Augmenting Human Intellect: Vale Doug Engelbart
“His vision didn’t stop there: he proposed co-evolution of people and technology, and wanted people developing systems to be using the tools they were building to do their work, ... bootstrapping the environment. He early on saw the necessity of bringing in diverse viewpoints ... to get the best outcomes. And continual learning was a key component ... not just an ongoing reflection on work processes looking for opportunities to improve, but a reflection on the reflection process; sharing between groups doing the work reflection, to collaboratively improve.”
The Mouse a contestant in first-ever Tech Tournament
Learn about the first-ever Tech Tournament sponsored by the Industrial Research Institute, and how one contestant features -- the computer mouse.”
Doug Engelbart, computer visionary and pioneer, dies at 88
“The world remembers Doug Engelbart (1925-2013) and his considerable contributions to humanity” // SEE ALSO SPECIAL COMPILATION of key articles and newscasts:
Press Tributes to Doug Engelbart on his Passing, and special tributes from colleagues:
The Human Side of Doug Engelbart
Reflections on our future
This article commemorates Doug's remarks from the Oct 1996 ASIS Conference on global complexity: information, chaos and control, where ASIS honored Doug with a Special Achievement Award. “We at the Bootstrap Institute say the world has one category of people who are operating and another category of activity that's improving the capability to do that work. So we called the first part the “A” activity and the next part the “B.” The “B” is that which is busy trying to improve how capable you can be at “A.” Because we have significantly more challenges coming, we must get a more effective “B” going to cope with that change. To improve the capability for doing “B,” you obviously have to add a “C” to improve your capability to improve...”
Douglas Engelbart and the Means to an End
“Engelbart tells us what his intent was in developing these technologies—they were a means to an end. His point wasn’t to build a pointing device. His goal was to help humankind expand its capacity to solve problems...”
Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution
“Engelbart’s ideas revolutionized computing and helped shape the modern world. [...] To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created.”
Learning From Revolutionaries: Doug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations
“I hope you’ll take the time to bathe in Doug’s seminal thinking. There was so much more to what he invented than the mouse or windows. His vision and his implementations of it really show us how to redesign the way that people work within and across organizations in order to be maximally innovative and adaptive. Doug’s life work isn’t over. We still need to implement much of his vision and to take advantage of the practices he promulgated within his own organization at SRI over several decades, which resulted in continuous innovation.”
Doug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations
Change Your Organization's Nervous System - “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.”
The Mouse Inventor's Vision of Computing
“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...”
Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart, computer engineer, died on July 2nd... “He had a different vision, in which everyone had instant access to information of small screens and could collaborate, instantly, to solve the increasingly complex problems the world faced.”
Doug Engelbart's Legacy of Innovation Inspiration
“Computing pioneer Doug Engelbart’s inventions transformed computing, but he intended them to transform humans... Engelbart himself was involved in the creation of “Bootstrapping Innovation,” which the institute bearing his name defines as “a distillation of Doug Engelbart's strategic vision put to practice. It is essentially the same strategic approach he applied in his own research team for breakthrough results.”
Did Silicon Valley Abandon Doug Engelbart?
“One of the most provocative tributes among a sea of tributes to Doug Engelbart, is a post by Tom Foremski, who points out that despite all the applause for the innovative inventor of the mouse, no one would fund Engelbart’s work during the last 40 years of his life.”
The Creator of the Computer Mouse Never Received Any Royalties
“Though Engelbart revolutionized computing in 1967 with the invention of the mouse, he never received any royalties from his creation”
Remembering Doug Engelbart, with two talks about his visionary work
“Engelbart was one of those people who imagined the possibility of the Internet as a place where people could work together and push humanity forward. He was ahead of his time not only in what he invented, but in how he thought about the process of creation. Digital collaboration, crowdsourcing, group innovation — these are concepts Engelbart championed 60 years ago that are still relevant (yet, importantly, not a matter of course) today.”
References: The Demo | Ian Ritchie TED Talk | Peter Hirshberg TED Talk | Augmenting Human Intellect
Doug Engelbart’s passing leaves a legacy to treasure
“He was a visionary inventor and engineer, a top-down changer of worlds. He had a devastatingly simple aim: to make the world a better place by augmenting the human intellect to better take on the problems the world presented. [...] His approach was not to solve individual engineering problems, but to find ways of realising his big picture, something which he devoted his whole working life to: enhancing human potential by inventing ways of thinking about, and realising, richer human-computer interaction.”
See also special compilation in Remembering Doug Engelbart
A few words on Doug Engelbart
“People often compare Engelbart's work to today's tech, but that misses the point. Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals.”
Doug Engelbart, the visionary who foresaw the modern internet and created the mouse, dies aged 88
“Engelbart was one of the first great computer visionaries, and perhaps the first to envision a future where computers, and more importantly networks of computers, augment human intellect.”
Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse and so much more, dies at 88
“In December 1968, his "Mother of all Demos" changed computing forever." According to Vint Cerf, Doug was one of our farthest seeing visionaries. "He had a keen sense of the way in which computers could augment human capacity to think... The [Web] is a manifestation of some of what he imagined or hoped, although his aspirations exceeded even that...”
The shocking truth about Silicon Valley genius Doug Engelbart
“He's lauded by many for his stellar contributions but no one would fund him in the last four decades of his life...
There is an unfinished computer revolution, and with important unfinished work that he wasn't able to complete. … What new platforms of innovation could have come from his work, what new hundred billion dollar industries might have emerged?”
See also Remembering Doug Engelbart
In Memoriam: Douglas Engelbart, Maestro of the Mouse and So Much More
“Silicon Valley has lost one of its true visionaries — but his monuments are everywhere... Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, but leaving it at that is like praising Orville and Wilbur Wright for their pioneering role in the history of propellers... a passionate believer in what he called Collective IQ, [his 1968 demo] is still about the most intense tour de force of raw creativity and innovation that the tech world has ever seen...”
See also Remembering Doug Engelbart
What Douglas Engelbart Taught Me About Designing User Interfaces
“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...”
CHM Fellow Douglas C. Engelbart
“His goal was building systems to augment human intelligence. His group prototyped much of modern computing (and invented the mouse) along the way...”
Originally published in Jul 2013, updated extensively Dec 2018.
The Pioneers of the World Wide Web
“Tim Berners-Lee deserves praise for putting together the World Wide Web, but others can take credit for giving him the idea....”
Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy
From the Archives (1999): “Engelbart still is working nonstop on the crusade he launched in the 1950s: He believes that as technology speeds up the rate of change, making the world increasingly complex, its power must be harnessed to help people collaborate and solve problems.” [...] "His reasoning goes like this: 'Every year sooner' that the world learns how to tackle problems collectively, then every year sooner the odds increase that we can cope before complex problems crash our whole society."