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Douglas Engelbart

1925–2013 · 88 years Tier II

A Navy radar technician who read one essay and built a career

Portrait of Douglas Engelbart — SRI International — 1968-12 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Engelbart was eight when his family moved to a small farm along Johnson Creek outside Portland, and nine when his father died. He served two years in the Navy as a radar technician in the Philippines, and it was in a bamboo library hut on Leyte that he read Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay imagining machines built to extend human thought. He finished his engineering degree at Oregon State in 1948 and took a research job at what became NASA's Ames lab, where he grew restless within months. In December 1950, newly engaged, he spent weeks working out what he wanted from a career and concluded that organizing collective human intelligence, using computers as the tool, was worth spending it on. He earned his doctorate at Berkeley in 1955.

His 1962 report, "Augmenting Human Intellect," won him Air Force funding and a lab of his own, the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, where he and the engineer Bill English spent the 1960s building a system called NLS — windows, hypertext links, collaborative editing, and a wooden-shelled pointing device with two wheels that the team nicknamed the mouse because "the tail came out the end." On December 9, 1968, in San Francisco, he demonstrated all of it at once, live, to a stunned audience of computer professionals who had never seen a screen do any of those things. The lab became the second node on the ARPANET the following October. Engelbart patented the mouse and never collected a cent in royalties, SRI eventually licensed it to Apple for around 40,000 dollars.

The lab he built did not survive the decade that made it famous. Researchers left for Xerox PARC, preferring personal machines to the shared, networked system Engelbart believed in, and a 1969 defense funding law that barred non-military research cut off much of his budget. SRI's management sidelined him within his own center, sold the lab to Tymshare in 1977, and Tymshare was absorbed by McDonnell Douglas in 1984, where Engelbart worked as an employee inside a company with no real interest in his larger vision. He spent nearly two decades as a mostly forgotten figure in an industry building products out of his own ideas without crediting him for it, and did not receive the field's major honors — the Turing Award and the National Medal of Technology among them — until the late 1990s, in his seventies.

His daughter Christina helped him found the Bootstrap Institute in 1988 to keep pushing the augmentation idea after the industry had moved on without him, and the honors did eventually arrive: the Turing Award and the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 1997, the National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton in 2000. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2007 and remarried the following year. He died of kidney failure at home in Atherton, California, on July 2, 2013, at 88. The 1968 demonstration is taught now as the day the modern personal computer was previewed, decades early, by a man whose own lab did not live to build it.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Douglas Engelbart's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework article
The report that won him Air Force funding and defined his life's project 1962
Computer mouse invention
Patented as an "X-Y position indicator", never earned him a royalty 1970
NLS, the oN-Line System invention
Demonstrated windows, hypertext and collaborative editing years ahead of any product 1968
The Mother of All Demos speech
A 90-minute live demonstration in San Francisco, December 9, 1968 1968
Bootstrap Institute company
Founded with his daughter Christina to keep the augmentation idea alive 1988

Life in brief

with age at each point

1934 aged ~9 His father dies, when Engelbart is nine
1945 aged ~20 Reads Vannevar Bush's essay in a Red Cross hut on Leyte
December 1950 aged 25 Decides, newly engaged, to devote his career to augmenting human intellect
1955 aged ~30 Earns his PhD in electrical engineering at Berkeley
1962 aged ~37 Publishes Augmenting Human Intellect and wins Air Force funding
December 9, 1968 aged 43 Presents the Mother of All Demos in San Francisco
1970 aged ~45 Receives the patent on the computer mouse
1988 aged ~63 Founds the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina
July 2, 2013 aged 88 Dies at home in Atherton, California