42 Facts About Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer.

At both Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas, Engelbart was limited by a lack of interest in his ideas and funding to pursue them and retired in 1986.

In December 2008, Douglas Engelbart was honored by SRI at the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos".

Douglas Engelbart's ancestors were of German, Swedish and Norwegian descent.

Douglas Engelbart was the middle of three children, with a sister Dorianne, and a brother David.

Douglas Engelbart graduated from Portland's Franklin High School in 1942.

Douglas Engelbart returned to Oregon State and completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948.

Douglas Engelbart was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Ames Research Center, where he worked in wind tunnel maintenance.

Douglas Engelbart's career was inspired in December 1950 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals other than "a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after".

In 1945, Douglas Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", a call to action for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge.

Douglas Engelbart had read something about the recent phenomenon of computers, and from his experience as a radar technician, he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen.

Douglas Engelbart envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display "working stations", flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways.

Douglas Engelbart then formed a startup company, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctoral research on storage devices, but after a year decided instead to pursue the research he had been dreaming of since 1951.

Douglas Engelbart took a position at SRI International in Menlo Park, California in 1957.

Douglas Engelbart worked for Hewitt Crane on magnetic devices and miniaturization of electronics; Engelbart and Crane became close friends.

At SRI, Douglas Engelbart soon obtained a dozen patents, and by 1962 produced a report about his vision and proposed research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

Douglas Engelbart recruited a research team in his new Augmentation Research Center.

Douglas Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy".

Douglas Engelbart designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab.

Douglas Engelbart conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most computers were inaccessible to individuals who could only use computers through intermediaries, and when software tended to be written for vertical applications in proprietary systems.

Douglas Engelbart applied for a patent in 1967 and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels, which he had developed with Bill English, his lead engineer, sometime before 1965.

Douglas Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end.

Douglas Engelbart's group called the on-screen Cursor a "bug", but this term was not widely adopted.

Douglas Engelbart never received any royalties for the invention of the mouse.

Douglas Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer.

Tymshare took over NLS and the lab that Douglas Engelbart had founded, hired most of the lab's staff, renamed the software Augment, and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division.

Various executives, first at Tymshare and later at McDonnell Douglas Engelbart, which acquired Tymshare in 1984, expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them.

In 2005, Douglas Engelbart received a National Science Foundation grant to fund the open source HyperScope project.

Douglas Engelbart attended the Program for the Future 2010 Conference where hundreds of people convened at The Tech Museum in San Jose and online to engage in dialog about how to pursue his vision to augment collective intelligence.

Douglas Engelbart's book is being republished by the Doug Douglas Engelbart Institute.

Douglas Engelbart served on the Advisory Boards of the University of Santa Clara Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Foresight Institute, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, The Technology Center of Silicon Valley, and The Liquid Information Company.

Douglas Engelbart had four children, Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman with his first wife Ballard, who died in 1997 after 47 years of marriage.

Douglas Engelbart remarried on January 26,2008, to writer and producer Karen O'Leary Engelbart.

Douglas Engelbart died at his home in Atherton, California, on July 2,2013, due to kidney failure.

Douglas Engelbart was 88 and was survived by his second wife, the four children from his first marriage, and nine grandchildren.

Bardini points out that Douglas Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Douglas Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies.

Douglas Engelbart thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work.

Douglas Engelbart was inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998.

Douglas Engelbart was awarded The Franklin Institute's Certificate of Merit in 1996 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1999 in Computer and Cognitive Science.

On December 9,2008, Douglas Engelbart was honored at the 40th Anniversary celebration of the 1968 "Mother of All Demos".

Douglas Engelbart received the first honorary Doctor of Engineering and Technology degree from Yale University in May 2011.