Advent of Computing - Podcast 2019
“Advent of Computing, the podcast that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has led to our modern world.” Featuring Doug Engelbart's pioneering work in three podcasts in 2019. Could use some fact-checking, but largely well researched, with great insight, well told!
Check out
The Demo | Edge-Notched | Evolution of the Mouse | The Engelbart Audio Collection
Culture of Innovation at ARPA & Xerox PARC
“Keynote Speaker Alan Kay presents key lessons learned from the culture within the ARPA community and Xerox PARC that fostered so many technological breakthroughs, in such a short period of time.” Includes learnings from Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect Research Center. Stories that inform future cosmic scale innovators.
Video Contents: 0:01 Introductions | 04:29 Enter Alan Kay | 22:46 Discussing Engelbart |
See also Related Essay: "How?" | Event Site
Revisiting Engelbart’s ‘Collective IQ’ in the Era of AI
“This PC pioneer believed technology was a tool to augment human intelligence — not replace it”
How? - When “what will it take?” seems beyond possible
“When “what will it take?” seems beyond possible, we need to study how *Immense Challenges* have been successfully dealt with in the past. [...] Need higher levels of qualitatively different thinking than the thinking that caused the challenges, including how to set up and nourish the communities of top people [pursuing the solutions]." *Immense Challenges* call for cosmic vision and collective synergy.
This essay written for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Summit to accompany Alan's session VIDEO: Scale Up the Circular Economy - with Alan Kay
Surprise: AI In 2019
“Later, when I was working at Apple in [Silicon Valley], a colleague introduced me to Doug Engelbart, and I learned about augmentation theory from the master. His view of augmentation was not just for individuals, but also teams, whole businesses, and all organizations, even nations, could be augmented to use advanced technologies to deal with complex and urgent problems.”
The Origins of the Mac
March 2019 Issue (151) “How the mother of all demos led to the computer that changed everything.” Check out the article / Purchase the Issue
1968: When The World Began - return to a square
In this Podcast: “On 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart gave the ‘Mother of All Demos’ – and the world changed. 50 years later, both creators and keepers of the flame for that demo reflect on how 1968 changed the world — for all of us. On 9 December, 2018, some of the luminaries of the Internet gathered to commemorate the Golden Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos. We had a chance to talk with some of them, weaving their stories together into one of our own.”
See Podcast | Show Notes | Prequel | 4-Part 1968 Series | Series Announced
"What Would Doug Engelbart Do?" Ask Organizers of a Silicon Valley Event
“Inspired by the man who showed the way to modern computing, tech-minded experts shared ideas for how to tackle climate change, nuclear proliferation, and broken political systems.”
How the Mother of All Demos portrayed the power of possibilities
“Net Results: Five decades after Douglas Englebart clicked the first mouse, it is still a gobsmacking thing of wonder." [...] "In short, 50 years on, we still haven’t fully comprehended the vision, or the portent, of that astonishing Mother of All Demos."
How design factored into "the mother of all tech demos"
“A crucial, but rarely discussed element of Engelbart’s stagecraft was his custom-built chair. Herman Miller designer Jack Kelley modified an Eames shell chair and affixed a detatchable tray to house a keyboard, a computer mouse, and a keyset.” Jack Kelly recalls the setup for the seminal demo - “I designed the computer chair with a swing-out console because Engelbart liked to work in different attitudes and statures … stand-up, sit down, relax. … How do you solve for that?”
The Mother of All Demos
“In December 1968, Douglas Engelbart debuted many of the concepts of modern, interactive computing.”
Net@50: Did Engelbart's “Mother of All Demos” Launch the Connected World?
“His goal was building systems to augment human intelligence. His group prototyped much of modern computing (and invented the mouse) along the way”
50 Years Later, We Still Don’t Grasp the Mother of All Demos
“To Engelbart, his work was never about the technology itself, but about helping people work together to solve the world’s biggest problems.”
How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos
“Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs. [...] They should augment rather than replace the human intellect.”
50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ changed personal technology forever
“Imagine someone demonstrating a jet plane 15 years before Kitty Hawk [or] a smartphone 15 years before the first cellular networks were even launched.”
1968: When The World Began - the mother of all demos
In this Podcast: “On the 9th of December in 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave the ‘Mother of All Demos‘ – the most important hour in the history of computing, one that drew back the curtain on the world we all live in today.”
See Podcast | Show Notes | Sequel | 4-Part 1968 Series | Series Announced
'The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart' makes LA Film Finalist
“Selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles CineFest competition" [...] "'The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart' provides a glimpse into the mind of a man who has indeed revolutionized humanity."” Check Out: Trailer #1 | Trailer #2 | About the Film
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley
“New book by Fisher - A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Opens with chapter on Doug Engelbart and his team discussing their 1968 Demo. A masterfully woven collective oral history of events as they unfolded. See Preview.”
People’s Interactions with Cognitive Assistants for Enhanced Performances
In Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2018 - "The main motivation of this paper laid down by Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer, and an early computer and Internet pioneer who invented the computer mouse, urged people to work quickly "to augment human intellect and address complex, urgent problems." Technology and organizations are two instruments that people have developed to augment their intellect in order to enhance their performance."
Mother of Invention
How a hacked Eames Shell Chair, the world's first mousepad, and a one-off keyboard console set the stage for the personal computer revolution.
"In the lead-up to the Mother of All Demos, Engelbart recognized Herman Miller's work as complementary to his own goal to facilitate, as he explained it, "better solutions, faster solutions, solutions to more complex problems, better use of human capabilities." When Engelbart called Herman Miller to help design both a new office at SRI and the furniture for the demo, Kelley was a natural partner."
As tweeted by IDEO. See also: Video animation to accompany article
In One 1968 Presentation, This Inventor Shaped Modern Computing
“Douglas Engelbart’s career was about seeing the possibilities of what computing could do for humanity.”
Here's How To Master The ABCs Of Innovation
“Fortune 500 CEOs cited dealing with the rapid pace of technological change as their "single biggest challenge." Another global survey [...] identified the speed of disruptive innovation as one of the highest risks facing their organizations. [...] Yet, the intense attention on innovation often misses a key element. [While] many companies are paying attention to immediate challenges and opportunities, [...] too few are being innovative in how they innovate. [...] Douglas Engelbart, the noted engineer and inventor, captured the critical difference when he wrote "the key to the long-term viability of an organization is to get better "and better at improving itself." To understand why, take a look at Englebart's framework for the "ABCs of Organizational Improvement."
See this article tweeted by the Author, and trending on Twitter.”
Elephant Footprint: The Vision and Impact of Douglas Engelbart
Choose Format: eReader | Blog
DOUG ENGELBART'S VISION AND IMPACT TRANSCENDED HIS COMPUTER MOUSE - “At the time of his passing, Engelbart was frustrated by humans’ failure to prioritize the power of the Creative IQ. His vision was that technology would work with our infinite capacities as humans, not work independently of them.” [ See also: Editor's Note | Inventors Digest - June 2016 Issue ]
Doug Engelbart: More Than the Inventor of the Mouse
The system he demonstrated, NLS, "was the first operational hypertext system. Even so, NLS itself was merely a tool to manifest the grander concepts that would provide us with the ability to raise what Doug termed the “collective IQ.” He was simply building the minimal infrastructure that was necessary to realize his vision.”
Engelbart on Improving Improvement
“Doug’s vision for improving improvement to better tackle complex, urgent problems is to many his most significant contribution.”
Revealing the Future: Douglas Engelbart
“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.'”
Internet Pioneer's Greatest Contribution May Not Be Technological
“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
“Award winners at the Oregon History Day competition will now advance to the National History Day competition this June in Washington, D.C. for their outstanding presentations on Leadership & Legacy.”
Among the winners was eighth grader Zaidie Long for her documentary "Douglas Engelbart: Man Behind the Technological Revolution""
Of mice and Men
A radio show on Design - this episode explores the Keyset invented by Doug Engelbart as a companion to the Mouse. "It allowed them to work with much greater speed and efficiency than was possible with only a mouse and QWERTY keyboard. So why did the keyset never take off like the rest of Doug’s inventions (which included hyperlinks, video conferencing, collaboration tools, digital text editing, and many more technologies in use today)? In this episode we consider the tradeoffs between “user-friendly” and “complicated” designs by talking to Engelbart’s daughter – Christina Engelbart and Apple Computer’s former VP and Chief Scientist – Larry Tesler.
See Christina Engelbart's followup post Meet the 'keyset'– a mouse’s best friend, and our exhibit page Doug Engelbart: Father of the Keyset for more background and archive photos.”
Innovation Magazine and the Birth of a Buzzword
“Today's technoculture of entrepreneurship and creative problem solving owes much to this 1960s magazine… In the September 1971 Issue, Innovation published one of the earliest profiles of computer visionary Douglas Engelbart. Members could sign up for a seminar with Engelbart in his lab at SRI [to] try out the augmentation system made famous by his 1968 public demonstration, in which he debuted a number of groundbreaking technologies.”
See companion article featuring Doug Engelbart: Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop, by Nilo Lindgren, Innovation, issue 24, April 1971, pages 50-60.
Channeling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education
“Gardner Campbell not only teaches the ideas of Doug Engelbart — the visionary who invented the mouse, hypertext and many more of the digital tools so many people use every day — he understands that Engelbart’s technological attempt to “augment human intellect” also ought to be a central goal of pedagogy. Fortunately, [he] is in a good position to pursue this goal in practice.”
Internet Hall of Fame Announces 2014 Inductees
“The Internet Hall of Fame welcomes 2014 Inductees at ceremony in Hong Kong... For his visionary work related to networking and the foundations of the information age, Doug Engelbart was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame." Further details on this posthumous award, see Doug Engelbart inducted into Internet Hall of Fame.
Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
“This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept underlying the World Wide Web and much more. Barnet includes her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of the hypertext innovation, telling both the human and the technological story.”
Chapter 3 - 'Augmenting the Intellect: NLS' is devoted to Doug Engelbart’s pioneering work.
See [ Chapter 3 Abstract | Table of Contents ]
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.”
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.”
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.”
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
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.
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."