The "Father of Groupware"

Computer-supported meeting - circa 1967

Doug Engelbart has been affectionately referred to as the "Father of Groupware" for his pioneering work in computer supported collaborative work. Beginning in 1951 with visions of people working together on complex, urgent problems augmented by interactive computers, he pioneered in the 1960s and '70s an integrated system called NLS which included computer-supported meetings and teleconferencing, shared files, author-id time stamps on every line of sourcecode and every paragraph in the documentation, digital libraries, hyper-email, and online communities. You can see most of these features demonstrated in his 1968 "Mother of All Demos." In 1969 Engelbart founded the Network Information Center to support the first networked online community (see Engelbart's Role in Early Computer Networking.

For complete details and descriptions see:

• Collaboration Support Provisions in AUGMENT, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1984 - almost all of the features described in this paper were in operational usage by 1968.
• Working Together. Douglas C. Engelbart and Harvey Lehtman. 1988

The History of Groupware

This clipping is taken from the book "Working Apart Together," by G. Henri ter Hofte, 1998.

See Also

From Doug's Lab

• "The Mother of All Demos" (90 min Video/Film) Doug's 1968 debut of NLS (Augment's precursor) including hypermedia, the mouse, collaborative work, interactive computing, human computer interface,and overarching guiding principles. See especially Clip25 where Doug, sitting in San Francisco, brings in a coworker sitting in his lab in Menlo Park, for some one on one collaboration.
  


• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1962. See especially what he envisioned for any time, any place team work in this 'backcast' section 7. Team Collaboration.


• Intellectual Implications of Multi-Access Computer Networks, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1970. (AUGMENT,5255,).


• NLS Teleconferencing Features: The Journal and Shared-Screen Telephoning, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1975.


• A Software Engineering Environment, Kenneth E. Victor, Proceedings of AIAA/NASA/IEEE/ACM Computers In Aerospace Conference, Los Angeles, CA, October 31-November 2, 1977, pp. 399-403 (AUGMENT,29292,)


• Collaboration Support Provisions in AUGMENT. 1984 (OAD,2221,)


• Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1992.


• Doug Engelbart - A Lifetime Pursuit, a biographical sketch by Christina Engelbart (5 pages).

From the Press

• Wired article: The Click Heard Round The World, by Ken Jordan, 2004