Doug Engelbart, founder of the Augmented Research Center (ARC) at SRI and inventor of the computer mouse, has died at the age of 88. Engelbart was one of the first great computer visionaries, and perhaps the first to envision a future where computers, and more importantly networks of computers, augment human intellect. To this end, Engelbart and his fellow researchers at the ARC devised prototypes — in the 1960s! — that could be considered the forerunners of the World Wide Web, Skype, multiple on-screen windows, screen sharing, and the computer mouse.
In 1950, at the ripe old age of 25, Douglas C. Engelbart had an epiphany that high technology had the ability to expand and augment human intelligence. In 1962, after joining the Stanford Research Institute and founding the Augmented Research Center, this epiphany was crystallized into a treatise called Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. In short, the treatise suggested that we would all be a lot more creative, productive, and intelligent if we had a shared intellectual space. In 1968, Engelbart and his fellow researchers realized this shared intellectual space by creating the NLS (oN-Line System).
Doug Engelbart, holding his original mouse. It used two wheels on the underside to measure the X-Y distance traveled. The ball mouse was also created around the same time, by a German company called Telefunken.On December 9, Engelbart and 17 researchers working with him at the ARC gave a 100-minute public demonstration of the NLS, which they had been working on since Engelbart’s original treatise was published in 1962. Around 1,000 computer professionals attended the presentation, which would turn out to be the first public debut of the computer mouse (pictured above), hypertext, and screen sharing with built-in video conferencing. This was in 1968, some 16 years before the mouse would be popularized by Apple and Microsoft, and decades before the arrival of the World Wide Web and Skype.
At this point, it’s better if you switch over to the video below, where Engalbert himself, on stage at the San Francisco Convention Center, demonstrates the NLS. If you don’t have time for the full 100-minute demonstration, you should probably skip forward to the 31-minute mark for a good overview of the NLS input devices (mouse and chord keyboard), and the 75-minute mark for the video conferencing and screen sharing/collaboration demo.
This demo, which left the attendees awe-struck, would later be referred to by Silicon Valley dwellers as “the mother of all demos.” In an age when computers were very much still room-sized devices intended for massive computation, NLS suggested that computers, aided by networks, could be used for real-time collaboration between researchers. Looking back, of course, sitting at our computers that are connected to billions of other people via the internet and the World Wide Web, we now know how scarily prescient Engelbart was.
The ARC was funded by DARPA, NASA, and the USAF — and you won’t be surprised, after watching Engelbart’s demo, to hear that the ARC later became one of first nodes of the ARPANET, the precursor of the internet. The first permanent ARPANET link was between the Interface Message Processor (one of the first packet-switched routers) at UCLA and the IMP at SRI. ARC, still headed by Engelbart, then became the first Network Information Center (NIC). (See: Changing the world: DARPA’s top inventions.)
Soon after the excitement of the NLS and ARPANET, however, Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity. Engelbart still firmly believed that networked collaboration was the future, while the rest of the world, including some of his fellow researchers at the ARC, were quickly shifting their towards personal computing. The ARC was eventually sold off a company called Tymshare, which was then acquired by McDonnell Douglas, and with each successive sale Engelbart’s influence waned. Disillusioned, Engelbart eventually retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, his vision of a networked intellectual space squeezed out by operational concerns and a lust for larger profits.
Sitting here in 2013, of course, we know that Engelbart’s epiphany wasn’t in vane. Thanks to the World Wide Web, invented in 1993 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and continuing efforts in the realms of networking and interfaces, we finally have a network of computers and information that augments human intelligence beyond our wildest imaginations.