Douglas Engelbart dies at age 88; computer visionary

(SRI International)




In what technology author Steven Levy dubbed “the mother of all demos,” Engelbart demonstrated what could happen when computers talk to one another, showcasing innovations such as word processing, collaborative editing, hypertext links, video conferencing and desktop windows — 13 years before the IBM personal computer and 15 years before the Macintosh.



Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak credits Engelbart and his landmark 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” — a blueprint for how technology can harness information and help people collaborate with one another — “for everything we have in the way computers work today.” The paper earned Engelbart funding from the Defense Department.

“What he did was absolutely brilliant and so far ahead of its time back then,” Wozniak said. “He saw where the future was going to go.”

Engelbart’s work inspired generations of scientists and was deployed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Jobs to power their companies and fortunes.



Levy, author of “Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything,” remembers visiting Engelbart in small offices half a block from where Apple was developing the Lisa and Macintosh computers.

“He was in the shadow of the people who would get credit for his ideas and make billions of dollars from them,” Levy said.




“He wanted to help people solve problems, and he saw the world as having very significant problems. That is not something you can get a patent on, start a company or make a fortune on,” said Rheingold, author of “Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology.” “Bill Gates’ vision was a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. Doug had a much larger humanitarian vision.”


After the war, he returned to Oregon State and received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1948. In 1955, he got a doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.




For all of his work to promote collaboration, Engelbart was known in the industry as a control freak, and many of his colleagues eventually moved on to new research centers such as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and to companies such as Apple to develop his ideas for the mainstream.

DARPA funding began to dry up, and, in the late 1970s, Engelbart’s research group was bought by a company called Tymshare. It was sold again in the early 1980s to defense contractor McDonnell Douglas.







He is survived by his second wife, writer and producer Karen O’Leary Engelbart, whom he married in 2008; daughters Gerda, Diana and Christina; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren.