Historic Firsts:
Interactive Computing
0
Overview
1
Engelbart's pioneering work in interactive computing was part of his larger vision for "augmenting the human intellect," which he first conceived in the early 1950s. He assumed that people working together toward the common good needed to get much more effective at pursuing their missions. He had never seen a computer but had read enough about them to surmise they could be harnessed to enable all-new ways of working together, and as a former radar technician in WWII he knew that information could be displayed on a screen. He pictured knowledge workers accessing a vast shared knowledge space through highly responsive display workstations. This was at a time when computers were used for complex mathematical and scientific functions, and you would load in your instructions, and come back later for the results.
After receiving his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley, he took a research position at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in 1957, fleshed out and published his vision in a 1962 report, invented the computer mouse in 1963, had an early prototype working with display monitor along with other input devices by 1964, had hypermedia, groupware and other important pioneering firsts in full operation in his lab by 1967, which he presented in a now-famous 1968 demo:
Doug Engelbart's presentation at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference was a live online hypermedia demonstration of the pioneering work that Engelbart's group had been doing at SRI. Later called "The Mother of All Demos," this historic demonstration paved the way for human-computer interaction. read more
Doug saw human-computer interaction as just a small part of a larger ecosystem of people interacting with knowledge, people, tools and what he calls our "human system" of conventions, methods, processes, paradigms, etc. We interface with this whole ecosystem. His exploratory work encompassed the whole ecosystem, with a particular emphasis on interface requirements for high-performance knowledge workers and high-performance teams (see references below).
Ivan Sutherland is considered the Father of Interactive Computing for his ground-breaking work on Sketchpad, the interactive display graphics program he developed in 1963. He was soon after, in his position at the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office under the direction of J.C.R. Licklider, facilitating ARPA's research grant to Engelbart for developing the NLS system at SRI based on his visionary manifesto published in a 1962 Report, in which Engelbart envisioned interactive computing as a vehicle for human interaction with computers, with each other, and with their knowledge, all in a vast virtual information space. In a 1965 Report he published his early experiments with pointing devices, including the mouse, for composing and editing on interactive display workstations. Engelbart's work on interactive computing at SRI migrated directly to Xerox PARC, from there to Apple, and out into the mainstream. Thus the tree of evolution for interactive computing generally traces back to Engelbart's lab at SRI.
In December 2008, on the 40th anniversary of his 1968 demo, SRI sponsored the public commemorative event Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing in his honor.
See Also
3
Explore the Web
3a
From Doug's Lab
3b
- Visit Historic Firsts
- for more of Doug Engelbart's many groundbreaking firsts.
- Visit Doug's Vision for Humanity
- among those Historic Firsts, this describes the larger context of his work.
- Visit Doug's Great Demo: 1968
- brings to life his early achievements with archive footage,
photos, fun facts, story, and retrosectives; this demo was the debut of his NLS system including hypermedia, the mouse, collaborative work, interactive computing, human computer interface, software engineering, and his overarching guiding principles.
(aka the "Mother of All Demos" – snippets shown above).
- Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Douglas C. Engelbart. October 1962. See for example how he envisioned an architect might work interactively with a computer in the Introduction's summary of Section IV.
- Computer-Aided Display Control, William K. English, Douglas C. Engelbart, Bonnie Huddart. July 1965, Stanford Research Institute. Prepared under contract for NASA, Langley Research Center, and Langley Air Force Base Virginia.
- Doug Engelbart - A Lifetime Pursuit, a short biographical sketch by Christina Engelbart (5 pages).
- Toward High-Performance Knowledge Workers. Douglas C. Engelbart, OAC '82 Digest, Proceedings of the AFIPS Office Automation Conference, San Francisco, CA, April 5-7 1982, pp. 279-290 (AUGMENT,81010,).
- Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware. Douglas C. Engelbart, Proceedings of the GroupWare '92 Conference, San Jose, CA, August 3-5, 1992, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (AUGMENT,132811,)
|
hide header
