|
|||
 |
Years
before personal computers and desktop information processing became
commonplace or even practicable, Douglas Engelbart had invented a number of
interactive, user-friendly information access systems that we take for
granted today: the computer mouse was one of his inventions. At the Fall
Joint Computer Conference in
|
||
|
Mouse
(computer), a common pointing device, popularized by its inclusion as standard
equipment with the Apple Macintosh. With the rise in popularity of graphical
user interfaces in MS-DOS; UNIX, and OS/2, use of mice is growing throughout
the personal computer and workstation worlds. The basic features of a mouse
are a casing with a flat bottom, designed to be gripped by one hand; one or
more buttons on the top; a multidirectional detection device (usually a ball)
on the bottom; and a cable connecting the mouse to the computer. By moving
the mouse on a surface (such as a desk), the user typically controls an
on-screen cursor. A mouse is a relative pointing device because there are no
defined limits to the mouse's movement and because its placement on a surface
does not map directly to a specific screen location. To select items or choose
commands on the screen, the user presses one of the mouse's buttons,
producing a "mouse click."
Mouse Patent # 3,541,541 issued
Douglas Engelbart's patent for the mouse is only a representation of his pioneering work in the design of modern interactive computer environments. |
|||
|
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart
|
|
Douglas Engelbart in 1984,
showing two mice
| |
Born
|
|
|
Citizenship
|
US
|
|
Nationality
|
US
|
|
Ethnicity
|
German (father's side),
Norwegian and Swedish (mother's side)
|
|
Fields
|
|
|
Institutions
|
|
|
Oregon State College
(BS); UC
Berkeley (PhD)
|
|
|
Doctoral advisor
|
|
|
Known for
|
|
|
Notable awards
|
|
Douglas Engelbart
Dr.
Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor and early computer pioneer. He is best
known for inventing the computer mouse,[1] as a pioneer of human-computer
interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to
GUIs; and
as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s
increasingly urgent and complex problems.[2]
His
lab at SRI was
responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before
or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles,
which he termed his "bootstrapping strategy", which he specifically
designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.
Early life and education
Engelbart was born in the U.S. state of Oregon on January 30, 1925 to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys
Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He is of German, Swedish and Norwegian descent.[4]
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 a place called Johnson Creek when
he was 9 or 10, after the death of his father. He graduated from Portland's Franklin
High School in 1942.
Midway through his college studies at Oregon State
University (then called Oregon State College), just at the end of
World War II, he was drafted into the Navy, serving two years as a radar
technician in the Philippines. It was there on a small island in a
tiny hut up on stilts that he first read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which greatly inspired
him. He returned to Oregon State and completed his Bachelor's degree
in Electrical Engineering in 1948, a B.Eng. from UC Berkeley
in 1952,[5] and a Ph.D. in EECS
from UC Berkeley in 1955. While at Oregon State, he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon social fraternity.
As a graduate student at Berkeley he assisted in the construction of the
California Digital Computer project CALDIC. His graduate work led to several patents[6]. After completing his PhD he stayed on
at Berkeley to teach for a year, and left when it was clear he could not pursue
his vision there. He then formed a startup, Digital Techniques, to commercialize
some of his doctorate research on storage devices, but after a year decided
instead to find a venue where he could pursue the research he had been dreaming
of since 1951 (see Epiphany).
Career and accomplishments
The first computer mouse held by Engelbart showing the
wheels that directly contact the working surface.
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 (1) he would focus his career
on making the world a better place, (2) any serious effort to make the world
better requires some kind of organized effort, (3) harnessing the collective
human intellect of all the people contributing to the solution was the key, (4)
if you could dramatically improve how we do that you'd be boosting every effort
on the planet to solve important problems, and the sooner the better (5)
computers could be the vehicle for doing all this.
Several years prior, Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", 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 suddenly 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 went to UC Berkeley to learn everything he
could about computers, got his PhD, was told to be very careful about who he
talked to about his "wild" ideas. After a year of teaching at
Berkeley as Acting Assistant Professor, he took a position at Stanford Research
Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park
hoping one day to pursue his vision there. He initially worked for Hewitt Crane on devices. He and Hew became
lifelong friends.
SRI and ARC
At SRI, Engelbart gradually proved himself with over a dozen patents to his
name (some resulting from his graduate work), and within a few years was funded
to produce 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 Center (ARC, the lab he founded at SRI), and became the
driving force behind the design and development of the On-Line System, or NLS. He and his team developed
computer-interface elements such as bit-mapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to
the graphical user
interface. 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 processing), and when software tended to be
written for vertical applications
in proprietary systems.
Two Apple Macintosh Plus
mice, 1986
In 1967, Engelbart applied for, and in 1970 he received a patent for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse U.S.
Patent 3,541,541), 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 royalties for his mouse
invention. During an interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no
idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to
Apple for something like $40,000."
Engelbart showcased many of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at the
so-called mother of all demos.[7]
ARPANET
Because Engelbart's research and tool-development for online collaboration
and interactive human-computer interfaces was partially funded by ARPA,
SRI's ARC became involved with the ARPANET (the precursor of the
Internet).
On October 29, 1969, the world's first electronic computer network, the ARPANET, was established
between nodes at Leonard Kleinrock's
lab at UCLA and Engelbart's lab at SRI. Interface Message
Processors at both sites served as the backbone of the first Internet [1].
In addition to SRI and UCLA, UCSB,
and the University of Utah
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/Internet.
Anecdotal Notes
Historian of science Thierry Bardini has argued that Engelbart's
complex personal philosophy (which drove all his research endeavors)
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
relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf.[8] 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.
Engelbart's philosophy and research agenda is most clearly and directly
expressed in the 1962 research report which Engelbart refers to as his 'bible':
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
The concept of network-augmented intelligence is attributed to Engelbart based
on this pioneering work.
End of research career and subsequent
developments
Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various
misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers
became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, 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.
In his book about Engelbart, Bardini points out that in the early 1970s,
several key ARC personnel were briefly involved in Erhard Seminars
Training. Although EST seemed like a good idea at first, the
controversial nature of EST reduced the morale and social cohesion of the ARC
community.
The Mansfield Amendment,
the end of the Vietnam War, and the
end of the Apollo program
reduced ARC's funding from ARPA and NASA. SRI's management, which
disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains
of ARC under the control of artificial
intelligence researcher Bertram Raphael, who negotiated the transfer of
the laboratory to a company called Tymshare. Engelbart's house in Atherton
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 Douglas (which took over Tymshare in
1984[9]), 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[10]. Engelbart retired from McDonnell
Douglas in 1986, determined to raise a flag on neutral ground where he could
pursue his work in earnest.
Teaming with his daughter, Christina Engelbart, in 1988 he founded the
Bootstrap Institute with modest funding to coalesce his ideas into a series of
three-day and half-day management seminars offered at Stanford University 1989
- 2000, which served to refine his ideas while inspiring candidate
participants. 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 reorgs 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[11]:
In December 1995, at the Fourth WWW Conference in Boston, he was the first
recipient of what would later become the Yuri Rubinsky
Memorial Award. In 1997 he was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize
of $500,000, the world's largest single prize for invention and innovation, and
the ACM Turing Award. To mark the 30th anniversary of
Engelbart's 1968 demo, in 1998 the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives and the Institute for the
Future hosted Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, a large symposium at Stanford University's
Memorial Auditorium, to honor Engelbart and his ideas. Also that year, ACM
SIGCHI awarded him the CHI Lifetime Achievement
Award (and inducted him into the CHI Academy in 2002).
In early 2000 Engelbart produced, with a dedicated team of volunteers and
sponsors, what was called the The Unfinished Revolution - II, also known as
the Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford University, to document and
publicize his work and ideas to a larger audience (live, and online). The video
archives of both the 2000 UnRev-II: Engelbart's Colloquium at Stanford,
and the 1998 "Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution" Symposium,
are still available online as of this writing (December
2008). In December 2000, US President Bill Clinton awarded Engelbart the National Medal of
Technology, the United States' highest technology award. In 2001
Engelbart was awarded a British Computer
Society's Lovelace Medal, and
in 2005 he was made a Fellow of the Computer History
Museum and honored with the Norbert Wiener Award, which is given annually by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Robert X.
Cringely did an hour long interview with Mr. Engelbart on 9 Dec 2005
in his NerdTV video podcast series. On December 9, 2008,
Engelbart was honored at the 40th Anniversary celebration of the 1968
"Mother of All Demos".[12] 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 Rulifson, Engelbart's chief government
sponsor Bob Taylor,
and other pioneers of interactive computing, including Andy van Dam and Alan Kay. 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 Consortium
recognized Engelbart as an NMC Fellow [13] for his lifetime of achievements.
At present
The most complete coverage of Engelbart's bootstrapping ideas can be found
in Boosting Our Collective IQ[14], 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-Lee. 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 Markoff and A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century
by Donald Neilson. Other books on Engelbart and his laboratory include Bootstrapping:
Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini and a yet unpublished book, Evolving
Collective Intelligence, by Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg. All four of these books are based
on interviews with Engelbart as well as other contributors in his laboratory.
He 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.[15]
In 2005 Engelbart received a National Science
Foundation grant to fund the open source HyperScope
project. The Hyperscope team built a browser component using Ajax and 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 International.
Engelbart has served on the Advisory Board of the University of Santa Clara
Center for Science,
Technology, and Society, and The Hyperwords Company Ltd (producer of
the free Firefox Add-On called 'Hyperwords'[16].
Family
Dr. Engelbart has four children, Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman with
his late wife of 47 years, Ballard who died in 1997. He has nine grandchildren.
No comments:
Post a Comment