Introduction - Who is Douglas Engelbart?
Section 1 - The Achievements of Douglas Engelbart
Section 2 - His Impact on the Industry.
Section 3 - A True Visionary.
Additional information
References - details of the sources of information I have used to write the report
A Concept Map illustrating the development of technologies demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart and his team from A.R.C. at the Western Computer Conference in 1968. (87.6Kb)
A simple timeline showing Engelbart's place amongst computing pioneers in the development of the modern PC (19.3Kb)
 Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Oregon in 1925. He studied Electrical Engineering but his studies were interrupted by World War II. Joining the Navy, he trained as a Radar Technician and spent two years serving in the Philippines. It was here that he encountered the ideas of Vannevar Bush in an 'Atlantic Monthly' journal article entitled "As we may think" in 1945. Returning home at the end of the war, he gained his degree and worked at the NACA Ames Laboratory for about three years.
A Man with a MissionEngelbart felt he needed a goal in life and remembered the hypothetical machine called the 'Memex' in Vannevar Bush's paper. It had been described as a desk with several slanting translucent screens on top and a huge storage capacity using microfilm. Material was projected onto the screens for reading and annotating and a keyboard together with buttons and levers were provided for operating the 'Memex'. Its purpose was to organise documents and information and to create useful links between it all.
This concept of linking documents was one of the key points of the 'Memex' - Bush called it 'associative indexing'. He, and subsequently Engelbart, realised that one of the greatest problems faced by the human race would be the organisation of an ever-increasing quantity of information. His suggestion was to link it together by association in much the same way as the human mind works. The ideas of Vannevar Bush contributed significantly to Douglas Engelbart's eventual decision to pursue the goal of augmenting human intellect through the use of computers. |
 The BeginningBy 1951, Engelbart’s vision had crystallised. He joined UC Berkley where he gained a PhD in 1955 and became an Acting Assistant Professor. Later, he moved on to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). In 1958, Engelbart published a paper in collaboration with Charles P. Bourne entitled “Facets of the Technical Information Problem” It contained extensive questions concerning the modus operandi for a comprehensive information-handling system including its policies, aims, scope, characteristics and the research required to produce it. This paper appears to be the first formal statement of Engelbart’s ideas for using computers to augment human intelligence.
Creation of ARCHe then formulated his own concepts which were set out in his paper, published in October 1962, entitled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” In 1963, he received funding for his own research laboratory at SRI which he called the “Augmentation Research Centre” (ARC). He created a team which employed a process he described as ‘bootstrapping’ - creating tools and developing techniques in the course of the research that enabled ongoing improvements in the methods actually used to carry it out. In this way, the workers at ARC were not only conducting the research but were also ‘guinea-pigs’ who tested the methods devised and thus improved the results.
Development of oNLine System (NLS)During the 1960s and 1970s, ARC developed a system which Engelbart called NLS (oNLine System). Using time-sharing 'workstations' and a central mainframe computer, it enabled team members to collaborate extensively on research. NLS also offered a centralised library facility called the Journal containing the vast number of documents produced in the course of ARC’s research. All documents were navigable by use of hypertext links, accessible from any of the team’s workstations and constantly evolving as work progressed.
Funding for NLS was provided by a contract from ARPA. In early 1967, ARPA chose SRI to be the second node on the ARPANET after UCLA. NLS subsequently became the foundation of the NIC system (Network Information Centre) and used to co-ordinate the RFCs (Requests for Comment) that developed the working protocols for the Internet.
The 'Mother of All Demos'The pinnacle of ARC’s achievement came in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco attended by over a thousand computer professionals when Douglas Engelbart and seventeen researchers from ARC staged a ninety minute live public demonstration of the NLS system. This has frequently been referred to as 'The Mother of All Demos' and featured the debut of The Mouse, together with hypertext, groupworking, shared-screen collaboration, and online teleconferencing. |
The 'Mainframe Mentality'The “mainframe and punched-card” mindset of the 1960s found it impossible to envisage an instant response - one researcher commented that he would not know what to do if the response was faster than twenty minutes. But Engelbart was convinced that slow room-sized mainframes would, in time, become fast desktop machines. They would be used for far more than just computationHe set about devising new and effective ways for users to navigate the ‘information space’ opened up to them by new technology. This required several key components. First, bitmapping which allowed data to be represented as images, icons, windows etc by using pixels to create a screen ‘map’. Second, the ability to directly manipulate objects on the screen, acting upon them without having to type in complex lines of codes and change ‘modes’ to carry out different tasks. Third, Engelbart developed the ‘mouse’ as a means of ‘entering’ the screen and performing actions upon the objects. From these came the Graphical User Interface and WYSIWYG which revolutionised the way humans interact with computers. The core concept is an interface employing familiar metaphors like a desktop or a piece of paper which translates human instructions into the ones and zeros of the computer’s digital language and gives the illusion of direct manipulation (although it actually inserts another layer of interpretation between the computer and the user). It allows a user to simply switch ‘modes’ - opening and closing a program, editing, saving, moving - with just one click of the mouse. Engelbart developed further the ‘associative indexing’ concept of Vannevar Bush which enabled the user to navigate information in a similar manner to the human brain. Using hypermedia, one piece of data could be linked to another to create a web of information. With the advent of the World Wide Web, it is now possible to access 'information space' through hypertext and the user interface of a web browser. |
Recognition at last....In December 1998, Stanford University hosted "Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution”, a day-long symposium involving many people now actively working in the fields that he pioneered thirty years earlier. As Wired News reports “The day was an unabashed love-fest for the self-effacing Engelbart, who was moved to tears by the first standing ovation of the afternoon”. Watching footage of the 1968 demo, fellow pioneer Alan Kay recalls "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life. Engelbart was like Moses opening the Red Sea". It had a similar effect on hypermedia pioneer Andy van Dam , then twenty years old, who says he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "I found it staggering. It just blew me away."Paul Saffo, director of Menlo Park-based Institute for the Future, says of Engelbart "It's not so much that people overlooked Doug but that they studiously tried to ignore him because his ideas made them uncomfortable." He likened Engelbart’s vision to a UFO landing on the White House lawn.
Even Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, acknowledges Engelbart's vision of the future, saying "Doug Engelbart's work was the closest to the Web design - when I saw that the first time I was amazed. He had even used the hash sign as a delimiter for the address within a document (I guess like me by analogy with an apartment number). Doug's stuff is unbelievable".
While friends, family and colleagues universally agree that Engelbart is extremely gentle and kind, they also describe him as "single-minded," "bullheaded," and, at times, a "control freak.". Perhaps his main failing was naiveté, born from his idealism, a difficulty in coping with the politics of organisations and the stubborn resistance of colleagues. Sun Microsystems Inc. executive Jeff Rulifson, one of those who worked with Engelbart at ARC says "He has a precise idea about what people should be working on. He wants them to take big steps but they don't always want to do it that way."
However, Engelbart is still true to his vision. Rehabilitated from the intellectual wilderness, he continues working tirelessly to shape the future through his concept of the Knowledge Workshop. Today, he leads the Bootstrap Institute which he founded in 1989 and the Bootstrap Alliance which brings together many big players in the world of computing for purposes of collaboration. One of its future aims is an Open Hyperdocument System using NLS/Augment as its starting point. |
Despite this, Engelbart stubbornly refused to compromise his lofty goals and pursued his vision relentlessly.
"I didn't do this to be famous," Engelbart says in his soft-spoken, understated manner. "And how much money can you give to a guy who's just doing his job?".
As a visionary, Douglas Engelbart appears almost unique in the computing world with his humanist views of developing ways of using computers to change the world for the better. His complex and difficult to explain ideas were, literally, decades ahead of their time. It has only been in the last fifteen years that some have been absorbed into mainstream computing and, even now, it is not easy for people to grasp his far-reaching vision for the future.
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They were unable to see computers as facilitators for communication but simply as vast expensive computational machines. 
Nevertheless, his pioneering work led to the creation of several famous computer millionaires while he has remained very much in the background, an unsung hero.