Douglas Englebart (1925-Present)
Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse, the graphical user interface (GUI), and the first functioning hypertext system, NLS, which was also the second computer system linked to the ARPANET.
Born in Oregon in 1925, Engelbart was the grandson of Western pioneers and the son of a radio store owner and a mother who, he recalls, was "quite sensitive, and artistic." His father died when he was just nine, and the family's finances were tight. Following high school, he majored in electrical engineering at Oregon State University for two years, then enlisted with the Navy. This was in 1944, the midst of World War II, although on the day he shipped out of San Francisco, Japan surrendered. Two significant things occurred to Engelbart while he was in the Navy. He worked as a radar technician, which presented him with direct experience on how information could be communicated directly, electronically, on a screen. And while he was posted in the Philippines, he chanced upon a copy of Life magazine that included Vannevar Bush's essay, "As We May Think," which described something similar to the personal computer (as well as something like the internet).
Following the war, Engelbart completed his degree and moved down to the San Francisco Bay Area, to work at Ames. Within a couple of years, his work there had become somewhat dull, and he began to wonder what else he could, or instead, should be doing. So Engelbart set about considering the different avenues he could take to do something beneficial, and yet still earn a living. He considered getting into economics, or teaching but then he saw, suddenly and completely, the problem that he could help resolve. The epiphany hit him the day after he asked his future wife to marry him. Engelbart recognized that everything had changed. The world was shifting away from old ways of work, industry, and idea. Civilization had arrived at a period where the problems it was confronting were growing more and more difficult, and at the same time they were growing more imperative. This complexity and urgency "had exceeded what humans can deal with," he explained. "It suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you'd really contribute something basic."
With his new goal as motivation, Engelbart entered in the graduate program in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley and earned his Ph.D. in 1955. After gaining his Ph.D. he joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), an independent think-tank in Menlo Park, and before long began to draft the system he had visualized a decade earlier. In 1963 he wrote a paper titled "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." The paper grabbed the eye of the U.S. Advance Research Projects Agency, and Engelbart was able to establish the Augmentation Research Center at SRI.
At SRI, Engelbart developed a new field directed helping organizations keep up with the increasing complexity and urgency they were confronting with the exponential development and growth of technology, or as he plainly put it, augmenting human intellect. In 1962, he wrote his seminal work, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" . While at SRI, Engelbart worked on Augment, a project to produce computer tools to augment human capabilities. As part of this endeavor, he developed a computer system known as NLS (oN-Line System), to cross-reference research papers for sharing among geographically dispersed researchers. NLS supplied groupware capabilities, screen sharing among remote users, and reference links for traveling between sentences within a research paper and from one research paper to another. Engelbart had a vision of an interface between human and machine allowing for instant connection and communication. Partially in fulfillment of that ambition, he invented the first graphical user interface (GUI) and computer mouse.
In 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart presented NLS, an elaborate hypermedia—groupware system, in a 90 minute multimedia presentation that included a live video conference with staff members back in his research lab 30 miles away. To this day, Engelbart's demonstration is still recognized as "the mother of all demos." It was genuinely groundbreaking, but Engelbart was way ahead of his time. His ideas were too unusual and revolutionary for others to fully comprehend. Some people attending thought the entire affair was a hoax.
Engelbart had produced NLS with ARPA funding. SRI, where Engelbart's lab was became the second client on the ARPANET. Engelbart was very active in the entire project and assembled the Network information Center (NIC) which used NLS as a kind of online clearinghouse for ARPANET resources.
Today, the spiritual descendants of Engelbart's NLS, with its mouse and graphic display and "writing machine," pose on nearly every desk in the world. And with the arrival of the Internet and local-area networks and "groupware" like Lotus Notes, it appears that a great deal of Engelbart's vision has been realized. However the core themes of his work on "augmentation" continue to be unrealized. The personal computer has permitted us to work better, only we still work, for the most part, alone. Today's computers and the Internet are minor advances, but the challenge is still immense.
Engelbart has continued to work on augmenting human intellect, rarely experiencing the recognition many believe he deserves. In 1989, he established the Bootstrap Institute to foster high performance organizations by producing enabling technologies and furthering collaboration. Doug Engelbart has or shares twenty-one U.S. patents, including one for the computer mouse, which he named an "X-Y Position Indicator." Many of his inventions after the mouse were in software, which at the time wasn't subject to patent.
