Nov 1, 2024
Bob Stein, Atari’s Encyclopedia Project
Bob Stein worked at Atari Research for 18 months beginning in
1981. He was hired by Alan Kay. He worked almost exclusively on an
encyclopedia project, a potential collaboration between Atari and
Encyclopaedia Britannica that never went anywhere.
I learned about Bob after he uploaded an item called The Atari
Drawings to Internet Archive. It's a collection of nine colorful
pencil drawings, drawn in 1982 by Disney animator Glen Keane. The
drawings depict futuristic scenarios where people use a
computerized encyclopedia to get information: for instance, "An
earthquake wakes a couple in the middle of the night. The
Intelligent Encyclopedia, connected to an online service, informs
them of the severity of the earthquake and makes safety tips
readily available." and "A mother and her children looking into a
tidepool in Laguna ask the Intelligent Encyclopedia about the
plants and animals that they see."
Bob described the collection of art in his introduction to the
document:
"In 1982 executives from Warner, Inc., Atari's parent company,
were scheduled to visit the Research Lab where the Encyclopedia
Project was located. Brenda Laurel and I came up with these
scenarios to give the execs a sense of what we were working toward.
The drawings were made by Disney animator, Glen Keane.
When you look at these, remember they were made 16 years
before Google and 12 years before Yahoo, even 8 years before the
earliest web-based search engines.
That said, one of the most interesting things about these
scenarios as seen today, is that with the exception of the image of
the architect and the teacher none of them indicated any inkling
that the most important element of the web to come was that it
would bring people into contact with each other. What we see here
is almost entirely people accessing content from a central server,
no sense that we would be communicating with each other or
uploading our own contributions to the collective culture. My own
explanation for this lapse focuses on the print-era mentality that
saw readers purely as consumers of content."
Bob saved and scanned a large number of materials from his
time at Atari, and uploaded them to Internet Archive. In addition
to the scans of Keane's Atari Drawings, the documents include memos
about the encyclopedia project and a transcript of a 1982 seminar
for Atari Research featuring Charles Van Doren. Check the show
notes for those links.
After Atari, Bob was co-founder of The Criterion Collection,
which restores and distributes important classic films; and
co-founder of The Voyager Company, the first commercial multimedia
CD-ROM publisher. In 2004, he co-founded The Institute for the
Future of the Book, a think tank "investigating the evolution of
discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked
screens."
This interview took place December 16, 2023.