Doug Engelbart: The Visionary Who Shaped the Future of Computing
“Though his contributions weren’t immediately recognized by the broader tech world, Engelbart’s legacy has only grown with time. From the rise of the personal computer to the dawn of the internet, the seeds he planted continue to bear fruit. His pioneering ideas have influenced tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, and his vision of a connected world is now our everyday reality.”
See also more articles from SteamRocket
Beyond the Mouse: Douglas Engelbart‘s Visionary NLS System
“As we face the complex challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to social inequality to global health crises, the need for tools and frameworks that can help us work together to solve problems is more pressing than ever. Engelbart‘s vision of augmenting human intellect offers a compelling roadmap for how we might use technology to tap into our collective wisdom and creativity.”
Douglas Engelbart - Inventing the 21st Century
In this Podcast, “we look back to the man who wanted to augment human intelligence to help us work together to solve the world's most complex problems, and in doing so invented the 21st Century. How do we get smart enough to solve the really difficult problems? Douglas Engelbart said "the better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better" where our problem-solving abilities are constantly improved, and therefore so is everything we do!"
See also Avail Formats | Show Notes
Extended Mind interview with Donald Clark
“In this episode of Great Minds on Learning, John Helmer interviews Donald Clark exploring The Extended Mind. Where do our thoughts live? And if, as some theorists contend, they do not observe physical limitations, but extends to our technology tools and physical surroundings, what are the implications for learning?” Includes Great Mind Doug Engelbart's vision on collective intelligence.
See also: Episode Notes | Detail: Learning Theorists | Detail: Engelbart on Collective IQ
A Machine for Thinking: How Douglas Engelbart Predicted the Future of Computing
“More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the "Mother of All Demos" that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since.” See Also: About the Hidden Heroes Series
Improvement communities
“Improving the way we improve is a collective effort with exponential rewards. But why have so few industries embraced it?”
See companion article Collective IQ and Continuous Improvement
Collective IQ and Continuous Improvement
“How do you harness the collective intelligence of a group, solve difficult problems, and share what you learn?”
An excellent distillation and synthesis of Doug Engelbart's driving vision for navigating accelerating change. See companion article Improvement communities
Augmenting the Learning Dialogue Online
A Q&A with Gardner Campbell “We've heard a lot lately about moving the remote learning experience farther away from a training model and closer to a collaborative learning model in which students participate together in the co-creation or discovery of knowledge.
As far back as the 1960s, alongside the work of Doug Engelbart, people have dreamed about ways to augment the knowledge worker, the researcher, the scholar, the faculty, and the student... Today, a conversation about how to do that ”
The Click Heard around the World
“On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute hosted a session at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in which he used the first computer mouse to sweep through a demonstration that became the blueprint for modern computing.”
Related Articles: Tech Suport | How design factored into “the mother of all tech demos”
"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 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?”
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.”
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."
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 ]
Engelbart on Improving Improvement
“Doug’s vision for improving improvement to better tackle complex, urgent problems is to many his most significant contribution.”
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.
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.
An Homage to Douglas Engelbart and a Critique of the State of Tech
“Theodor Holm Nelson, a thorn in the side of the computing establishment, took his critique to Shakespearean levels in a eulogy for his friend Douglas Engelbart.”
See also the Tribute Event where Ted spoke.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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
Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues
“For internetworked organizations [...] there’s also a robust body of proven practices that reminds us how to accelerate our capacity for innovation as a group of people. Many of the basic principles for “bootstrapping innovation” among people who are working together online (and offline) to address complex issues were invented and practiced by Doug Engelbart. [...] At our recent Visionaries’ meeting, Christina Engelbart, Doug’s daughter, reminded us that her father’s life work revolved around helping groups of people tackle really complex issues.”
Celebrating the man who invented the mouse
“The mouse was merely a byproduct of Engelbart's larger vision, said his daughter, Christina Engelbart [...] "That was what the public recognizes as a great innovation that's really had a huge impact on everyone. But truly his greatest innovation of all was the vision and the strategic organizing principles that catapulted the innovation of his lab and that could catapult the work today if it was applied and harnessed in teams and organizations” Watch the Stanford News Report
Education, Information Technologies, and the Augmentation of Human Intellect
“Capturing a moment in which participatory culture offered a glimpse of ways in which creation, communication, reflection, and awareness might be part of the same complex web of activity, a kind of mindfulness that would gain purpose and direction from opportunities for creation and sharing. That mindfulness would not happen automatically. [...] But participatory culture within environments rich with integrated domains and structures encouraging reflection and mindfulness can set up all sorts of lovely feedback loops, reciprocalities, and serendipitous encounters.”