Douglas C. Engelbart

Inventor of the computer mouse

• Born: January 30, 1925
• Birthplace: Portland, Oregon
• Died: July 2, 2013
• Place of death: Atherton, California

Primary Company/Organization: Stanford Research Institute

Introduction

Douglas C. Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, but his life's work focused on using computing systems to support organizations as “augmented knowledge workshops” using “online systems,” the combination of tools such as e-mail, video conferencing, networking, and hypertext to advance organizations and cross-organizational efforts. He pioneered such tools to advance organizational transformation; his firsts include display editing, windows, cross-file editing, outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. He was also the founder of the Bootstrap Institute, later known as the Doug Engelbart Institute, which is dedicated to deploying technology to solve complex human problems.

Early Life

Born 1925 in Oregon, Douglas Carl Engelbart grew up on a small farm near Portland, Oregon, during the Great Depression. After high school graduation in 1942, he attended Oregon State College (now Oregon State University), majoring in electrical engineering. During World War II, he spent two years in the U.S. Navy in the Philippines as an electronic/radar technician. While in the Navy, he read Vannevar Bush's groundbreaking 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think,” in which Bush introduced the hypothetical information storage and retrieval machine known as the memex. After the war, Engelbart returned to school, earning his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948.

After his undergraduate work, Engelbart began working as an electrical engineer at Ames Laboratory in San Francisco for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the progenitor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA). Engelbart left NACA in 1951, became engaged to be married, and began to assess and develop his life goals. He did not like the idea of spending 5.5 million seconds (his working life to age sixty) simply working at a job and supporting his family. Instead, he deliberately and consciously set himself the goal of contributing positively to the world and humankind, and he concluded that harnessing human potential could be greatly facilitated through the use of computers. At that time, he recognized the huge, untapped potential of computers to improve human effort and the human condition; he focused his interests on how computers and their human users interact. He began to visualize people in front of computer screens accessing cyberspace, developing and organizing ideas rapidly and easily. These dreams anticipate the Internet and the World Wide Web.

After this epiphany about computing, Engelbart enrolled in the graduate school of electrical engineering at the University of California in Berkeley, from which he earned his Ph.D. in 1955. His graduate work would result in several patents. He then taught at Berkeley a year before moving to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1957.

Life's Work

By the 1960s, Engelbart was inventing significant computer products: groupware, hypertext, and onscreen windows with menus. In 1963 came his most significant invention, the computer mouse. The original mouse, developed with Bill English, was carved from wood and was so named because of the wire (tail) connecting it to the computer. SRI patented the mouse and (since Engelbart had developed it as an employee); as a result, Engelbart and English received no royalties for their invention.

It had two wheels perpendicular to each other, attached to an analog device that plotted location of the wheels on an x-y axis; the analog device was housed in the wooden shell and wired to a workstation. Engelbart also referred to the device as “peripheral”: “If I were designing a car, the mouse was just a windshield wiper.” In fact, the mouse became the steering wheel. Although SRI owned the patent, it failed to recognize the value of the mouse, licensing it to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Apple for lifetime fees of merely $45,000 each. Other licenses earned even less. The patent lasted from 1970 to 1987, expiring just as the mouse became ubiquitous, so there were no royalties at all for the millions sold after 1987. For Engelbart, video teleconferencing and the early precursor to the Internet were more important.

Engelbart developed his ideas of human-computer interaction for raising collective organizational IQ until 1963, when he finally got the chance to establish the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. He created the mouse, help menus, and indeed many if not most of the basic interactive systems of modern computing. ARC funding ended in 1977, and Engelbart was unable to find funding from a private sector unable to understand what he was trying to accomplish. In 1996, he was able to partner with Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications to realize his idea of bootstrapping: feeding back results to make the next iteration faster and easier. That reality involved organizations dialoguing and tracking the dialogue to build a cross-referenced knowledge base. Practical needs and abstract intellectual concepts alike belonged in the knowledge base. The effort was available to all who used Netscape's web browser and Sun's Java. Eventually, every PC would be able to access the data.

On December 9, 1968, Engelbart, still at the Stanford Research Institute, unveiled the SRI team's latest inventions at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in what has been dubbed the Mother of All Demos. With Bill English and the SRI team, Engelbart took an hour and a half to demonstrate the mouse, e-mail, word processing, cut-and-paste functions, hypertext, and video conferencing. For the first time, the world at large began to understand the potential of a computer network and the possibilities offered by human-computer interaction. Attendance at the demonstration was more than one thousand people, who at that time focused on Engelbart's now primitive black-and-white images on a 22-inch television screen.

Engelbart called his interactive functions the oN-Line System (NLS), which he envisioned to be an integrated system that would allow collaborating and bootstrapping for continual enhancement of human intellect and the human world. NLS was to provide a new way of thinking about how people learn, work, and live with one another. Engelbart and his team were at one of the first two Internet nodes. Before Engelbart, computers were stand-alone, giant machines, devoted mainly to mathematical and scientific calculations; some saw them mainly as glorified, efficient adding machines. Engelbart and the SRI team showed how computers could be much more: facilitating human communication, for example. However, Engelbart recognized and would persist in believing that the hardware and software were secondary to the potential of a galvanized human community acting together through the technology; he saw technology as serving, not dominating, human endeavor.

In November 1969, Engelbart received the first packets transmitted by Vinton Cerf and his team over the ARPANET (the precursor of the Internet) from the University of California, Los Angeles (the first node of the later Internet) to SRI (the second node). Networked computing was old hat even then for Engelbart, who had been contemplating nets as early as 1951, when there were not even two dozen computers in existence.

On the fortieth anniversary of the NLS, Stanford and the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose held commemorations. Andries van Dam of Brown University said that he was overwhelmed at the time about the massive capacity for self-improvement in recurrent cycles that refined with each iteration, made the group smarter for the next iteration, and made the tools more useful the next time through. It was a continuous process. In the forty years since, the true integrated system had fallen by the wayside because of the need to dumb down links and the loss of intellectual curiosity and knowledge of historical context. Rather than becoming smarter and better, computer geeks were locking themselves into smaller and smaller compartments, cut off from one another and from the broader world.

Engelbart, despite his prominence in the technological world, had higher priorities. His goal was to make humanity more adept at dealing with problems that may not have solutions. The computer is a tool for handling complexity, allowing people to use their brains more effectively. If it does that, it is more important than bronze or the printing press, according to Engelbart. In practice, Engelbart helped companies become more adept at coping with change, ever increasing and ever more complex change. Engelbart talked of a capability infrastructure: core competencies, workers, customers, facilities, whatever allows the business to function. This is where most managers spend their time and energies: developing organization, procedures, and human resources. More important to Engelbart was improvement of infrastructure, which gets neglected in times of rapid change. Engelbart also talked of a, b, and c activities, with a referring to the activities that directly apply to a business, b referring to activities to improve a activities, and c referring to activities that improve the improvement method. The c activities are the critical ones, yet they are the most likely to be forgotten.

C activities include more efficient knowledge transfer within the organization, better selection and operation of pilot programs, and so on. Tools for improving c activities include internal websites, databases, and data warehouses. Engelbart was working on intranets in the 1960s and at Tymshare (later owned by McDonnell Douglas) used intranet capability to integrate computing and communications. Technology makes people smarter by creating those lessons, databases, and collections of collective experience. However, technology alone does not solve the problem; Engelbart said that the neglected aspect is still the human. He was talking about basic quality circles in the 1990s. People had to be empowered to use the lessons learned, amplify them, act on them, and make decisions. Rather than project groups, task forces, and technology, businesses had to be communities.

Personal Life

Although after 1976 Engelbart fell into relative obscurity, in 1997 he finally achieved recognition and succeeded financially when he won the Lemelson-MIT Prize for invention, which included an award of half a million dollars. The Lemelson-MIT, established by inventor Jerome H. Lemelson in 1994, is the largest cash award for American inventors. His goal remained to make human effort smarter by using technology to promote collaboration: computers, networks, and hypermedia. That goal remains the chief aim of the Doug Engelbart Institute, the think tank in Atherton, Calfornia, that Engelbart established in 1988 with his daughter Christina.

After retirement, Engelbart remained in the Bay Area near his four children and nine grandchildren. His wife, Ballard, died in 1997 (the same year he won the Lemelson-MIT Prize) after forty-seven years of marriage. In 2008 he married writer and producer Karen O'Leary. He died at home in 2013 of kidney failure, having lived for some years with Alzheimer's disease.

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