Douglas Engelbart

Life

He was born on January 30, 1925, in Portland, Oregon. He took a bachelor's degree at Oregon State University and a master's degree and a doctorate (1955) at the University of California, Berkeley. He then moved to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International), where he founded and led the Augmentation Research Center within the institute. He died on July 2, 2013, in Atherton, California.

Augmenting human intellect

In the 1962 report "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", he set out a vision in which people, working together with computers, would increase their ability to solve complex problems. Its implementation was NLS (oN-Line System), which had a bitmapped display, hypertext, features for collaborative work and more.

The mouse was also born in this research. With Bill English, he built a wooden prototype with two metal wheels, applied for a patent in 1967 and was granted it in 1970 (U.S. Patent 3,541,541).

The Mother of All Demos

On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held in San Francisco, he gave a demonstration using NLS. He showed interactive editing of documents, navigation through hypermedia, operation using an input device called the keyset in addition to the mouse and keyboard, and collaborative work with video with a partner at a remote location, anticipating many of the features that would later become commonplace on personal computers and the internet.

Recognition

He received the Turing Award in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology in December 2000. In 1988 he founded the Bootstrap Institute (now the Doug Engelbart Institute) with his daughter Christina, and worked to spread the idea of raising the collective intelligence (Collective IQ) of organizations and society.