Doug Engelbart: The Unfinished Revolution
Engelbart "pioneered what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking and organizational transformation. After 20 years of directing his own lab at SRI, and 11 years as senior scientist, first at Tymshare, and then at McDonnell Douglas Corp., Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, where he is working closely with industry and government stakeholders to launch a collaborative implementation of his work.”
Appearing in Government Technology Magazine: Special Issue "Visions: technology and government for the new millennium
Douglas Engelbart: More Thoughts from Cassandra
Douglas Engelbart can be credited with inventing much of the computing paradigm we all use today, but have we missed his most important ideas? Adam looks at where Engelbart has been and where he thinks we need to strategize for the future, given the accelerating rate of change: “Wouldn’t you think [an organization] would try to knock off two birds with one stone by creating products that radically improve the productivity of its own employees, with the understanding that doing so would result in products that would better meet the needs of other customers?”
Reference: This article was inspired by Doug's Turing Lecture | Slidedeck
Doug Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing
“What is missing from the current commercial descriptions of the Web is a discussion about the 30-year history of R&D that created the underlying technologies on which the Web is based. Much of this foundation was laid in the 1960s by Doug Engelbart. In 1968, he demonstrated his concept of “interactive computing” to a group of computer scientists, now considered a seminal event in the history of computing." Source: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Vol.19 Issue 3.
A Worthy Prize Winner: Doug Engelbart
"Technology still hasn't caught up to Doug's vision for the future." -- Bob Haavind, Editor-in-Chief. "The 1997 Lemelson-MIT Prize, worth $500,000, was awarded during a ceremony at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. to Douglas Engelbart, a hands-on engineer/inventor who was instrumental in the development of networking and the personal computer. There could not be a more deserving winner of this prestigious award than this unassuming, brilliant visionary."
Of Mouse and Man
“In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.” -- Douglas Engelbart, upon receiving the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the crown jewel of inventor prizes, in New York last week.
Visit Engelbart Awards for details.
Tools that make business better and better: A Silicon Valley legend
“A Silicon Valley legend who pioneered the mouse and the Internet has been thinking about how groups can work smarter--companies, divisions, teams, whatever--longer than anyone else. Better than anyone too: His ideas--long incubated, long promulgated, and long ignored--provide a way of looking at how to improve corporate performance that's fresh and refreshingly practical. His name is Douglas C. Engelbart.
Inventor of the present works on the future
"If we are going to do any good with the collaborative work tools that computers provide, it is going to involve significant changes at all levels of our social system and our organizations" -- Doug Engelbart. Then and now, Engelbart understood that the most profound changes to result from his inventions were not hardware or software innovations, but social innovations - new ways for people to think, communicate and work together.
Computer Pioneer Works to Raise the 'Collective IQ' of Organizations
“If not for Douglas Engelbart, a great many of the technical innovations we consider integral to the personal computer revolution would not exist. [...] His motivating concept, still largely untested today, was that information technologies could serve as the connective tissue between people and information. The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in what he calls an organization's "collective I.Q,”
See also Denise Caruso interviews Doug Engelbart: Meeting the Creator on MSNBC's The Site
Man of the Mouse
“In 1967 Douglas Engelbart invented the COMPUTER MOUSE. He was also among the first people to develop uses for the Internet.”
Improving your organization's IQ
“In some of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley, the name Douglas Engelbart is spoken with reverence... credited with inventing the mouse, hypertext, multiple-window screen displays, and computer conferencing, among other staples of computer technology. But his greatest innovation has been largely ignored. It is a vision of people using technology to 'improve the collective IQ of organizations'”
In this premier edition of her award-winning journal from the Drucker Foundation, Frances Hesselbein covers Engelbart's strategy for improving how we improve our organizations, and the ABCs of leveraging our Collective IQ throughout the organization's "improvement infrastructure" and across improvement communities.
Douglas Engelbart and the Invention of Collaborative Computing
“At the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, a soft-spoken and unassuming scientist by the name of Douglas Engelbart led an R&D team that created the first collaborative computing system. He’s best known as the inventor of the mouse, but his contributions to computing go far beyond that.”
Doug Engelbart: Father of the Mouse
“Many people mistakenly believe that the mouse was invented by Apple, [or] that Steve Jobs stole the idea from Xerox... But in truth, the mouse was first conceived of by Doug Engelbart in the early 1960’s... SuperKids recently visited with Doug in the offices of his current venture, Bootstrap, Inc.”
Educators Seek Technology Insights
Doug Engelbart meeting with educators at the Hartford Graduate Center to discuss how innovative computing and practices can help student-designed networked initiatives prepare them for their future. Photo Credit: Stephen Dunn - The Hartford Courant.
Dreaming of the Future
“Can digital technology make a better world? Improve our collective IQ? In the dreams of this visionary inventor it can.”
Also available in eReader format |
More of Engelbart in this 20th Anniversary Issue: Top 20 People (Doug Engelbart p.137) | Top 20 Technologies (find Mouse, GUI, Groupware)
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See Also: Full Issue |
Photo Credit: David Toerge
BYTE: Top 20 Technologies
“California garages again store cars and junk, not computer research labs as they did in the halcyon days of Woz and Jobs. Today, the myths may be tamer, but the pace of innovation hasn't changed. Here are the major technologies of the past 20 years.” (Note: Mouse, GUI, Groupware all trace back to Engelbart)
More of Engelbart in this 20th Anniversary Issue: The 20 Most Important People (Engelbart p.137) | Dreaming of the Future, by Douglas Engelbart |
See Also: Full Issue
BYTE: The 20 Most Important People
“Although computers are technology, they are created by people. And the people who create them are not just one-dimensional nerds--in fact their breadth fuels their innovation. These 20 people have made the greatest impact on microcomputing.” Re: Doug Engelbart (p.137): "Dedicated to getting companies to collaborate on innovation. Comparisons to Thomas Edison do not seem farfetched."
More of Engelbart in this 20th Anniversary Issue: Top 20 Technologies (find Mouse, GUI, Groupware) | Dreaming of the Future, by Douglas Engelbart |
See Also: Full Issue
Designing hypermedia applications
A special issue on Hypermedia - “the science of relationships... structuring, presenting, and giving users direct access to the content and interconnections within an information domain... navigation... 'blazing trails'... annotation... information overviews..." We open this special issue with contributions from two pioneers "as beacons of hypermedia’s potential to support people, teams, and organizations in the hypermedia field. Ted Nelson describes transclusion, the central feature embedded within the design of the Xanadu paradigm... Doug Engelbart describes features central to the design of an open hyperdocument system, which he believes will constitute the core of organizational information systems in the future. ”
Free access in PDF and eReader formats | Browse full issue including articles by Engelbart and Nelson.
Bootstrapping to the future
“Douglas Engelbart has been called the patron saint of the computer industry, .... One doesn't have to look very far to see the fruits of his lifelong efforts…. But these innovations were all part of a broader vision … which he calls "bootstrapping," refers to [speeding] up cycles of innovation and raise the "collective I.Q." of organizations.”
Also Avail: On Internet Archive | Scanned Clipping (for subscribers only)
The Creators
“Twenty-five years ago, they brought the Internet to life." Here celebrating the 25th anniversary of the installation of the first node on the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet.
Bootstrapping - en strategi för att förbättra förmågan till bättre förmåga
“Kunskapshantering i en komplex och tidspressad verklighet” | Featuring Doug Engelbart's strategy "to improve the ability for better ability: knowledge management in a complex and time-pressured reality."
Teldok Rapport, Vol. 84, by Bengt Göran Wennersten, Stockholm, Sweden, ISSN 0281-8574 (97 pages).
Douglas Engelbart: Always Ahead of His Time
“The goal wasn’t to do pretty things with computers. The goal was to get human organizations to be a lot more capable of dealing with complexity. In 1951, the complexity and urgency of human problems had already surpassed our ability to cope. I knew that if we couldn’t improve it, we were in real trouble... The problem is not the technology, but to change our perspective on what it’s for.”
Available Formats: PDF | eReader
Appearing in Computerworld Special 25th Anniversary Edition - 25 People Who Changed the World
Doug Engelbart’s Design for Knowledge-Based Organizations
“Doug Engelbart was driven to help people address really complex issues. One path is to support collaboration through the use of a Dynamic Knowledge Repository. [...] To Doug, bootstrapping is “getting better at getting better.” It’s at the heart of continuous innovation. He believes in the principle of leverage. Put your attention not on the thing you’re trying to design or do, but on how to IMPROVE the process you’re using to design or do, AND on also focus on how to improve your capacity to improve.”
This is a two-part article: Part 1 | Part 2.
Or read the PDF/Print version.
Two Men, Two Visions of One Computer World, Indivisible
“With computer technology advancing at a lightning pace, it's hard to imagine that anyone could work on the same project for more than 30 years -- and still not finish it. But that is the case with two legendary figures of computerdom: Theodor Holm Nelson and Douglas C. Engelbart. The two men are very different.”
Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook
“This handbook is a guide to designing and implementing with hypertext, including a survey of current hypertext practices, with contributions from professional hypertext developers." Engelbart's chapter anticipates that the tools and methods of computer-supported cooperative work will become harnessed with revolutionary benefit to the ongoing, everyday knowledge work within and between organizations, necessitating interoperability between knowledge-work domains through something like the "open hyperdocument system" made available for widespread use.
Engelbart Chapter pp. 397-413 | Knowledge-domain interoperability and an open hyperdocument system