| Engelbart, Douglas
Jan. 30, 1925
near Portland, Oregon, U.S.
American inventor whose work beginning in the 1950s led
to his patent for the computer mouse, the
development of the basic graphical user interface, and
groupware.
Engelbart grew up on a farm near Portland. Following
two years of enlisted service as a radar technician for
the U.S. Navy in World War II, he completed his
bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Oregon
State University in 1948. He soon became dissatisfied
with his electrical engineering job at the Ames Research
Center, located in Moffett Field, California, and in
December 1950 had the inspiration that would drive the
rest of his professional life.
Engelbart's dream was to use computers to connect
individuals in a network that would allow them to share
and update information in "real time." He
combined this idea of collaborative software, or
groupware, with his experience interpreting radar
displays and with ideas he gleaned from an Atlantic
Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, "As We May
Think," to envision networked computers employing a
graphical user interface. After receiving a Ph.D. in
electrical engineering from the University of California
at Berkeley in 1955, he stayed on as an acting assistant
professor for a year before accepting a position with
the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Stanford,
California.
In 1963 Engelbart was given funding by SRI to start
his own research laboratory, the Augmentation Research
Center, where he worked on inventing and perfecting
various devices--such as the computer mouse , the
multiple window display, and hypermedia (the linking of
texts, images, video, and sound files within a single
document)--for inputting, manipulating, and displaying
data. Together with a colleague at SRI, William English,
he eventually perfected a variety of input
devices--including joysticks, light pens, and track
balls--that are now common. Prior to Engelbart's
inventions, laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or
manually set electronic switches were necessary to
control computers, and data had to be printed before it
could be viewed. His work made it possible for ordinary
people to use computers.
Early in 1967 Engelbart's laboratory became the
second site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network (ARPANET), the primary precursor to the
Internet. On December 9, 1968, at a computer
conference in San Francisco, Engelbart demonstrated a
working real-time collaborative computer system
known as NLS (oNLine System). Using NLS, he and English
(back at Stanford) worked on a shared document in one
window (using keyboard and mouse input devices) while at
the same time conducting the world's first public computer
video conference in another window. Engelbart continued
his research, building increasingly sophisticated input
and display devices and improving the graphical user
interface, but because of budget cuts at SRI most of his
research staff migrated to other institutions such as
Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center in Palo
Alto, California.
In 1977 SRI sold Engelbart's NLS groupware system to
Tymshare, Incorporated, a telephone networking company
that renamed it Augment and sought to make it into a
commercially viable office automation system. As the
last remaining member of his research laboratory, and
with SRI showing no further interest in his work,
Engelbart joined Tymshare. In 1984 Tymshare was acquired
by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where Engelbart
worked on information systems. In 1989 he founded the
Bootstrap Institute, a research and consulting firm.
Over the following decade he finally began to receive
recognition for his innovations, including the 1997
Turing Award, a major achievement in computer
science.
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