Serving Our Country on the Battlefield and in the Lab
“Military veterans’ scientific and technological contributions have also shaped our daily lives.… One of those innovators was Douglas Engelbart, who received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2000 for inventions that provided the foundation for the modern personal computer” - influenced in part from his WWII-era service in the Navy as a radio and radar technician, he then dedicated his career in the service of mankind.
How the Internet was Born
A 4-part series commemorating the anniversary of the first transmission sent across the ARPANET: 1- A stuttered hello | 2- The network begins | 3- the ARPANET Comes to Life | 4- from ARPANET to Internet. Part 3 excerpt: "Stanford was selected because of Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation of Human Intellect project. Engelbart was already an eminent figure in computer science [his work was vital] to make the network more user–friendly."
Elephant Footprint: The Vision and Impact of Douglas Engelbart
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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 ]
Who Lost the Internet Wars?
“Engelbart imagined an information system built on the backbones of collaboration and education, all meant to amplify the collective human mind. He wanted a computerized network of real-time, human-wide collaboration, with the open-source spirit of Wikipedia and the purposefulness of Change.org”
Mit Engelbarts Maus machten andere Mäuse
PIONIER DER DATENVERARBEITUNG - "Unter den Computerweltschöpfern war er der innovativste: Douglas C. Engelbart hatte in den sechziger Jahren bereits alle Ideen, die die heutige Datenverarbeitung prägen.”
Why Modern Computing Owes Everything To Douglas Engelbart
“So why say he was doomed to obscurity? Because the system he envisioned to bring peace and understanding across the world was used to download cat videos and post status updates on Facebook. The inventions and innovations he freely gave away became gang turf for every computer company to sue every other computer company. His contributions were buried behind a wall of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs”
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.”
Innovative Companies Get Their Best Ideas from Academic Research - Here's How They Do It
“Since World War II, the U.S. has been an innovation superpower. [...] To account for its success, many point to America's entrepreneurial culture, its tolerance for failure and its unique ecosystem of venture funding. Those factors do play important roles, but the most important thing driving America's success has been its unparalleled scientific leadership.”
The best demo anyone's ever done, or will ever do
“At Facebook's F8 conference, head of product Chris Cox warmed my heart by talking at length about the "mother of all demos," the astonishing presentation which Douglas Engelbart gave at a San Francisco computing conference in 1968. Engelbart, best known today as the inventor of the mouse, showed his pointing device; a graphical user interface with windows; word processing; video conferencing; and other technologies which were mind-bending in the 1960s and which only became mainstream in the 1980s and beyond.”
Engelbart on Improving Improvement
“Doug’s vision for improving improvement to better tackle complex, urgent problems is to many his most significant contribution.”
These unknowns created the world's most important technologies
“If Doug Engelbart did not invent the Internet, he was there for its inception. According to ITworld, he received the first transmission on Web predecessor ARPANET. More critically, he invented the mouse that we all use to navigate the screens of our computers - genius move.”
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.'”
Creative AI: On the Democratisation & Escalation of Creativity
“Engelbart did not only provide a vision of interacting with a computer system, but he had a guiding philosophy. He believed that computers can be used to create an extension for the ways we do thinking, representation and association in our minds... not just to automate processes but to multiply the power of people and collaborators by creating systems that augment our intellect, humanity and creativity. His goal was to raise the human potential.”