Douglas Engelbart

Douglas C. Engelbart, who passed away last week, wasn't a household name. If anything, he will be remembered as the creator of the mouse, the ubiquitous pointing device that is attached to nearly every desktop machine and a large number of laptops. But his contributions were a lot larger than that; indeed, working at the Standard Research Institute (now SRI International) in the late 1960s and 70s, he invented many of the little things that help define computing as we know it.

Engelbart joined SRI in Menlo Park, California in 1957 and in the 1960s he established a group called the Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Air Force. There, with the help of a small team, he incubated a host of ideas about how computing could work, including inventing an early prototype of what would become the mouse in 1964 after attending a computer graphics conference. He and mechanical engineer William English then built a working prototype, a wooden box on metal wheels, which at first had three buttons. (For years, Engelbart believed that more buttons would be better.) 

Meanwhile, SRI kept working on other ideas. This culminated in a demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968 where he showed off a variety of interactive computer technologies, including many things that were unheard of in computing at the time.  

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, Engelbart and his team created a computerized system they called the oNLine System (NLS), which was designed to allow researchers to share information and store and retrieve documents in a structured electronic library. The NLS demo included everything from text editing (which was already somewhat standard) to windowing and the mouse; as well as more advanced items such as desktop video conferencing, hypertext, and dynamic file linking. That was very different from the batch-mode mainframes that dominated computing at the time, which often relied on punch cards you submitted and reports that came back notably later.    

Note that demo included a link back from Brooks Hall in San Francisco to the SRI campus in Menlo Park over two 1,200-bits-per-second modems. Within it, he talks about an upcoming ARPA computer network that will link multiple computer sites at 20 kilobytes per second. (That, of course, would be called the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, and while that sounds ridiculously slow today, it was plenty fast then.)

You can see the full demo and a more detailed summary at a Stanford site. Today it looks rather dated, but at the time the concepts were incredibly revolutionary. Indeed that demo, which Steven Levy nicknamed "the mother of all demos" in his book Insanely Great, was hugely influential. It led to many other groups working on various features of the NLS, including additional work at Stanford and, perhaps best known, at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where key features of the modern user interface would be created.

After that, Engelbart continued to work on a variety of computer projects, with the SRI laboratory hosting one of the early ARPAnet connections and the Network Information Center, which controlled early domain names. Through SRI and later through his Bootstrap institute (now called the Doug Engelbart Institute) he continued to push the concept of "augmented intelligence," the idea that computers could make humans smarter, as opposed to the more common concept of "artificial intelligence" aimed at making the computers smarter.

I met Engelbart briefly on a number of occasions, usually at computer conferences, but what always struck me was his humanitarian vision of what computing could do. 

The best full obit I've seen was by John Markoff in the New York Times.