chapter only. The notes are from the opening and closing passages I read in the 1985 text. 1. **The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet.** An overview. It opens with an "unlikely subculture" south of San Francisco that is "creating a new medium for human thought". It predicts that "hundreds of millions of people" will join "new kinds of human communities" and compares the change to the spread of literacy after movable type. It says nobody knows whether this will be "the best or the worst thing the human race has done for itself". It closes by turning to the thinkers who dreamed it up. 2. **The First Programmer Was a Lady.** Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and Ada Lovelace, set in a Victorian London drawing room. The chapter includes Babbage and Ada's attempts to raise money for the engine, including a tic-tac-toe machine and Babbage's game-playing machines, and moves on toward the idea of the digital computer as a symbol system. 3. **The First Hacker and His Imaginary Machine.** Alan Turing and his 1936 paper on mathematical logic, the imaginary machine of the title, and later a passage on assembly language and machine language. It ends crediting von Neumann with adding "elegance and power" to Turing's first steps toward a programming language. 4. **Johnny Builds Bombs and Johnny Builds Brains.** John von Neumann ("Johnny"), the "von Neumann architecture", the stored-program concept, and the ENIAC story. The chapter covers John Mauchly's visit to John Atanasoff in 1941 and the 1973 *Honeywell v. Sperry Rand* decision, and ends with von Neumann's final illness. 5. **Ex-Prodigies and Antiaircraft Guns.** The metaphor of the "coding" of DNA and the "software of the brain" as the product of computing. Norbert Wiener, Julian Bigelow and Arturo Rosenblueth's 1943 paper "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" (the chapter text gives the title as "Behavior, Purpose and Technology"; I did not check which is the printed title), the 1942 Macy Foundation meeting, Warren McCulloch, and a first look at Claude Shannon. 6. **Inside Information.** Claude Shannon (unicycle and all) and information theory, a discussion of entropy in which Erwin Schrodinger's 1945 line that living organisms "eat negative energy" appears, and a turn toward 1957 and the MIT professor who "stumbled onto something big". 7. **Machines to Think With.** J.C.R. Licklider, who in 1957 logged every task he did in a day. The chapter covers his time at Lincoln Laboratory, the IBM AN/FSQ-7 machine he encountered there, and how interactive computing came out of that. It ends with the question whether the new medium will stay with "a smaller group" or become "the property of the entire culture, like literacy". 8. **Witness to History: The Mascot of Project MAC.** Told through David Rodman, who as a ten-year-old in 1960 walked into the MIT room where the first "hackers" worked. It covers Project MAC and the programmers' culture and ends by turning to "a dreamer out in California". 9. **The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker.** Doug Engelbart, from his 1945 Red Cross library reading (Vannevar Bush is named in the text) through three decades of trying to build a mind amplifier. The chapter notes that icons, mice, windows and bit-mapped screens are now part of Apple's business, a few blocks from his office at Tymshare in Cupertino. 10. **The New Old Boys from the ARPAnet.** Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC in 1983, with the Alto, Ethernet and the ARPAnet. It ends hoping we "will be ready to use them wisely". 11. **The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier.** Alan Kay and his aim of handheld, affordable "imagination amplifiers" for children, his time at Atari and Apple, and the Atari team's end. 12. **Brenda and the Future Squad.** Brenda Laurel and colleagues in the Atari Systems Research Group in Sunnyvale, and the author's questions about what it would feel like to operate "tomorrow's mind-augmenting information-vehicles". It closes on applied artificial intelligence. 13. **Knowledge Engineers and Epistemological Entrepreneurs.** Commercial expert systems and the people building them, opening with an epigraph (not attributed in the text I read) that intelligent machines are needed because the human mind "has known bugs". It closes on a visionary who forecast accurately in the 1960s and 1970s. 14. **Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond.** Ted Nelson, who calls himself "a tin-pot Da Vinci", and his Xanadu project, followed by the author's closing view that decisions about these machines "must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts". - Footnotes (on a separate page; I did not read them in detail). **Reception (as reported by others).** A review that a search snippet shows from a University of Michigan "quod" site (the page returned a Cloudflare block to my box) describes the book's account of Licklider's input/output work, Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, and his "link to sources" electronic documents, and quotes "make people realize that computers weren't just calculators" (p. 193 of an edition I do not know). I did not open the full review, so I am not using it as a source. Rheingold himself says the 1985 edition "sank like a stone". I did not look for negative reviews, so this is not balanced. **Why it is here.** The Engelbart biography note lists the book as a standard account of the people around Engelbart. Chapter 9 is the book's Engelbart chapter; the 2000 edition adds a 1999 Engelbart interview to its revised final chapter. ## 6. Fact-check Overall verdict: **supported** for the publication facts and the chapter list. The chapter notes come from the opening and closing passages I read, not the whole text. | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |---|---|---| | First published 1985 (Simon & Schuster, 335 pp., ISBN-10 0671492926) | Supported | Open Library record OL3021787M; the author's book page and Wikipedia say 1985 | | Author's bio page gives 1984 | Discrepancy | One line on his bio page says 1984; his book page and catalog records say 1985 | | MIT Press revised edition, April 2000, ISBN 9780262681155 | Supported | Author's book page; Open Library OL9524666M and OL24931535M | | 2000 edition adds 1999 interviews with Engelbart, Taylor, Kay, Laurel, Barr | As stated by the author | His book page; I did not read the MIT edition | | The author hosts the 1985 text free on his site | Supported | I opened all fourteen chapter pages; Wikipedia links to it as the original 1985 text online | | Fourteen chapters plus footnotes | Supported | Author's contents page | | Page numbers | Not given | No published contents list with page numbers was available to me | | The book is in the public domain | Not supported | The text page carries the "all rights reserved" notice. A free read from the author is not a license for copies | | Audiobook | Not found | Audible search page not parseable | | Library ebook in OverDrive | Unchecked | I could not parse OverDrive's search results or any library's catalog | | Interview claims | As quoted | Pages named in section 4; I read the excerpts, not every page | ## 7. Citations and references - Book text: [rheingold.com/texts/tft](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/) and [chapter pages](https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/01.html) as listed in section 2. - Author: [rheingold.com/howard](https://www.rheingold.com/howard); [Wikipedia, Howard Rheingold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Rheingold); [Wikipedia, Tools for Thought (stub)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Thought). - Catalogs: [Open Library work OL16028822W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16028822W); [MIT Press edition OL24931535M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24931535M); [Internet Archive 1985 scan](https://archive.org/details/toolsforthoughtp0000rhei); [Internet Archive 2000 scan](https://archive.org/details/toolsforthoughth00rhei); [Amazon, MIT Press paperback](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262681153). - Interviews: [Untangling the Web, Episode 33](https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/02/08/episode-33-transcript/); [The Informed Life, Episode 94](https://theinformed.life/2022/08/14/episode-94-howard-rheingold/); [Humans + AI, AC Ep3](https://humansplus.ai/podcast/howard-rheingold-human-cooperation-origins-technology-enabled-mind-consciousness-amplification-ac-ep3/). - Source that mentioned the book: [Doug Engelbart Institute, Biography](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/183/).