Douglas Carl Engelbart (born January 30, 1925) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of
hypertextHypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
, networked computers, and precursors to
GUIsIn computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
. He is a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and
networksA computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.
Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab.
Early life and education
Engelbart was born in the
U.S. stateA U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...
of
OregonOregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
on January 30, 1925 to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He is of
GermanThe Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
, Swedish and Norwegian descent.
He was the middle of three children, with a sister Dorianne (3 years older), and a brother David (14 months younger). They lived in Portland in his early years, and moved to the countryside to Johnson Creek when he was 9 or 10, after the death of his father. He graduated from
Portland'sPortland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
Franklin High School in 1942.
Midway through his college studies at
Oregon State UniversityOregon State University is a coeducational, public research university located in Corvallis, Oregon, United States. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees and a multitude of research opportunities. There are more than 200 academic degree programs offered through the...
(then called Oregon State College), near the end of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, he was drafted into the US Navy, serving two years as a
radarRadar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
technicianA technician is a worker in a field of technology who is proficient in the relevant skills and techniques, with a relatively practical understanding of the theoretical principles. Experienced technicians in a specific tool domain typically have intermediate understanding of theory and expert...
in the
PhilippinesThe Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
. On a small island in a tiny hut up on stilts that he first read
Vannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's article "
As We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
", which greatly inspired him. He returned to Oregon State and completed his
Bachelor's degreeA bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in
electrical engineeringElectrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
in 1948.
While at Oregon State, he was a member of
Sigma Phi EpsilonSigma Phi Epsilon , commonly nicknamed SigEp or SPE, is a social college fraternity for male college students in the United States. It was founded on November 1, 1901, at Richmond College , and its national headquarters remains in Richmond, Virginia. It was founded on three principles: Virtue,...
social fraternity.
He was hired by the
National Advisory Committee for AeronauticsThe National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a U.S. federal agency founded on March 3, 1915 to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958 the agency was dissolved, and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and...
at the Ames Research Center, where he worked through 1951.
Career and accomplishments
Epiphany
Doug Engelbart's career was inspired in 1951 when he got engaged and suddenly realized he had no career goals beyond getting a good education and a decent job. Over several months he reasoned that:
- he would focus his career on making the world a better place;
- any serious effort to make the world better requires some kind of organized effort;
- harnessing the collective human intellect of all the people contributing to effective solutions was the key;
- if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems - the sooner the better; and
- computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.
In 1945, Engelbart had read with interest
Vannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's article "
As We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
", a call to arms for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge. Doug had also read something about computers (a relatively recent phenomenon), and from his experience as a radar technician he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen. He envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display 'working stations', flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life's mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools.
He enrolled in graduate school in electrical engineering at
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, graduating with an MS degree in 1953, and a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1955.
As a graduate student at Berkeley he assisted in the construction of the California Digital Computer project
CALDICCALDIC was an electronic digital computer built with the assistance of the Office of Naval Research at the University of California, Berkeley between 1951 and 1955 to assist and enhance research being conducted at the university with a platform for high-speed computing.CALDIC was designed to be...
. His graduate work led to several patents. After completing his PhD he stayed on at Berkeley as assistant professor to teach for a year, and left when it was clear he could not pursue his vision there. He then formed a
startupA startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...
, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctorate research on storage devices, but after a year decided instead to pursue the research he had been dreaming of since 1951.
He took a position at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in
Menlo ParkMenlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
, in 1957. He initially worked for
Hewitt CraneHewitt D. Crane was an American engineer best known for his pioneering work at SRI International on ERMA , for Bank of America, magnetic digital logic, neuristor logic, the development of an eye-movement tracking device, and a pen-input device for computers.-Early life and career:Crane was born in...
on magnetic devices and miniaturization of electronics; Engelbart and Crane became lifelong friends.
SRI and ARC
At SRI, Engelbart gradually obtained over a dozen patents (some resulting from his graduate work), and by 1962 produced a report about his vision and proposed research agenda titled
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
This led to funding from ARPA to launch his work. Engelbart recruited a research team in his new
Augmentation Research CenterStanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line...
(ARC, the lab he founded at SRI), and became the driving force behind the design and development of the On-Line System, or
NLSNLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...
. He and his team developed computer-interface elements such as bit-mapped screens, the mouse,
hypertextHypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
, collaborative tools, and precursors to the
graphical user interfaceIn computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
. He conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most individuals were kept away from computers, and could only use computers through intermediaries (see
batch processingBatch processing is execution of a series of programs on a computer without manual intervention.Batch jobs are set up so they can be run to completion without manual intervention, so all input data is preselected through scripts or command-line parameters...
), and when software tended to be written for
vertical applicationA vertical application or vertical market application, is software defined by requirements for a single, or narrowly defined, market. It contrasts with horizontal application....
s in proprietary systems.
Engelbart applied for a
patentA patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
in 1967 and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse - ), which he had developed with Bill English, his lead engineer, a few years earlier. In the patent application it is described as an
"X-Y position indicator for a display system". Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. His group also called the on-screen cursor a "bug", but this term was not widely adopted.
He never received any
royaltiesRoyalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
for his mouse invention. During an interview, he says "
SRISRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...
patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to
AppleApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
for something like $40,000."
Engelbart showcased the
chorded keyboardA keyset or chorded keyboard is a computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a "chord" on a piano...
and many more of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at the so-called
mother of all demosThe Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...
.
ARPANET
Engelbart's research was funded by ARPA, SRI's ARC became involved with the ARPANET (the precursor of the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
).
The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420. Supervised by Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's
SDS 940The SDS 940 was Scientific Data Systems' first machine designed to support time sharing directly, and was based on the SDS 930's 24-bit CPU built primarily of integrated circuits. It was announced in February 1966 and shipped in April, becoming a major part of Tymshare's expansion during the 1960s...
Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login". The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.
In addition to SRI and UCLA,
UCSBThe University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
, and the
University of UtahThe University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
were part of the original four network nodes. By December 5, 1969, the entire 4-node network was connected.
ARC soon became the first Network Information Center and thus managed the directory for connections among all ARPANET nodes. ARC also published a large percentage of the early Request For Comments, an ongoing series of publications that document the evolution of ARPANET into the Internet. Although the NIC at first used NLS, it was intended to be a production service to other network users, while Engelbart continued to focus on innovative research. This inherent conflict led to establishing the NIC as its own group, led by
Elizabeth J. FeinlerElizabeth Jocelyn "Jake" Feinler is an American information scientist.From 1972 until 1989 she was director of the Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute...
.
Anecdotal notes
HistorianA historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
of science
Thierry BardiniThierry Bardini is a French sociologist who did all his academic career outside France. He is a full professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism ....
argues that Engelbart's complex personal philosophy (which drove all his research) foreshadowed the modern application of the concept of coevolution to the philosophy and use of technology.
Bardini points out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the
principle of linguistic relativityThe principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf. Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies. He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work.
End of research career
Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of Engelbart's researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for
Xerox PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon.
Engelbart served on the board of directors of
Erhard Seminars TrainingErhard Seminars Training, an organization founded by Werner H. Erhard, offered a two-weekend course known officially as "The est Standard Training"...
. Several key ARC personnel were also involved. Although EST had been recommended by other researchers, the controversial nature of EST and other social experiments reduced the morale and social cohesion of the ARC community.
The Mansfield Amendment, the end of the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, and the end of the Apollo program reduced ARC's funding from ARPA and
NASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
. SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of
artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
researcher
Bertram RaphaelBertram Raphael is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence.-Biography:Raphael was born in 1936 in in New York...
, who negotiated the transfer of the laboratory to a company called
TymshareTymshare, Inc. was headquartered in Cupertino, California from 1964 to 1984.It was a well-known timesharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company throughout its history and competed with companies such as Four Phase, Compuserve, and Digital Equipment Corporation...
. Engelbart's house in
AthertonAtherton is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, United States. Its population was 6,914 at the 2010 census. In September 2010, Forbes magazine placed Atherton's zip code of 94027 at #2 on its annual list of America's most expensive zip codes, with a median home price of $4,010,200...
burned down during this period, causing him and his family even further problems. Tymshare took over NLS and the lab that Engelbart had founded, hired most of the lab's staff including its creator as a Senior Scientist, renamed the software
Augment, and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division. Tymshare was already somewhat familiar with NLS; back when ARC was still operational, it had experimented with its own local copy of the NLS software on a minicomputer called OFFICE-1, as part of a joint project with ARC.
At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity. Operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to do further research. Various executives, first at Tymshare and later at
McDonnell DouglasMcDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor, producing a number of famous commercial and military aircraft. It formed from a merger of McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft in 1967. McDonnell Douglas was based at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport...
(which took over Tymshare in 1984), expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them. His interest inside of McDonnell Douglas was focused on the enormous knowledge management and IT requirements involved in the lifecycle of an aerospace program, which served to strengthen Doug's resolve to motivate the IT arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system. Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, determined pursue his work free from commercial pressure.
Teaming with his daughter, Christina Engelbart, in 1988 he founded the Bootstrap Institute to coalesce his ideas into a series of three-day and half-day management seminars offered at Stanford University 1989–2000. By the early 1990s there was sufficient interest among his seminar graduates to launch a collaborative implementation of his work, and the Bootstrap Alliance was formed as a non-profit home base for this effort. Although the invasion of Iraq and subsequent recession spawned a rash of belt-tightening reorganizations which drastically redirected the efforts of their alliance partners, they continued with the management seminars, consulting, and small-scale collaborations. In the mid-1990s they were awarded some DARPA funding to develop a modern user interface to Augment, called Visual AugTerm (VAT), while participating in a larger program addressing the IT requirements of the Joint Task Force.
Honors
Since the late 1980s, prominent individuals and organizations have recognized the seminal importance of Engelbart's contributions:
In December 1995, at the Fourth WWW Conference in Boston, he was the first recipient of what would later become the
Yuri Rubinsky Memorial AwardThe "Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award" was a prize that was awarded annually at the International World Wide Web Conference. Yuri Rubinsky, in cooperation with the International WWW Conference Committee, presented the SoftQuad Award for Excellence to Doug Engelbart at the Fourth International WWW...
. In 1997 he was awarded the
Lemelson-MIT PrizeThe Lemelson Foundation awards several prizes yearly to inventors in United States. The largest is the Lemelson-MIT Prize which was endowed in 1994 by Jerome H. Lemelson, and is administered through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
of $500,000, the world's largest single prize for invention and innovation, and the ACM
Turing AwardThe Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
. To mark the 30th anniversary of Engelbart's 1968 demo, in 1998 the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives
http://svarchive.stanford.edu/ and the
Institute for the FutureThe Institute for the Future is a Palo Alto, California–based think tank established in 1968, as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation, to help organizations plan for the long-term future....
hosted
Engelbart's Unfinished Revolutionhttp://unrev.stanford.edu/, a
symposiumIn ancient Greece, the symposium was a drinking party. Literary works that describe or take place at a symposium include two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium, as well as a number of Greek poems such as the elegies of Theognis of Megara...
at
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
's Memorial Auditorium, to honor Engelbart and his ideas. Also that year,
ACMThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
SIGCHISIGCHI is the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction, one of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups....
awarded him the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award (and inducted him into the
CHI AcademyThe CHI Academy is a group of researchers honored by SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. Each year, 5–7 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative contributions to the development of thefield of...
in 2002).
Engelbart was awarded The Franklin Institute's Certificate of Merit in 1996 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1999 in Computer and Cognitive Science.
In early 2000 Engelbart produced, with volunteers and sponsors, what was called
The Unfinished Revolution — IIhttp://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/colloquium.html, also known as the
Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford University, to document and publicize his work and ideas to a larger audience (live, and online).
In December 2000, US President
Bill ClintonWilliam Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
awarded Engelbart the
National Medal of TechnologyThe National Medal of Technology and Innovation is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development of new and important technology...
, the United States' highest technology award.
In 2001 he was awarded a
British Computer SocietyThe British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...
's
Lovelace MedalThe Lovelace Medal, established by the British Computer Society in 1998, is presented to individuals who have advanced Information Systems or added significantly to their understanding....
, and in 2005 he was made a Fellow of the
Computer History MuseumThe Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
and honored with the
Norbert Wiener AwardThe Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility was established in 1987 in honor of Norbert Wiener to recognize contributions by computer professionals to socially responsible use of computers...
, which is given annually by
Computer Professionals for Social ResponsibilityComputer Professionals for Social Responsibility is a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. in 1983 . It educates policymakers and the public on a wide range of issues...
.
Robert X. CringelyRobert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.- Biography :...
did an hour long interview with Engelbart on December 9, 2005 in his NerdTV
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/ video podcast series.
On December 9, 2008, Engelbart was honored at the 40th Anniversary celebration of the 1968 "
Mother of All DemosThe Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...
". This event, produced by SRI International, was held at Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University. Speakers included several members of Engelbart's original Augmentation Research Center (ARC) team including Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and
Jeff RulifsonJohns Frederick Rulifson is an American computer scientist.-Biography:Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941 in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Virginia Helen Johns...
, Engelbart's chief government sponsor
Bob TaylorRobert William Taylor , known as Bob Taylor, is an Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies....
, and other pioneers of interactive computing, including Andy van Dam and
Alan KayAlan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
. In addition, Christina Engelbart spoke about her father's early influences and the ongoing work of the Doug Engelbart Institute.
In June 2009, the
New Media ConsortiumThe New Media Consortium is an international 5013 not-for-profit consortium of more than 250 colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.NMC member institutions are found in almost...
recognized Engelbart as an NMC Fellow for his lifetime of achievements. In 2011, Engelbart was inducted into
IEEE Intelligent SystemsIEEE Intelligent Systems, a bimonthly publication of the IEEE Computer Society. It is an AAAI-sponsored journal. Cosponsors are the British Computer Society and the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence....
' AI's Hall of Fame.
Recent work and legacy
Doug Engelbart attended Program for the Future 2010 Conference where hundreds of people convened at The Tech Museum in San Jose and online to engage in dialog about how to pursue Doug Engelbart's vision to augment collective intelligence.
The most complete coverage of Engelbart's bootstrapping ideas can be found in
Boosting Our Collective IQ, by Douglas C. Engelbart, 1995. This is a special keepsake including three of Engelbart's key papers, artfully edited and produced into book form by Yuri Rubinsky and Christina Engelbart to commemorate the presentation of the 1995 SoftQuad Web Award to Doug Engelbart at the World Wide Web conference in Boston that December, honoring his early and seminal contribution to the hypertext systems. Only 2,000 softcover copies were printed, and 100 hardcover, numbered and signed by Doug Engelbart and
Tim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
. 30 pages, 5.5″×9″ includes Epilogue and details of the Award. Engelbart's book is now being republished by the Doug Engelbart Institute.
Two comprehensive histories of Engelbart's laboratory and work are in
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by
John MarkoffJohn Markoff is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.- Biography :...
and
A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Centuryhttp://www.sri.com/about/history/nielson_book.html by Donald Neilson. Other books on Engelbart and his laboratory include
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by
Thierry BardiniThierry Bardini is a French sociologist who did all his academic career outside France. He is a full professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism ....
and
The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart, by
Valerie LandauValerie Landau is an American designer, author and educator. She has filed two patents along with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent describes multitouch interface for chorded text entry. The new patent is inspired by Engelbart's early work developing the...
and
Eileen CleggEileen Clegg is a visual journalist and founder of Visual Insight where she creates visual maps of ideas by bringing together her experience with journalism, and art, which is part of an evolving visual language...
in conversation with Douglas Engelbart. All four of these books are based on interviews with Engelbart as well as other contributors in his laboratory.
Engelbart is now Founder Emeritus of the Doug Engelbart Institute, which he founded in 1988 with his daughter Christina Engelbart, who is now Executive Director. The Institute promotes Engelbart's philosophy for boosting Collective IQ—the concept of dramatically improving how we can solve important problems together—using a strategic
bootstrapping approach for accelerating our progress toward that goal.
In 2005 Engelbart received a
National Science FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
grant to fund the open source HyperScope
http://hyperscope.org project. The Hyperscope team built a browser component using
AjaxAjax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
and
DHTMLDynamic HTML, or DHTML, is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of a static markup language , a client-side scripting language , a presentation definition language , and the Document Object Model.DHTML...
designed to replicate Augment's multiple viewing and jumping capabilities (linking within and across various documents). HyperScope is perceived as the first step of a process designed to engage a wider community in a dialogue, on development of collaborative software and services, based on Engelbart's goals and research. The Doug Engelbart Institute is now based at
SRI InternationalSRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...
.
Engelbart has served on the Advisory Boards of the University of Santa Clara Center for Science, Technology, and Society
http://www.scu.edu/sts/,
Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a Palo Alto, California-based nonprofit organization for promoting transformative technologies. They sponsor conferences on molecular nanotechnology, publish reports, and produce a newsletter....
, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, The Technology Center of Silicon Valley, and The Hyperwords Company Ltd (producer of the Firefox Add-On called
HyperwordsHyperwords was a term for interactive text. Whereas hyper-links have the specific meaning of words which are linked to specific destinations, hyperwords refers to all interactive words where the idea is that the reader can issue commands on the text...
.
Family
Engelbart has four children, Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman with his first wife of 47 years, Ballard who died in 1997. He has nine grandchildren. He remarried on January 26, 2008 to writer and producer Karen O'Leary Engelbart.
An 85th birthday celebration was held at
the Tech Museum of InnovationThe Tech Museum of Innovation, or simply The Tech, is a museum located in the heart of Silicon Valley, in downtown San Jose, California USA.-History:...
.
External links