Meeting the Creator

The very act you are engaged in at this moment -- reading and clicking through information on a computer screen -- would not be possible if not for Douglas Engelbart. While working at Stanford Research Institute in the late 1960s, Engelbart invented or envisioned almost everything that makes personal computing possible today: the computer mouse, hypertext links, groupware, on-screen editing and much more.

But almost 30 years ago, few if any of his peers shared his vision. In Howard Rheingold's first book, Tools for Thought, his chapter about Doug Engelbart was called "The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker." Read Rheingold's take on Engelbart on his Brainstorms site. Engelbart's original documents and information about his project, the Bootstrap Institute are also available on the Web.