Doug Engelbart has died

Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk.

At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Institute and had a conference. So few people showed up that we held it in the same little church. We thought, given the implications for such things as life extension, that it was pretty funny to have the speakers literally preaching from the pulpit with the listeners sitting in the church pews. Christine was in the church kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was the conference lunch banquet. A PBJ, a banana, and a napkin in a paper bag.

I picked up my brown bag and walked into the small inner courtyard to sit. An older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life. I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something he'd seen again and again.

I kept thinking that he looked familiar. I introduced myself. He stuck out his hand: "I'm Doug."

I think that what most inspires me about Dr. Engelbart was not so much the physical manifestations of his work, although these were incredible, decades ahead of their time, and in some ways still not matched, but rather the philosophy that he used to guide his work.

It was his goal of greatly increasing the abilities of an individual human, as well as increasing the ability of groups of people to work together towards a goal that will remain timeless and inspirational long after everything he created has entered the realm of the pedestrian.

Ultimately, most of the problems we face on the planet are of human origin, and even for those that aren't the solution will need to be created by us as well. As a meta-machine, a machine that can embody and or imitate almost all other mediums, the computer offers a unique opportunity to augment and enhance the reach of humanity.

As the last few weeks have shown us, this reach can be extended in a negative fashion, and can be used to complicate the problems we already face.

But Doug Engelbart saw the other side of the coin, that the computer can be used to free and uplift us, and help us come together like never before. He saw this earlier than most and he pursued it further than most. And so we can follow along in his wake and add our efforts to his, and to the greater goal of extending humanity in a positive direction.

I'll finish by encouraging everyone reading this to take a few minutes now, and perhaps every few days from here on out to think about what efforts we can each make towards furthering Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goals. Not in the spirit of guilt or of shame, but instead as an inspiration. If one man, guided by a vision of using the computer to positively affect the course of human development, can accomplish this much in a few decades, how much further could we get with each of us working as well? I hope to do what I can, and I thank Douglas Engelbart for his efforts to help guide my way.

If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in 1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...

Edit: link had been to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY but a user below posted this archive.org link which is better. Thanks, mxfh!

He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon." ( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart )

I'm just going to imagine that he's running in the background with no terminal attached.

Anyone who works in interactive computing should be familiar with Doug Engelbart's work.

Years ago, at one of the first conferences on interactive computer, after people spent all day presenting their new work, Andy van Dam--builder of the first hypertext system with Ted Nelson who named it--stood up and said "you should all be ashamed that you don't know your history. Doug Engelbart invented almost everything presented here years ago." And he was right.

I hope a lot of you are watching The Mother of All Demos http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt.... But it's worth reading and understanding the reasons why Doug was working on all of this.

Doug and his crew at SRI had the goal of "human augmentation". Everyone else at the forefront of the computer industry thought we'd have general AI by the 1970s. They instead believed that GAI wasn't within reach. They believed that the things we wanted to build and accomplish as a society weren't doable with the communication tools we had.

They had the idea that computers could be tools to help individuals work. Since computers were multi-million dollar calculating machines, the idea that people would have a computer at their desk and that they'd help us to communicate and manage information was beyond-out-there.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

But after leaving Engelbart's group at SRI, lots of his team joined PARC and built the modern GUI and networking.

For a history of the details, I highly recommend reading Markoff's What the Dormouse Said http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers...

[Bonus: If you like Engelbart's MOAD, also watch Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo.]

I only tend to comment about once-a-year on HN, but it would be impossible not to say something about Doug and the impact he's had on our world.

Edit: Sutherland's Sketchpad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

Doug was the Albert Einstein of our field.

Oral history for people who want to learn more about him:

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...

Engelbart was perhaps the most important influence in realizing the computer as an interactive medium.

Around 1960, most were still thinking of the computer as a sophisticated calculator. You give it a problem, it spits out an answer. Even the idea of artificial intelligence was framed this way.

Engelbart realized the potential of the computer to augment human intelligence. High bandwidth, continuous interaction between human and computer allows the computer to be an extension of the mind. Chasing this vision led him and his team to naturally invent the mouse, bitmapped screens, hypertext, networked computers, etc.

IMO, more important than these individual inventions is Engelbart's foundational principle that technologies change what the mind is capable of thinking. And by augmenting our thinking, we enable ourselves to create new technologies. Mind and technology co-evolve. This is "bootstrapping" in the purest sense and the source of that profound feeling many of us have experienced while augmenting our minds through programming and other rich, creative interactions with computers.

I believe a black bar at the top of Hacker News is in order.

A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written by one of Engelbart's team.

It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain what word-processing did for text.

It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss interested, and I moved on.

Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called?

Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never thought I could google that, today of all days.

> Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI, theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but were unusual in those days.

Sadly, the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural is becoming less and less automatic and natural as people put things in walled gardens using weird non-standard rapidly-changing protocols and close access to anyone not using The Official Client.

For anyone who is not sure who he was check this out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I enjoyed reading many years ago:

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Pe...

Email here: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.h...

Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation.

Do people not read the links they upmod?

This source doesn't state that he's died. This just seems to be completely unsubstantiated at this point, especially as there's no mention of this anywhere else.

Like others on here have posted. Doug's true worth was not in the innovations he procured or the things he built, but rather what he saw as the future of computing, humanity, and technology. The way he was able to reach into the future and pull out the best bits, and then execute was something that not many innovators can claim to. The ideas that were built at SRI are nothing short of legendary, and the core principles still carry on.

It may be a bit sad to think that so many don't know his name, blindly believing the mouse was invented by Xerox, that the Internet was invented by Tim-Berners Lee, but in the end, does it really matter? To Doug, all that mattered was being visionary and helping people. It would do good for all of us here at HN to follow his example. Humans only get one shot, and Dr. Doug Engelbart nailed it.

P.S., thanks PG for the black topbar. A fitting sign of respect for a very great man.

I hope this gets a few more articles: Doug Englebart is far more of an influence on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was, even if he's less known.

He was one of the keynotes at a conference I attended out in the Valley in the early nineties. Tremendously inspiring guy and a much better speaker than a lot of tech people.

What I remember from that day was that he was very, very humble with a great sense of humor.

He was truly one of those Xerox Parc giants upon whose shoulders our entire industry rests upon.

Doug Engelbart has been a huge inspiration to me even though I never met him. I'm amazed at how much his group at SRI was able to accomplish. I think his vision - augmenting human intellect to help solve the world's complex problems - is still a vision worth sharing. Doug did help change the world, and I'll remember him for it.

From the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs:

>>>Two other occasional visitors were high school students Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who hung out at SAIL [Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory], with an older friend, Allen Baum, who was working at the laboratory during the fall of 1970. Jobs later said that the “vibrations” he felt at SAIL would stay with him his entire life. The bewitched Wozniak rode his bike up to the laboratory from his home in Los Altos, and he later said that his experiences there contributed to his hunger for his own computer.

SAIL was one of the core places of the computing revolution, from which The Mother of All Demos by Doug Engelbart was spawned. That demo happened in 1968, when Jobs was twelve or thirteen, and influenced everything that came afterwards in computing.

Doug - The energy and light of your vision and inspiration still burns bright, still ignites, still guides...

http://Collaborapologist.com/ http://CommunityOfImpact.info

Thanks, Doug

A friend - Sam

Nothing sad about well liked person, who accomplished a lot, dying at age 88. He won. RIP Doug Engelbart.

I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the future. I hold him in very fond memories.

Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain to be realized.

The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely connected.

It's amazing that he was working on augmentation already in 1962.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV Interview... amazing stuff http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011

Sad to hear he is gone. I got to talk him at one of the Computer History Fellow awards ceremonies and was struck by how clearly he thought about things. He will be missed.

Obligatory link to 'The Mother of All Demos': http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs

Mother of All Demos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY ... It is really amazing how he conceived all these in 1968 (45 years ago!). If you think about it, what we have today is just putting on a pretty UI on top of all these concepts. We hardly moved for those innovation breakthroughs that he demoed.

One thing that strikes me really odd from the demo of the mouse, is how nervous and worried he looks. I mean I can understand the concept of computers were so foreign until people got use to it. I think he was really intimidated by the culture of people being close minded to things they don't understand.(I thing progress was more of a liability.)

To my embarrassment, I didn't really know much about Doug Engelbart until Brett Victor brought him up in one of his excellent talks (Inventing on Principle). I quite like his eulogy: http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

Without Douglas Engelbart, none of the personal computing tech we have today would have been even this remotely far ahead. He was the first person to believe in the Personal Computer.

He got to pass on after seeing his vision come to life. It must have been an amazing experience for him.

He lived a life worth living and died accomplishing so much, this should be a motivation to us all to pursue our dreams and goals and make the most of it because this just proves how short life is no matter how great you are, death is the destination we all share.

If you are an IxD or UX guy, you really owe it to yourself to read "Designing interactions" by Bill Moggridge. In it, Doug Engelbart is interviewed for an entire chapter regarding how he and some other guys designed the mouse. Very interesting stuff.

From Wikipedia article: "...after 1976 ... Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer."

Go figure! A true visionary... He will be missed for sure.

Black bar ?

Waiting for Google to have a doodle about him tomorrow.

What a remarkable life!

R.I.P. Mr. Engelbart.

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Click.