, as designed by
Bill English from Engelbart's sketches
Guiding philosophy Engelbart's career was inspired in December 1950 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals other than "a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after". Over several months he reasoned that: • he would focus his career on making the world a better place • any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions. • if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems – the sooner the better • computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability. a call to action for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge. He had also read something about the recent phenomenon of computers, and from his experience as a radar technician, he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen. He envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display "working stations", flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life's mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he assisted in the construction of
CALDIC. His graduate work led to eight patents. After completing his doctorate, Engelbart stayed on at Berkeley as an
assistant professor for a year before departing when it became clear that he could not pursue his vision there. Engelbart then formed a startup company, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctoral research on storage devices, but after a year decided instead to pursue the research he had been dreaming of since 1951.
SRI and the Augmentation Research Center Engelbart took a position at
SRI International (known then as Stanford Research Institute) in
Menlo Park, California in 1957. He worked for
Hewitt Crane on magnetic devices and miniaturization of electronics; Engelbart and Crane became close friends. At SRI, Engelbart soon obtained a dozen patents, Among other highlights, this paper introduced "
Building Information Modelling", which architectural and engineering practice eventually adopted (first as "
parametric design") in the 1990s and after. This led to funding from ARPA to launch his work. Engelbart recruited a research team in his new
Augmentation Research Center (ARC, the lab he founded at SRI). Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "
bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab. The ARC became the driving force behind the design and development of the
oN-Line System (NLS). He and his team developed computer interface elements such as
bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to the graphical user interface. He conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most computers were inaccessible to individuals who could only use computers through intermediaries (see
batch processing), and when software tended to be written for
vertical applications in proprietary systems. mice, 1986 Engelbart applied for a
patent in 1967 and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (
computer mouse – ), which he had developed with Bill English, his lead engineer, sometime before 1965. In the patent application it is described 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. His group also called the on-screen
cursor a "bug", but this term was not widely adopted. Engelbart's original cursor was displayed as an arrow pointing upward, but was slanted to the left upon its deployment in the XEROX PARC machine to better distinguish between on-screen text and the cursor in the machine's low-resolution interface. The now-familiar cursor arrow is characterized by a vertical left side and a 45-degree angle on the right. He never received any royalties for the invention of the mouse. During an interview, he said, "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to
Apple Computer for something like $40,000." Engelbart showcased the
chorded keyboard and many more of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at
The Mother of All Demos.
Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity by the mid-1970s. As early as 1970, several of his 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. Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, determined to pursue his work free from commercial pressure. while participating in a larger program addressing the IT requirements of the Joint Task Force. Engelbart was Founder Emeritus of the Doug Engelbart Institute, which he founded in 1988 with his daughter Christina Engelbart, who is executive director. The Institute promotes Engelbart's philosophy for boosting Collective IQ—the concept of dramatically improving how we can solve important problems together—using a strategic
bootstrapping approach for accelerating our progress toward that goal. In 2005, Engelbart received a
National Science Foundation grant to fund the open source HyperScope project. The Hyperscope team built a browser component using
Ajax and
Dynamic HTML designed to replicate Augment's multiple viewing and jumping capabilities (linking within and across various documents).
Later years and death Engelbart attended the Program for the Future 2010 Conference where hundreds of people convened at The Tech Museum in San Jose and online to engage in dialog about how to pursue his vision to augment
collective intelligence. The most complete coverage of Engelbart's bootstrapping ideas can be found in
Boosting Our Collective IQ, by Douglas C. Engelbart, 1995. This includes three of Engelbart's key papers, edited into book form by
Yuri Rubinsky and Christina Engelbart to commemorate the presentation of the 1995 SoftQuad Web Award to Doug Engelbart at the World Wide Web conference in Boston in December 1995. Only 2,000 softcover copies were printed, and 100 hardcover, numbered and signed by Engelbart and
Tim Berners-Lee. The book was re-published and has been available since 2008. Two comprehensive history of Engelbart's laboratory and work are in
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by
John Markoff and ''A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century
by Donald Neilson. Other books on Engelbart and his laboratory include Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
by Thierry Bardini and The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart'', by
Valerie Landau and
Eileen Clegg. All four of these books are based on interviews with Engelbart as well as other contributors in his laboratory. Engelbart served on the Advisory Boards of the
University of Santa Clara Center for Science, Technology, and Society,
Foresight Institute, Engelbart had four children, Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman with his first wife Ballard, who died in 1997 after 47 years of marriage. He remarried on January 26, 2008, to writer and producer Karen O'Leary Engelbart. An 85th birthday celebration was held at
The Tech Museum of Innovation. Engelbart died at his home in Atherton, California, on July 2, 2013, due to
kidney failure. A close friend and fellow computer scientist,
Ted Nelson, delivered the
eulogy at his funeral. According to the Doug Engelbart Institute, his death came after a long battle with
Alzheimer's disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2007. Engelbart was 88 and was survived by his second wife, four children from his first marriage, and nine grandchildren. Bardini points 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 state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies. He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work. == Awards and honors ==