Doug Englebart

Biography

Douglas Carl Engelbart (30 January 1925 – 2 July 2013) was an American engineer and inventor whose research group produced, in a single decade, most of the components of modern interactive computing.

Trained in electrical engineering at Oregon State, he served as a radar technician in the Philippines during the Second World War, where he read Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" (1945) — the encounter he described as decisive. He took a doctorate at Berkeley in 1955 and joined SRI (Stanford Research Institute), where he founded the Augmentation Research Center (ARC).

Augmenting Human Intellect

Engelbart's 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is the statement of purpose behind everything that followed. Its argument is that the problems facing humanity are growing in complexity faster than human capacity to address them, and that the correct response is not artificial intelligence — building machines that think instead of us — but augmentation: raising the collective capability of people working on hard problems.

Two ideas from it remain underused. The first is the H-LAM/T system — Human using Language, Artifacts and Methodology, in which he is Trained — Engelbart's insistence that a capability is a property of the whole system, and that changing the artifact without changing the language, method and training yields little. The second is bootstrapping: applying the improvement process to the improvement process itself, so that the tools for building better tools get better.

The Mother of All Demos

On 9 December 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart gave a 90-minute live demonstration of the NLS (oN-Line System) that has since been called the Mother of All Demos. In one session, to an audience of about a thousand, it showed: the mouse, windows, hypertext links, real-time collaborative document editing with two people working in the same file, outline processing with view control, video conferencing with a shared screen, version control, context-sensitive help, and dynamic file linking — most of it running on a machine in Menlo Park thirty miles away.

Almost nothing in the demonstration existed anywhere else. Much of it took another twenty-five years to become ordinary, and some of it — genuinely fluid real-time co-editing with view control, the view being separable from the document — is arguably still not.

The Mouse

Engelbart invented it with Bill English around 1963–64 as a comparative study of pointing devices; the patent, filed 1967 and granted 1970, describes an "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was one item in a much larger programme, and Engelbart was consistently ambivalent about being remembered for the smallest part of it. He also considered the mouse a transitional device, and continued to advocate the chord keyset — a five-key one-handed input device used alongside a keyboard — on the grounds that expert users should be able to trade learning time for speed. See mobile text entry for the same argument in a different setting.

Recognition

Engelbart received the ACM Turing Award in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology in 2000. Funding for ARC was withdrawn in the 1970s and the group dispersed, many of its members to Xerox PARC, where the graphical interface was developed into the form the industry adopted.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Engelbart is the clearest historical case of someone who understood the object of design as the human–machine–method system rather than the machine. His augmentation programme is the direct intellectual ancestor of the claim that cognition is distributed across people and their tools — and his career is also a lesson in how much of a vision survives commercialisation, which in his case was the pointing device and not the point.

Related Reading

• Ted Nelson
• Designing Interactions
• PARC Research
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Extended Self
• Norbert Wiener