Footnote

You may have known our organization by a different name -- Bootstrap Institute or Bootstrap Alliance. We changed our name to the Doug Engelbart Institute in 2008 to better reflect the man whose seminal work we represent.

Doug and his daughter/partner Christina Engelbart first incorporated the Bootstrap Institute in 1988 as a California corporation to "raise a flag" on neutral ground where organizations could coalesce and collaborate around his vision. He had previously been at SRI, a research institution, and then in large commercial companies such as Tymshare Inc. and McDonnell Douglas, and needed the freedom to explore and engage his visionary work full time. The Bootstrap Institute actually functioned more like a non-profit organization in their quest to form strategic alliances between the public and private sectors. Thus was born a collaborative Alliance Program, which they incorporated as the Bootstrap Alliance, a non-profit organizational base for collaboration. The work was funded primarily through government R&D contracts, Alliance sponsors, workshops, and consulting. Eventually they dropped the Bootstrap Institute, and renamed the non-profit more fittingly to the Doug Engelbart Institute.