A Machine for Thinking: How Douglas Engelbart Predicted the Future of Computing

To me, it's sad that Engelbart is best known for that demo, the mouse,and so forth. Those of us who knew and worked with him at the beginning of this century knew him to be of a different mindset: yes it was about human augmentation, but not by mice and windows, but rather as networked social systems he called capability infrastructures. To him, it was all about the "coevolution of human and tool systems".

Little known fact: SRI- yes, Doug's lab - has an employee who trains you in the proper way to use a mouse, owing to the RSI effects of poor posture when using it. It's not the mice and windows, it's how you work together and network your findings. NICs he called them: networked improvement communities.

You saw the seeds of that in the 1968 MOAD when the screen shows not just the document he is co-editing with Bill English, but a video image of English himself. MOAD was not Engelbart's whole story; it was just the beginning.