Doug Englebart has just died. Little known outside the computing and technical world (he received many of the prestigious prizes in the field but not great renown outside it) he was really the inventor, or perhaps the prophet, of the way that we do computing these days. Indeed, much of what Steve Jobs brought to computing in the sense of selling machines that did it was originally posited by Englebart. To the point of not just writing about it but doing the early designs and proving their possibility.
The New York Times says this:
In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.
For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.
That single, 90 minute, demonstration has provided much of the route map for how we interact with computing these days. Englebart's ideas were taken up and developed further at
You can see a discussion of that talk here.
If you use a mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, WYSIWYG word processor, multi-window user interface, shared documents, shared database, documents with images & text, keyword search, instant messaging, synchronous collaboration, asynchronous collaboration -- thank Doug Engelbart.
There are various online versions of the talk which can be found here. Or of course there's a version on YouTube:
An interesting little aside about the invention and patenting of the mouse:
In 1967, Engelbart filed for a patent for a rudimentary form of computer mouse — SRI patented the mouse and licensed it to
Apple for about $40,000. Later, ARC would become involved with ARPANET, the precursor of the internet. In December 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Engelbart the National Medal of Technology.
That money went to SRI of course but at least people were openly paying for IP back then, eh? And here's the actual patent number and application:
In 1967 Engelbart filed Patent No. 3,541,541 for "X-Y position indicator for a display system," a wooden shell with two wheels and a long tail - hence the nickname given to the device by the team.
