Douglas Engelbart, legendary inventor dies

Compare and contrast with the Steve Jobs hagiography. There is little justice in the historical appreciation of contributors to technological progress. Cunning self-promoters loom large in the public mind, while more modest persons, with greater achievements, are forgotten.

It’s sad but typical that Engelbart’s obituary is in the Tech section of CNN. Here’s what I’ve written about his broader impact (in Computing for Ordinary Mortals /plug):

[In the late 1960s], Doug Engelbart was directing the new Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart had a grand vision of computers: they would “augment the human intellect,” partly by automating routine tasks, and partly by making it easier for people to work with each other. In 1968 he and his colleagues made public the oNLine System (NLS), in what later came to be known as the mother of all demos. They demonstrated video conferencing, windows containing text and graphics, shared word processing documents, and an invention they called a mouse—new ideas for how people could interact with and through computers.

His most famous paper was Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, in 1962. He described “intellectual workers” (today’s knowledge workers) in some detail three decades before the idea became widely known to the public. He was enormously influential in my area of work, human-computer interaction.

One major innovation of Doug’s many was the keyboard he created for his own use — as far as I know he did it only for himself, and it never was marketed. He divided a classical keyboard in two and strapped one half to one side of his chair and the other to the other side. If you were talking to him, he would focus completely on the conversation while recording what he wanted to remember of it with his hands at his sides typing on his divided keyboard. An amazing man. If there is a core creative genius, it was Doug — certainly neither Gates or Jobs, neither of whom ever created anything except market.

JG

To give my computer students a sense of historical context in one of the classes I teach, I typically have them read a few early non-technical papers:

Vannevar Bush, in “As We May Think”, describes a hypertext system comparable to the World Wide Web, in 1945. (Bush’s thoughts influenced Engelbart.)

J. C. R. Licklier, in “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, set out a vision for how computers could help with what we today call knowledge work, in 1960.

Ivan Sutherland, in “The Ultimate Display”, describes Star Trek’s holodeck, in 1965.

Without background like this, they tend to assume most of the important developments in interactive computing happened just recently, instead of before they were born.