Right now you’re probably using a mouse with your computer, which has a graphical user interface seen on a bitmapped display. You use the interface to follow hypertext links thanks to your computer being connected to others on a network. All of that stuff comes from “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968. And it was all put together by one person: Douglas Engelbart, who was born January 30, 1925.
Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon in the US, and left college after two years to serve in the US Navy during WWII as a radar and radio technician. He later said that when he was stationed on the remote island Leyte, he lived in a small hut on stilts, and that was where he read Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think. That one article predicted most of the computer and networking systems we use today, and Engelbart said it had a big influence on his own thinking.
When he left the Navy, he returned to college and in 1948 graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. Soon after that he moved to California to enroll in graduate work in electrical engineering (with a specialty in computers, which barely existed at the time) from the University of California at Berkeley. He realized in the early 1950s that he was engaged to be married but had no career goals other than “a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after.” So he formulated four statements that would guide his work:
- he would focus his career on making the world a better place
- any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions.
- 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
- computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.
By the time he graduated with a PhD, he already had eight patents. His first idea was to become a professor, but he realized that wouldn’t allow him to achieve what he hoped. He went to work for the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) where he quickly obtained another dozen patents as well as publishing his research agenda, which became a classic in the field. The Advanced Research Project Administration (ARPA — which is now DARPA) funded his new Augmentation Research Center at SRI, and in 1967 patented the computer mouse — which he called “an X-Y position indicator for a display system.” His term for the cursor was “the bug.” Luckily his technical work was more influential than his naming. The next year he presented The Mother of All Demos.
He also founded the Bootstrap Institute at Stanford University (it’s now the Doug Engelbart Institute) and worked on his idea of “collective IQ,” which he popularized in his 1995 book Boosting Our Collective IQ. Only a limited number were published in the first edition, but the book is now generally available at the Engelbart Institute.
His work has been vastly influential, and he was awarded nearly every prize in the field, including the Turing Award, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, and the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award. He passed away in 2013 at 88. And thanks to Doug Engelbart, you can use your mouse to click some hypertext to get more details.
