Douglas C. Engelbart, 1925-2013
Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html?ref=global-home&_r=0
Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and
thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the
world.
He had a good job working at a government aerospace
laboratory in California,
but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that might
last, even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what
might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.
The epiphany spoke to
him of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun
out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions
that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer.
In later years, one
of those inventions was given a warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry
creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.
Dr. Engelbart died on
Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton,
Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary
Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.
Computing was in its
infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size
calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone
would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for
a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in
science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.
In his epiphany, he
saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different
symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in
the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display
for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications
for a given project.
It was his great
insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated
if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the
approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their
“collective I.Q.”
A decade later,
during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at
Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The
unit, the Augmentation
Research Center,
known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced
Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department. Even so, in the
main, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic
outsider.
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.
In contrast to the
mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the
oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and
to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic
library.
The conference
attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the
power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology
would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research
Center and at the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would
transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern
life.
Years later, people in Silicon Valley
still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all demos.” It took until
the late 1980s for the mouse to become the standard way to control a desktop
computer.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore.,
on Jan. 25, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart. He spent his formative years on
a farm in suburban Portland,
graduated from high school in 1942 and attended Oregon State College. Toward
the end of World War II, he was drafted. He spent two years in the Navy, one of
them in the Philippines,
as a radar technician.
One day he was in a
reading library on a small island when an article titled “As We May Think”
caught his eye. The article, by Vannevar Bush, a physicist and inventor who
oversaw the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during
the war, described a universal information retrieval system called Memex. The
idea stuck with Dr. Engelbart, and he made it his life’s work.
After returning to Oregon State
and graduating, he was hired to work at Ames
Research Center,
a government aerospace laboratory in California
run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, NASA’s forerunner. While
there, working as an electronics technician, he saw how aerospace engineers
started with small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size
airplanes.
The idea of scaling
remained with him. After getting his Ph.D. at the University
of California, Berkeley, and starting work at SRI, he wrote
a seminal paper on the importance of scaling in microelectronics. He presented
it in 1960, a year after the invention of the planar transistor, which had
improved the electrical output of transistors and made them cheaper to
manufacture and available to a mass market.
Dr. Engelbart grew
convinced that computers would quickly become more powerful and that there
would be enough processing power to design the Memex-like Augment system that
he envisioned. He was proved right.
The idea for the
mouse — a pointing device that would roll on a desk — occurred to Dr. Engelbart
in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was musing
about how to move a cursor on a computer display.
When he returned to
work, he gave a copy of a sketch to William English, a collaborator and
mechanical engineer at SRI, who, with the aid of a draftsman, fashioned a pine
case to hold the mechanical contents.
Early versions of the
mouse had three buttons, because that was all the case could accommodate, even
though Dr. Engelbart felt that as many as 10 buttons would be more useful. Two
decades later, when Steve Jobs added the mouse to his Macintosh computer, he
decided that a single button was appropriate. The Macintosh designers believed
in radical simplicity, and Mr. Jobs argued that with a single button it was
impossible to push the wrong one.
(When and under what
circumstances the term “the mouse” arose is hard to pin down, but one hardware
designer, Roger Bates, has contended that it happened under Mr. English’s
watch. Mr. Bates was a college sophomore and Mr. English was his mentor at the
time. Mr. Bates said the name was a logical extension of the term then used for
the cursor on a screen: CAT. Mr. Bates did not remember what CAT stood for, but
it seemed to all that the cursor was chasing their tailed desktop device.)
The importance of Dr.
Engelbart’s networking ideas was underscored in 1969, when his Augment NLS
system became the application for which the forerunner of today’s Internet was
created. The system was called the ARPAnet computer network, and SRI became the
home of its operation center and one of its first two nodes, or connection
points. (The other node was at the University
of California, Los Angeles. Two others followed, at the University of Utah
and the University of California, Santa
Barbara.).
Dr. Engelbart saw his ARC group grow rapidly after 1969. At
the height of the Vietnam War, it swelled to more than 50 researchers — a
significant number of them young men who had taken to computing in part to
avoid the military draft.
The group disbanded
in the 1970s, and SRI sold the NLS system in 1977 to a company called Tymshare.
Dr. Engelbart worked there in relative obscurity for more than a decade until
his contributions became more widely recognized by the computer industry. He
was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize and the
Turing Award.
His first wife, the
former Ballard Fish, died in 1997. Besides his wife, his survivors include his
daughters, Gerda and Christina Engelbart and Diana Mangan; a son, Norman; and
nine grandchildren.
Dr. Engelbart was one
of the first to realize the accelerating power of computers and the impact they
would have on society. In a presentation at a conference in Philadelphia
in February 1960, he described the industrial process of continually shrinking
the size of computer circuits that would later be referred to as “Moore’s Law,” after the
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
Speaking of the
future, he said, “Boy, are there going to be some surprises over there.”
Correction: July 3, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the original
name of the research group SRI International. It was Stanford Research
Institute, not Stanford Research International. It also misidentified one of
Mr. Engelbart’s inventions. What he called “the bug” is now known as the
cursor, not the mouse.
Douglas Engelbart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was
an American inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best
known for his work on the challenges of human/computer interaction,
particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI
International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse,[4] and the
development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user
interfaces.
photos
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