Wonderful, but nonetheless, a belated gesture of appreciation. The world
still owes him recognition for what "Bootstrapping", the way Engelbart
describes it, could mean to the future of humanity.
-ppy
==
Henry van Eyken wrote Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:57:14 -0500 :
>
> It's official!
>
> Douglas Engelbart will be awarded the 2000 National Medal of Technology
> by President Clinton at a black-tie, gala banquet in the National
> Building Museum on the evening of Friday, December 1, 2000. Other
> recipients of the NMT are Dean Karnen, Donald B. Keck, Robert D. Maurer,
> Peter Schultz, and the IBM Corporation. President Clinton will also be
> awarding National Medals of Science.
>
> Related ceremonies will include a roundtable discussion between the
> Laureates and young people who have demonstrated an aptitude for science
> and engineering. This will enable young people to discuss their
> interests and solicite guidance from the Laureates, who are role models
> for America's youth. Plans are neing made for a webcast at approximately
> 10:45 a.m., November 30.
>
> On Friday, December 1, at 10:30 a.m., a press roundtable will be held
> for both science and technology Laureates in the International Trade
> Center (Ronald Regan Building).
>
> Following are the Citation and a brief biography of Doug Engelbart. In
> the meantime, we are awaiting an electronic reproduction of the medal as
> we are preparing a special home page (typo-free) for the
> http://www.bootstrap.org
>
> H.
>
> Contribution Category: General Product & Process Innovation
>
> Citation: For creating the foundations of personal computing including
> continuous real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and
> the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, online journals,
> shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work.
>
> Brief Biography: Dr. Engelbart, more than any other single person, set
> the stage for that component of the computer revolution now called
> personal computing. During the early 1960s, when the hallmark of
> computing was large mainframe computers, he correctly saw that a close,
> interactive, and continuous relationship between computer and its user
> would yield enormous benefit in making that person motre efficient and
> effective. Nor was it all vision. During that time he perfected the
> notions of on-line, real-time systems that caused machines to deliver to
> their users what they wanted when they wanted it, all interactively.
> This work came to define the functionality of personal computing even
> though some time would pass before the personal computer itself would be
> affordable for an individual user. As Director of a laboratory at
> Stanford Research Institute that grew to a staff of 40 to 50 members, he
> and they created many of the concepts and tools of personal computing
> that we take for granted over thirty years later. The concepts of
> point-and-click and hypertext are just two that have come to define the
> ease with which we now interact with computers. Over two dozen of the
> properties and capabilities of present computers were demonstrated by
> the mid-1970s (see Comprehensive Description).
>
> As important as these contributions were, they were but stepping stones
> toward Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goal of elevating the competency of an
> entire organization through the augmentation of its members through
> distributed computing systems. Most of the software innovations were
> embedded in an integrated groupware system he called NLS, one of the
> first interactibve systems anywhere. All this was made possible for the
> first time at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968 in San
> Fransisco. On a huge screen at the Conference, he jointly edited a
> document (two cursors) with a collaborator 40 miles away at SRI in Menlo
> Park.
>
> Through video windows on each workstation, they had a full personal and
> computer-based interaction. His conviction about distributed computer
> systems led to his group being the second node on the fledling ARPANET
> and later the Internet. His Network Information Center was the entryway
> for anyone getting an address for these new networks for over twenty
> years.
>
> This early establishment of what personal and collaborative computing
> should be helped create a prescription of what for how computers were to
> evolve. These directions included hardware, such as cathode display
> tubes and the mouse, which he invented, and network interfaces. They
> included software directions such as windowing hypermedia and hypertext
> shared-screen teleconferencing, and, importantly, the concepts and
> methods of on-line text and graphics processing. These foundations made
> it clear that computers would have this new role of continuous, proximal
> support of an individual, working either alone or, through networking,
> as part of a group. At least four of Dr. Engelbart's staff transferred
> to Xerox Park where bit-map displays, icons and the desktop metaphor
> with its overlapping windows were created. When Steve Jobs of fledgling
> Apple Computer saw all this, he understood immediately the ingredients
> of what came to be the MacIntosh. SRI has issued licences for the mouse
> to both Xerox and Apple Computer.
>
> So, the enablement of Moore's Law and this personalized functionality
> for computers opened the doors to one of the most dramatic sector
> growths in history. That Dr. Engelbart forsaw this kind of impact is
> illustrated by this quote from his 1970-paper: "There will emerge a new
> marketplace, representing fantastc wealth in commodities of knowledge,
> service, information, processing, storage, ...." This anticipation of
> the way computers should and would ultimately serve individuals clearly
> helped establish the primacy of the United States in the information era
> and it still enjoys the competitive advantage of that accelerated
> growth.
>
> The National Medal of Technology is "to recognize technological
> innovators who have made lasting contributions to enhancing America's
> competitiveness and standard of living" and whose solid science results
> in "commercially successful products and services." This could not be a
> more apt description of Dr. Engelbart and his life's work.
>
> (to be continued on the site ...)
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Nov 13 2000 - 19:16:41 PST