Douglas Engelbart
Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor, of Norwegian descent. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse, and is a pioneer of human-computer interaction, including GUIs, hypertext, and networked computers.
Engelbart received a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1948, a Bachelor of Engineering degree from UC Berkeley in 1952, and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1955.
As a World War II radio tech based in the Philippines, Engelbart was inspired by Vannevar Bush's article 'As We May Think'. After the war, following his inspiration, Engelbart studied at UC Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1955. He spent over a year trying to create an unsuccessful startup, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctorate research into storage devices, then found a job at the Stanford Research Institute across the bay in Palo Alto.
Historian of science Thierry Bardini has persuasively 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 of technology. Bardini has also pointed out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf. 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 sophistication of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new technologies. He thus set himself to the task of developing better technologies for manipulating information.
At SRI, Engelbart was the primary force behind the design of the On-Line System, or NLS. He and his team at the Augmentation Research Center (the lab he founded) developed computer-interface elements such as bit-mapped screens, multiple windows, groupware, the graphical user interface, and hypertext. He developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution.
In 1970 Engelbart received a patent for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse U.S. Patent # 3,541,541), describing it in the patent application 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. It was also called the bug at the time but eventually the mouse name won out. He never received any royalties for his mouse invention, though, since subsequent mice used different mechanisms that did not infringe upon his patent.
Because Engelbart's user interface research was partially funded by ARPA, the ARC was also one of the first two nodes on the ARPANET (the precursor of the Internet) and served as the first Network Information Center.
Due to various misfortunes, Engelbart slipped into obscurity after 1976. Several of Engelbart's best researchers became alienated from him and fled when Xerox PARC raided ARC for talent. The Mansfield Amendment, the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of the Apollo Project sapped ARC's funding from ARPA and NASA. SRI's management never really understood what Engelbart was doing, and put the remains of ARC under the control of artificial intelligence researcher Bert Raphael, who fired Engelbart in 1976. Finally, Engelbart's house in Atherton burnt down.
In 1978, a company called Tymshare bought NLS and hired its creator as a Senior Scientist. Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity. Various executives at Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas (which took over Tymshare in 1982) expressed interest in his ideas, but never really committed the funds or the people to further develop them. He left McDonnell in 1986.
Fortunately, since the late 1980s, many people have begun to recognize the importance of Engelbart's contributions.
In 1996 he was awarded 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 Turing Award. And in 2001 he was awarded a British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal. That year, Stanford University hosted a symposium to honor him and his ideas.
Currently (at age 79 in 2004), he is the director of his own company, the Bootstrap Institute in Fremont, California, which promotes the concept of Collective IQ. Bootstrap is housed rent free courtesy of the Logitech Corp., a famous manufacturer of computer mice.
See also
