Computer industry inventor and thinker Douglas Engelbart dies - July 2013

Augmenting Human Intellect
http://www.1962paper.org/web.html

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/

Douglas “Doug” Engelbart, a legendary American inventor and computing icon who invented the computer mouse and helped develop much of the modern PC user interface, passed away last night, according to family sources.

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

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.

Engelbart's philosophy:

Engelbart's career was inspired in 1951 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals beyond getting a good education and a decent job.[citation needed] Over several months he reasoned that:

1. he would focus his career on making the world a better place;
2. any serious effort to make the world better requires some kind of organized effort;
3. harnessing the collective human intellect of all the people contributing to effective solutions was the key;
4. if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems — the sooner the better; and
5. computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.

http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/07/doug-engelbart-passes-away.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307

NY Times obit

Influence on Doug Engelbart

--> Vannevar Bush

Yesterday, July 2, 2013, I began reading a used book that I bought five to eight years ago. The book is titled "HyperText and HyperMedia" by Jakob Nielsen of useit.com fame. The book, however, was published in 1990. Yesterday in the book, I read about Vannevar Bush and his 1945 idea called Memex (memory extender).

From The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 As We May Think

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

AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK By Douglas C. Engelbart October 1962

May 24, 1962 letter from Douglas C. Engelbart to Dr. Vannevar Bush

Program On Human Effectiveness by Doug Engelbart.

See also Doug's Abstract for his talk at this 1995 Bush Symposium for a glimpse into how his thinking evolved vis-a-vis Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think".

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

The web was developed between March 1989 and December 1990.

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

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, proposed and later prototyped a new hypertext project in response to a request for a simple, immediate, information-sharing facility, to be used among physicists working at CERN and other academic institutions. He called the project "WorldWideWeb".

In 1992, Lynx was born as an early Internet web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the Web on the Internet.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/july/dougEngelbart

He was one of my heroes, and in addition to all the other things he pioneered, he was the first to do an outliner, years before I learned how to program computers.

I met Englebart a number of times, we talked about augmenting intellect, outliners, how to develop software.

He was a real computer genius. His accomplishments and contributions are a foundation for all that we do with computers today.

http://scripting.com/davenet/2000/10/06/dinnerWithDougEngelbart.html

It may appear that the outliner approach is narrow, but I don't think it is. I think outliners mirror what's going on in our brains, they reflect the way we organize ideas, concepts and information. I told Engelbart that our success with outliners came with people who understood the process of thinking. Everyone thinks, but only a few are aware of how they do it. This requires a higher level of awareness. First we have to turn on their lights again, after a hiatus of quite a few years. Then I want to figure out how make the tool useful for people who aren't aware of their process, the way MORE did in the 80s, by sneaking it in, in the guise of a presentation program.

http://scripting.com/davenet/2000/11/30/bootstrapping.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517341/douglas-engelbarts-unfinished-revolution/

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/html/info/vannevar_bush.html
#technology #history