Douglas Engelbart

From 1963 Engelbart led the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, funded by ARPA, NASA and the Air Force. There his group built the oN-Line System (NLS), a system for working with linked, structured documents on a screen with a keyboard, a chord keyset and a mouse. The mouse was designed in 1964 by Bill English at Engelbart's lab and patented in 1970. The lab also hosted the Network Information Center for the early ARPANET.

On 9 December 1968 Engelbart and his team demonstrated NLS to an audience of about 1,000 computing professionals in San Francisco, linked by microwave to the host computer at SRI in Menlo Park. The demonstration showed collaborative on-line editing, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing and the mouse. It became known as the 'Mother of All Demos', and the IEEE has dedicated a Milestone plaque to it.

In October 1962 Engelbart published 'Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework' as an SRI report for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It argued that computers could extend human intellect, in part by letting people structure information and share it over a network, and it led to his ARPA funding. He later received the ACM Turing Award (1997) and the US National Medal of Technology (December 2000).

In 1957 Engelbart was a partner in Digital Techniques, a small company of four that earned consulting income and hoped to commercialise his inventions. In his own account, after a year of growing doubt he told his partners he was pulling out, saying he could not give up his dream of augmenting human work with computers; they said they did not want to continue without him. He then asked SRI for a job and waited several months for an answer.

Leaving a company he had helped found for an uncertain research goal, and then waiting months at SRI, is consistent with strong commitment to a mission over income. This account rests on his own recollection; the later decades of advocacy recorded by Marc Weber point the same way. Impact Motivation

Engelbart said he asked the programme committee of the autumn computer conference in March 1968 for time to show NLS live in San Francisco. The organisers were hesitant and twice sent people to inspect the system. The team ran video and data links to SRI and kept a film recording on standby in case the live system crashed. In his account he did not tell his research sponsors how much of their money the demonstration used, so that they would not be exposed if it failed; he put the cost at about $10,000 to $15,000.

Staging an unprecedented live demonstration without telling his sponsors the full cost is consistent with willingness to take a personal professional risk; the detail about sponsors comes only from his own recollection. Risk Tolerance

After 1969 ARPA tightened its funding and Bob Taylor, who had funded Engelbart, left for Xerox PARC, which later hired some of his closest lieutenants, including Bill English and Jeff Rulifson. In 1977 SRI sold the lab to Tymshare, where NLS became Augment. Engelbart says that in the mid-1970s he asked SRI to let someone else manage the lab so that he could keep the research direction, and that SRI instead replaced him and ended his employment in July 1977.

He describes seeking a role that kept the research direction without the daily management, which fits a strong need to keep control of his own research agenda; Marc Weber and others describe him as a visionary rather than a hands-on manager, while his own account of the dismissal reasons is uncorroborated here. Need for Autonomy