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Comment by ux266478 | Hacker News Reader

People talk about Apple stealing from Xerox, but what you may not know is that Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI left shortly after this demo and took everything to Xerox without him. The man spent the rest of his career being swept into gutters, never got any recognition until the early 2000s at the very end of his life. It's a really tragic tale.

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That's factually incorrect. Engelbart was recognized as the man that started it all by plenty of people in the industry, to the point the Logitech (a Swiss company, go figure) allocated him a an office for his Bootstrap Institute just because they thought it was the right thing to do.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/07/23/177246/douglas-e...

Anybody in the industry knows who Engelbart is and his name recognition is close to 100% in the circles where it matters. Between him and my late friend at Logitech they changed the world of personal computing.

But neither Engelbart or my friend were much on the 'cult of personality' and that is one reason their names are not 'household names' but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are. I think that makes them nicer people, for not seeking that.

Interesting, that much isn't common knowledge. I was only aware of the struggles he had at Time Share and later obscure research foundations. It's good to know his name mattered in important places, that kind of stuff often doesn't filter down to us on the outside.

Neither Logitech nor Engelbart sought the spotlight on this but if you search for a bit I'm sure you'll be able to dig up references to it. Engelbart and the Logitech founders were what every techbro should aspire to: modest, capable and with very good ethics.

I think it's reasonable to think that he deserved more recognition.

But I also recall attending a Techcrunch party at Mike Arringtons house in 2006/7 or so that Engelbart showed up at briefly, and how fun it was to see him instantly surrounded like a celebrity, so I think you're righ he was recognised in the circles where it mattered.

> I think it's reasonable to think that he deserved more recognition.

That I will definitely agree with.

Well, sort of. I mean, yeah he deserved to be praised, but the reason half the SRI staff left to go to Xerox is that Engelbart and his people were becoming obsessed with EST training. EST is basically a cult that starves you, insults you until you cry, then builds you back up with compliments while asking you to pay up front for the next sucker in your family to take the "training." It's about as close as you can get to a cult while still being a business. Engelbart and his closest people were basically forcing SRI workers to take EST training, and they did't like it so they left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training

Do you have a source for this?

Edit: found this comment from hn a few years back with a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584517

It is a sad ending, but Engelbart's software had an incredibly bad UI. The manuals are still online from the company he went to, Timesharing Systems, if I recall. The Xerox document model was the winning idea which was licensed to Apple and not stolen (Jobs and Gates were both invited to tour PARC).

Personally I'm skeptical it wasn't just a product of context. The Xerox document model was logical, in a world that still heavily relied on paper. Having an abstraction that seamlessly interoperated with the century of information storage that preceded it is a no-brainer. In today's world where paper is becoming increasingly rarer, and much work has been done in digitizing that mountain of documents? I'm not so sure. And I think Engelbart was focused on that future, rather than the 30-year transition period that would end up happening.

It's not to say that the specific implementations Engelbart was working with were good. But I'd point to Plan 9 from Bell Labs as a kind of hybrid between Douglas Engelbart's vision and what Xerox produced. It's a little alien, but relatively easy to learn, and at least conceptually it shows that an unstructured UI made up of hypertext and windows can be quite nice to use. When that's integrated with the primary IPC mechanism of the operating system, which also happens to be the filesystem, you end up with an intense synergy that's hard not to be delighted by. I don't think it was possible to avoid computers becoming digital filing cabinets, but I also don't think we should write off moving beyond this era at some point. There is a large, underexplored dark wood. I am very interested in what lives inside. I think revisiting Engelbart's ideas of human augmentation with a prolog-based system like the Japanese Fifth Gen Computer project has extremely promising implications.

"Well, Steve, it's like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox. I broke into his house to steal the TV set, only to find out you had already stolen it."

-Bill Gates

Tragic indeed. This has always been a tough business. Apple, Xerox, Facebook, OpenAI…

My understanding is that the GUI designers from Xerox also went to work for Apple specifically to bring their concepts to life because Xerox wasn't interested... if the original devs willfully jumped ship to Apple, and were the ones who actually did the work, then did Apple really steal it?

Along the same lines...

Apple was founded because HP didn't want Woz's ideas for what became the Apple I.

Fortunately, Jobs thought he could sell it.

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