Who Lost the Internet Wars?,
By Leslie Nguyen-Okwu for OZY, July 11, 2016 "Engelbart imagined an information system built on the backbones of collaboration and education, all meant to amplify the collective human mind. He wanted a computerized network of real-time, human-wide collaboration, with the open-source spirit of Wikipedia and the purposefulness of Change.org"
Why Modern Computing Owes Everything To Douglas Engelbart,
By "Penguin" Pete Trbovich for BeMyApp, June 17, 2016 "So why say he was doomed to obscurity? Because the system he envisioned to bring peace and understanding across the world was used to download cat videos and post status updates on Facebook. The inventions and innovations he freely gave away became gang turf for every computer company to sue every other computer company. His contributions were buried behind a wall of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs"
Doug Engelbart's Vision Transcends Mouse Invention,
By Reid Creager for Inventors Digest, June 2016, pp.10-13 "Mouse Inventor Had a Larger Vision - Doug Engelbart's Vision and Impact Transcended His Computer Mouse". Excerpt from the Editor's Note: "One of recent history's most acclaimed innovators and the subject of this month's Time Tested feature, [Doug] Engelbart wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1962 that outlined society's need for augmenting human intellect to keep up with technology. His daughter, Christina Engelbart, provided us unique context for those contributions--as well as warm personal memories of a man who personifies Father's Day."
[ read Full Article | Editor's Note | Inventors Digest - June 2016 ]
Mit Engelbarts Maus machten andere Mäuse,
by Martin Burckhardt for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Feuilleton, June 21, 2016 "Unter den Computerweltschöpfern war er der innovativste: Douglas C. Engelbart hatte in den sechziger Jahren bereits alle Ideen, die die heutige Datenverarbeitung prägen."
Innovative Companies Get Their Best Ideas from Academic Research — Here's How They Do It,
by Greg Satell for the Harvard Business Review, April 19, 2016 "Since World War II, the U.S. has been an innovation superpower. [...] To account for its success, many point to America's entrepreneurial culture, its tolerance for failure and its unique ecosystem of venture funding. Those factors do play important roles, but the most important thing driving America's success has been its unparalleled scientific leadership."
The best demo anyone's ever done, or will ever do,
by Harry McCracken, for Fast Company, April 16, 2016 "At Facebook's F8 conference, head of product Chris Cox warmed my heart by talking at length about the "mother of all demos," the astonishing presentation which Douglas Engelbart gave at a San Franciso computing conference in 1968. Engelbart, best known today as the inventor of the mouse, showed his pointing device; a graphical user interface with windows; word processing; video conferencing; and other technologies which were mind-bending in the 1960s and which only became mainstream in the 1980s and beyond."
Engelbart on Improving Improvement,
by James Spohrer for Service Science, April 8, 2016 "Doug Engelbart is most well-known for the invention of the mouse, and being an internet pioneer (the first leg of the internet connected to his lab in California). However, for those who know his work, these contributions are not the most significant. Doug's vision for improving improvement to better tackle complex, urgent problems is to many his most significant contribution."
These unknowns created the world's most important technologies,
by Michael Kaplan for the New York Post, April 1, 2016 "If Doug Engelbart did not invent the Internet, he was there for its inception. According to ITworld, he received the first transmission on Web predecessor ARPANET. More critically, he invented the mouse that we all use to navigate the screens of our computers — genius move."
Revealing the Future: Douglas Engelbart,
by Clive Gifford, for LG-CNS, Mar 9, 2016 "he had a vision whilst driving to work one day, ruminating on how complex problems increasingly needed large teams of people to work together, sharing and swapping information to solve them [...] A sudden visual image of a giant CRT screen covered in various symbols and pieces of information [...] Users could move round this information space to form and organise ideas and solutions with great flexibility and speed, and with users linked, the information spaces could be potentially merged or transferred between users. As Engelbart recalled in an interview with Wired magazine in 2004: "All of a sudden – wham…Everybody could share knowledge. The vision unfolded rapidly, in about a half hour, and suddenly the potential of interactive, collaborative computing became totally clear"
Creative AI: On the Democratisation & Escalation of Creativity,
by Samim Winiger & Roelof Pieters, March 7, 2016 "Engelbart did not only provide a vision of interacting with a computer system, but he had a guiding philosophy. He believed that computers can be used to create an extension for the ways we do thinking, representation and association in our minds... not just to automate processes but to multiply the power of people and collaborators by creating systems that augment our intellect, humanity and creativity. His goal was to raise the human potential."
This Week In Tech History: The Mother Of All Demos,
by Gil Press, for Forbes, December 7, 2015 "December 9, 1968. Doug Engelbart demonstrates the oNLine System (NLS) to about one thousand attendees at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held by the American Federation of Information Processing. The demonstration introduced the first computer mouse, hypertext linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, real-time on-screen text editing, and shared-screen teleconferencing. Engelbart and his colleague Bill English, the engineer who designed the first mouse, conducted a real-time demonstration in San Francisco with co-workers connected from his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI's headquarters..."Read more.
Smithsonian's "Places of Invention" Exhibit Highlights the Rise of the Personal Computer,
by Blake Patterson, for ByteCellar, July 8, 2015 "I recently visited the museum and there saw many legendary things, among them: the Xerox Alto; a MITS Altair 8800; Douglas Engelbart's (father of hypertext) invention: the first, wooden mouse; the original Macintosh computer; a general history of Silicon Valley at the genesis of personal computing; a hobbyists' billboard pulled from the Valley's long past; and a lovely display highlighting the work of distinguished iconographer Susan Kare..."Read more.
See also the Smithsonian's coverage of this exhibit and photos from Christina Engelbart's visit.
Internet Pioneer's Greatest Contribution May Not Be Technological,
May 5, 2015 Doug Engelbart's greatest breakthrough may be to change how we think, how we learn and innovate, and how we collaborate. The Internet Hall of Fame featured profile on this 2014 Inductee, including how one university is putting his vision to practice in an experimental MOOC and associated Engelbart Scholar Award program.
Oregon students win history honors, heading for nationals,
The Oregonian, April 22, 2015 Twenty-four Oregon students advance to the nationals in Washington DC for their outstanding presentations on Leadership & Legacy in last Saturday's Oregon History Day, including Junior Level contestant Zaidie Long of ACCESS Academy in Portland, who presented her documentary: "Douglas Engelbart: Man Behind the TechnologicalRevolution".
From the vault: Watching (and re-watching) "The Mother of All Demos",
by Megan Geuss for ArsTechnica, April 12, 2015 Ars revisits a computing history classic through art, YouTube, and William English. /// In December 1968, engineer and inventor Douglas C. Engelbart and a team of more than a dozen engineers and staff from the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) gave a demonstration at San Francisco's Civic Center Auditorium to show off what they called the oN-Line System (NLS). The demo, which lasted for about an hour and a half, became known as "The Mother of All Demos".
Of mice and Men,
99%Invisible (podcast and article), Jan 20, 2015
A Radio Show about Design with Roman Mar - this episode explores the Keyset invented by Doug Engelbart. "If you are looking at a computer screen, your right hand is probably resting on a mouse.. moving back and forth from keyboard to mouse. .... There is another way..." See Christina Engelbart's followup post Meet the 'keyset', and our exhibit page Doug Engelbart: Father of the Keyset for more background and archive photos.
VCU launches MOOCs,
Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 2, 2014 Vice Provost Gardner Campbell at Virginia Commonwealth University is teaming with other professors and other universities, and joined forces with Christina Engelbart at the Doug Engelbart Institute to design a collaborative MOOC plus the all new Engelbart Scholar Award;See also more background and photos.
EVENT: Technology Legend: Honoring Douglas Engelbart, Computer History Museum, December 2013, sponsored by SRI International and Logitech, Inc.
A special public tribute event to honor the passing of Douglas Carl Engelbart (1925-2013)
Doug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations: Change Your Organization's Nervous System,
by Patty Seybold, customers.com, July 17, 2013 I have been a fan and follower of Doug Engelbart since I first discovered his work in the early 1970s. After his death in 2013, I revisited a videotaped interview I did with Doug in November of 1991 [in which Doug described] much of his seminal thinking about how to design high performance organizations. [...] In this article, I summarize a few of the high points from that interview.
Doug The Mouse Inventor's Vision of Computing,
by John Markoff, NY Times, July 13, 2013 Beginning in the 1950s, when computing was in its infancy, Douglas C. Engelbart set out to show that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. [...] In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration...
CHM Fellow Douglas C. Engelbart,
by Marc Weber, Computer History Museum, July 12, 2013 His goal was building systems to augment human intelligence. His group prototyped much of modern computing (and invented the mouse) along the way...
What Douglas Engelbart Taught Me About Designing User Interfaces,
by Nathan Manousos, FLINTO, 03 July 2013 Defending a multi-button mouse, Englebart explained to the group that immediate learnability should not always be the goal of a hardware device or a software interface...
The Pioneers of the World Wide Web,
By Andrew Beattie, Techopedia, April 29, 2013 Tim Berners-Lee deserves praise for putting together the World Wide Web, but others can take credit for giving him the idea....
Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues,
by Patty Seybold, in Outside Innovation, June 6, 2010 For internetworked organizations [...] there’s also a robust body of proven practices that reminds us how to accelerate our capacity for innovation as a group of people. Many of the basic principles for “bootstrapping innovation” among people who are working together online (and offline) to address complex issues were invented and practiced by Doug Engelbart. [...] At our recent Visionaries’ meeting, Christina Engelbart, Doug’s daughter, reminded us that her father’s life work revolved around helping groups of people tackle really complex issues. (read the article)
Christina Engelbart speaking re:
the vision driving Doug's work
[photo courtesy SRI International]
Bootstrapping Innovation: Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results,
by Ronni Marshak, Senior Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, June 3, 2010 At our Spring 2010 Visionaries meeting, Christina Engelbart, executive director of the Doug Engelbart Institute and
heir apparent to the visionary thinking of
her father, Doug Engelbart, presented the concepts and action model for Bootstrapping Innovation… (read the article)
"If the name Douglas C. Engelbart ever comes up on TV's Jeopardy game show, the question doubtless will have been: "Who invented the computer mouse?" In fact, that's hardly Engelbart's only claim. [...]
Ask Engelbart, and he says his life's work is about an even more audacious goal: trying to figure out ways to help the human race solve its increasingly complex problems..."
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