Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor who developed technologies and capabilities integral to modern computing. In the 1960s, Engelbart led a team of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) whose breakthroughs included on-screen text editing, the interactive user interface, the remote computer network, hyperlinking, and the computer mouse.

Engelbart’s work and inventions made computers easier to control and more accessible to ordinary people through the use of simple devices. Prior to his work, computers required laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or manually set electronic switches, and data had to be printed before it could be viewed.

Engelbart was born on January 30th, 1925, in Portland, Oregon. He grew up during the Great Depression on a small farm near Portland with his father Carl Louis Engelbart, mother Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart, older sister Dorianne, and younger brother David. His father started a radio shop in Portland in the late 1920s, selling and repairing radios. His father passed away when he was nine years old.

In 1950, Engelbart married his wife, Ballard, The couple had four children: Gerda, Diana, Christina, and Norman. Ballard passed away in 1997. Engelbart remarried Karen O’Leary in 2008. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007. He passed away on July 2nd, 2013, at the age of 88. The formal cause of death was kidney failure.

Engelbart graduated from High School in Portland in 1942. While attending Oregon State University, Engelbart's education was interrupted by World War II. He spent two years in the navy (1944-1946), working as a radio and radar technician in the Pacific. After his time in the Navy, Engelbart returned to Oregon State University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1948.

He worked as an electrical engineer at the Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California, for three years before attending graduate school at Berkeley. In 1955, he received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). He stayed on as an acting assistant professor for a year before accepting a position with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI; now SRI International) in Menlo Park, California.

Engelbart credits the motivation for his work to a single vision while working at the Ames Research Center. On a Monday morning in 1950, Engelbart was driving to Moffett Field when a clear image came to his mind. He described the image as a hallway, brightly lit, with windows on the left and closed doors on the right. The hallway, with a shiny linoleum floor, extends as far as he can see to infinity.

At the time of the vision, he felt he had already accomplished many of his career goals and was lacking direction. Engelbart decided

Why don’t I set a goal for my profession that will maximize the benefit my career will have to mankind?

He gained inspiration from the following:

• A magazine article written by Vannevar Bush, titled, As We May Think
• The 1949 book, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, written by Edmund C. Berkeley
• His experiences in the Navy using a light pen to interact with the radar cathode ray tube (CRT) screen

Engelbart developed his ideas for devices to interact with a monitor, attached to a computer, that was connected to a network.

I knew implicitly, and with surety, that if a computer could punch cards, that it could also electronically display text and draw on a CRT... And if radar attached to a CRT could respond to operators, then people could also interact with a computer that had a CRT. I could see electronically, that if other people were connected to the same computer complex, we could be collaborating... And I knew that was something I could do.

To further develop his ideas on computing, Engelbart decided to return to college. He enrolled in an electrical engineering Ph.D. program at UCB, in part because they had recently accepted a project to build an experimental computer.

Starting in 1957, Engelbart spent twenty-one years at SRI. Engelbart saw it as an opportunity to get involved in computers and eventually expand the role of the computer into an interactive workstation.

The institute was working on a project called ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting), funded by Bank of America to build a computer system that could help the company handle its accounts more efficiently. While not directly involved, Engelbart worked in the same laboratory as ERMA staff.

Engelbart earned several patents for his work on technologies, including scaling and magnetic computer components. This helped him pursue funding for his desired research areas, and in 1959 he received a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This grant led to Engelbart's landmark 1962 paper "Augmenting the Human Intellect: A conceptual Framework."

The 134-page paper documents his thinking on the increasing complexities of the world and the need for a computer-based augmentation solution that could help increase "human intellectual effectiveness". Engelbart writings accurately describe what a future workstation for an architect may look like:

He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side; this is his working surface, and is controlled by a computer (his ‘clerk’) with which he can communicate by means of a small keyboard and various other devices. He is designing a building. He has already dreamed up several basic layouts and structural forms, and is trying them out on the screen. The surveying data for the layout he is working on now have already been entered, and he has just coaxed the ‘clerk’ to show him a perspective view of the steep hillside building site with the roadway above. … Gradually, the screen begins to show the work he is doing – a neat excavation appears on the hillside, revises itself slightly, and revises it again. After a moment, the architect changes the screen to an overhead plan view of the site, still showing the excavation.

The paper was received well by numerous agencies, in particular the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which provided Engelbart funding to found his own lab within SRI, the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) in 1963.

It was within ARC that Engelbart worked on inventing and developing various devices for inputting, manipulating, and displaying data:

• the computer mouse
• the multiple-window display
• hypermedia (the linking of texts, images, video, and sound files within a single document)
• joysticks
• light pens
• track balls

In 1965, Engelbart and his team developed and implemented the oN-Line System (NLS), for sharing and navigating content through a shared, centralized digital archive. It was the first system to use hypertext, providing the ability to jump between documents, reports, software code, and more.

In 1967, ARC became the second site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the primary precursor to the Internet.

On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco Engelbart demonstrated the working real-time collaborative computer system NLS. After nine months of planning and technical execution, Engelbart presented to roughly 1,000 attendees at Brooks Hall in San Francisco for nintey minutes. They displayed a remote network, shared-screen collaboration, video conferencing, hypertext, interactive text editing, and the computer mouse.

Engelbart in his ARC office.

Many of Engelbart's research staff at ARC went on to work at other institutions such as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

In 1977, SRI sold Engelbart’s NLS groupware system to Tymshare, Inc. a telephone networking company. Tymshare renamed it Augment and sought to make it a commercially viable office automation system. With Engelbart the last remaining member of his research laboratory, and SRI showing no further interest in his work, he joined Tymshare. In 1984 Tymshare was acquired by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where Engelbart worked on information systems.

In 1989, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, a research and consulting firm.

During the 1990s, Engelbart continued to evolve Augment (successor to NLS) by tying it to the World Wide Web in a project called Hyperscope. The project was the first step in establishing an open hyperdocument system. It is a browsing tool enabling viewing and navigation features. Hyperscope is written in JavaScript using the Dojo toolkit and works in Firefox.

The basic idea for the mouse first came to Engelbart in 1961. While sitting in a conference session on computer graphics, it occurred to him that with a pair of small wheels traversing a tabletop, one wheel turning horizontally, one turning vertically, the computer could track their combined rotations to move a cursor on the display. The wheels would function similar to the wheels on a planimeter—a tool used by engineers and geographers to measure areas on maps, blueprints, and drawings. Engelbart recorded the idea in his notebook for future reference.

First computer mouse.

In his 1962 paper, Engelbart refers to a “pointer” that allows the worker the ability to navigate items on-screen. In 1963, Engelbart was awarded a small grant from Bob Taylor at NASA to explore an efficient way of moving a cursor on a display screen. Engelbart and his team rounded up then best-of-breed pointing devices to compare, producing some in-house prototypes including a foot pedal and a knee-operated device. After reviewing earlier notes, lead engineer Bill English built a prototype of the handheld device in 1964 with perpendicular wheels mounted in a carved-out wooden block, with a button on top. Someone in Engelbart’s lab said it looked like a mouse and the name stuck. To this day, no one recalls who dubbed it the mouse.

In 1965, Engelbart's team published the final report of their study evaluating the efficiency of the various screen-selection techniques. The mouse won and was included as standard equipment in their research moving forward. The patent application for this "X-Y position indicator for a display system" was filed in 1967, with US Patent number 3,541,541 was awarded in 1970.

The first computer mouse plugged into a display workstation in 1964.

Engelbart's lab, ARC, at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), became the second site connected to ARPANET (first major computer network launched in 1969) ARC received the first trans­mission sent over the ARPANET from UCLA. Engelbart ran the Network Information Center (NIC) to serve the ARPANET user community.

Many of Engelbart's key accomplishments came through his unified system NLS for sharing and navigating content through a shared, centralized digital archive. NLS had many historic computing firsts:

• Collaborative computing—computer-supported meetings and teleconferencing, shared files, author-id time stamps for source code and paragraphs in documentation, digital libraries, hyper-email, and online communities.
• Hypermedia—providing the ability to jump between documents, reports, software code, etc.

On December 9th, 1968 Doug Engelbart appeared on-stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium for his presentation, titled "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect." He and his team spent presented for nintey minutes discussing and demonstrating the NLS system.

During the nintey minutes, Engelbart was seated at a custom-designed console, driving the presentation through the NLS computer thirty miles away in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The computer projected onto a large screen overhead, flipping between his presentation outline and live demos of features, with members of his research lab teleconferenced in from SRI in shared screen mode to demonstrate more of the system. Engineer Bill English played a significant role in the production.

During the presentation, Engelbart and his team displayed the following:

• a remote network
• shared-screen collaboration
• video conferencing
• hypertext
• interactive text editing
• the computer mouse

The demonstration has come to be known as the “Mother of All Demos,” within the technology community.

1968 "Mother of All Demos"

Engelbart has been recognized with numerous awards and honors throughout his career:

• National Medal of Technology and Innovation—America's highest technology award, received from President Bill Clinton in 2000

President Clinton with Douglas Engelbart in 2000.

• Lemelson-MIT Prize—awarded to Engelbart in 1997 for his invention of the computer mouse
• Turing Award—received in 1997, nicknamed "the noble prize of computing" awarded to individuals with highly significant technological innovations
• BCS Lovelace Medal—a British award, received in 2001
• Computer History Museum Fellow Award—awarded in 2005
• Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility—received in 2005; the award focuses on the social implications of technology

Engelbart's doctoral research at UCB on computer storage devices (1952-1955) resulted in eight patents. In 1956, he formed Digital Techniques, Inc. to commercialize his research before joining SRI. His first major research assignment at SRI (1957-1960) on the All-Magnetic Logic Computer (ALMC) produced twelve patents. The technology from this program was commercialized by Aircraft Marine Products (AMP) Inc., under license from SRI.