Douglas Engelbart

Dr. 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 (in a joint effort with William English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world's increasingly more urgent and complex problems (which Horst W. J. Rittel and others since have called wicked problems).

End of corporate career and subsequent developments

Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing, where Engelbart saw the future in timeshare (client/server) computing, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: Engelbart came from a time in which only timeshare computing was achievable, and also believed in joint effort; the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon. The Mansfield Amendment, the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of Project Apollo reduced ARC's funding from ARPA and NASA. SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of artificial intelligence researcher Bert Raphael, who fired Engelbart (from the lab that Engelbart had founded) in 1976. Engelbart's house in Atherton burned down shortly afterwards, causing him and his family even further problems.

Related Topics:
1976 - Xerox PARC - Mansfield Amendment - Vietnam War - Project Apollo - NASA - Artificial intelligence - Bert Raphael - Atherton

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In 1978, a company called Tymshare bought NLS, hired its creator as a Senior Scientist, and offered commercial services based upon NLS. Tymshare was already somewhat familiar with NLS; back when ARC was still operational, it had experimented with its own local copy of the NLS software on a minicomputer called OFFICE-1, as part of a joint project with ARC.

Related Topics:
1978 - Tymshare

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At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity--operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to do further research. Various executives first at Tymshare and later at McDonnell Douglas (which took over Tymshare in 1982) expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them. He left McDonnell in 1986 and retired from corporate life.

Related Topics:
McDonnell Douglas - 1982 - 1986

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Since the late 1980s, prominent individuals and organizations have recognized the seminal importance of Engelbart's contributions:

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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. In 1998 Paul Saffo, from the Institute for the Future, hosted "The Unfinished Revolution I," a large symposium at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium, to honor Engelbart and his ideas. In early 2000 Engelbart produced, with a dedicated team of volunteers and financial supporters, what was called the Engelbart Colloquium or "The Unfinished Revolution - II,", at Stanford University. The Colloquium was meant to document and publicize his work and ideas to a large audience (live, and online). The archives of this "Engelbart UnRev-II Colloquium at Stanford" are still available online as of this writing (Sep. 2005). In 2001 he was awarded a British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal. 2005 saw Engelbart made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and winner of the Norbert Wiener Award, awarded annually by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Related Topics:
1996 - Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award - 1997 - Lemelson-MIT Prize - Turing Award - Paul Saffo - Institute for the Future - Symposium - Stanford University - 2001 - British Computer Society - Lovelace Medal - 2005 - Norbert Wiener Award - Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

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