11 ms·

Doug Engelbart has died

1178 points by sbarre 13y ago

justinjlynn 13y ago
Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation.
- thoughtsimple 13y ago
  I can't find anything either though at 88, it isn't too hard to believe.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  There's this: https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/352489027716386816 https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/352489027716386816 but I do not know how Rheingold get the news
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- VLM 13y ago
  There's an email from Christina (his daughter) on classiccmp cctalk, so I'd be inclined to believe it. (edited to add that Christina is his daughter, and if you can find a cctalk archive, or subscribe and just missed it, its dated 6:31 and AEK forwarded it onto the list this morning.)
- astrodust 13y ago
  The Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart) has already been updated with this link: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/ http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-invento...
kintamanimatt 13y ago
Do people not read the links they upmod? This source doesn't state that he's died. This just seems to be completely unsubstantiated at this point, especially as there's no mention of this anywhere else.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  When I posted this comment the link was to a completely unrelated page that made no mention of his death. As of right now the link has changed twice. For whatever reason HN had a snafu and didn't delete it when I hit the delete button. Now the comment is completely incorrect, undeletable, and uncorrectable!
  - sbarre 13y ago
    Link submitter here (first time, too): My apologies, I saw the news via the Computer History Museum's twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/352485400973021186 https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/35248540097302118... ) , and they linked to that page. I googled around for a better link but couldn't find anything, but felt it was worth mentioning as a story to allow for discussion?
    - kintamanimatt 13y ago
      It just seemed like an elaborate troll and an unsubstantiated rumor at first because that link didn't mention his death, and as you said, there was nothing else mentioned about his death anywhere! Your link makes a lot more sense now, but I'm still confused why so many people upvoted it before it was corrected to a better link that corroborated the title! > first time, too Welcome! :-)
jonstewart 13y ago
Email here: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.h...
glhaynes 13y ago
If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in 1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt... Edit: link had been to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY but a user below posted this archive.org link which is better. Thanks, mxfh!
- sandyarmstrong 13y ago
  Thank you for posting, this version is much higher quality than the other youtube links.
  - mxfh 13y ago
    The version hosted on archive.org seems to have even less compression artifacts. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...
- agumonkey 13y ago
  No offense, but that metaphor is still an euphemism.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  Another one of his hidden gems is the video where he discussed how they created a virtual tele-conferencing room by moulding CRT screens in the shapes of the head of each participant and projected their face onto it. It's the perfect example of a practical solution Doug invented decades ago that still hasn't been matched by today's technology. P.S. I was never able to find the link after I saw it once, so if someone here knows where to find it; please let me know.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >>>It's the perfect example of a practical solution Doug invented decades ago that still hasn't been matched by today's technology. I just told one my co-workers about this and he nearly broke down crying. I asked him who he was and he went into the same example you gave. To say he was ahead of his time is an understatement. Always sad to lose such a visionary. I'm just learning about some of these incredible people and their amazing contributions.
adamnemecek 13y ago
For anyone who is not sure who he was check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs
recuter 13y ago
Obligatory link to 'The Mother of All Demos': http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs
- oasisbob 13y ago
  Better quality, full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
jgrahamc 13y ago
I'm just going to imagine that he's running in the background with no terminal attached.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- MWil 13y ago
  love it!
bretpiatt 13y ago
He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "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." ( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart )
- ThomPete 13y ago
  Hmm so a kind of liberal vs. socialist philosophy of technology. You just gave me a new perspective on things. Thanks!
  - triplesec 13y ago
    entirely not such a gross simplification
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      hence the expression "kind of"
  - saraid216 13y ago
    I'd suggest checking out Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Encyclopedia Britannica on the term "communitarianism". It's far more relevant than applying the word "socialist" without meaning.
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      That depends what you put in that word. To me socialism is not a bad thing.
rmason 13y ago
He was one of the keynotes at a conference I attended out in the Valley in the early nineties. Tremendously inspiring guy and a much better speaker than a lot of tech people. What I remember from that day was that he was very, very humble with a great sense of humor. He was truly one of those Xerox Parc giants upon whose shoulders our entire industry rests upon.
- mtraven 13y ago
  Don't think he was ever actually a member of PARC, although his ideas and collaborators certainly inhabited the place.
DanBC 13y ago
> Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI, theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but were unusual in those days. Sadly, the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural is becoming less and less automatic and natural as people put things in walled gardens using weird non-standard rapidly-changing protocols and close access to anyone not using The Official Client.
dlg 13y ago
Anyone who works in interactive computing should be familiar with Doug Engelbart's work. Years ago, at one of the first conferences on interactive computer, after people spent all day presenting their new work, Andy van Dam--builder of the first hypertext system with Ted Nelson who named it--stood up and said "you should all be ashamed that you don't know your history. Doug Engelbart invented almost everything presented here years ago." And he was right. I hope a lot of you are watching The Mother of All Demos http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt.... But it's worth reading and understanding the reasons why Doug was working on all of this. Doug and his crew at SRI had the goal of "human augmentation". Everyone else at the forefront of the computer industry thought we'd have general AI by the 1970s. They instead believed that GAI wasn't within reach. They believed that the things we wanted to build and accomplish as a society weren't doable with the communication tools we had. They had the idea that computers could be tools to help individuals work. Since computers were multi-million dollar calculating machines, the idea that people would have a computer at their desk and that they'd help us to communicate and manage information was beyond-out-there. http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html But after leaving Engelbart's group at SRI, lots of his team joined PARC and built the modern GUI and networking. For a history of the details, I highly recommend reading Markoff's What the Dormouse Said http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers... [Bonus: If you like Engelbart's MOAD, also watch Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo.] I only tend to comment about once-a-year on HN, but it would be impossible not to say something about Doug and the impact he's had on our world. Edit: Sutherland's Sketchpad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA
mdkess 13y ago
What a remarkable life!
alayne 13y ago
It's amazing that he was working on augmentation already in 1962. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
tlrobinson 13y ago
I believe a black bar at the top of Hacker News is in order.
- jrarredondo 13y ago
  The best recommendation in the thread.
tqs 13y ago
Engelbart was perhaps the most important influence in realizing the computer as an interactive medium. Around 1960, most were still thinking of the computer as a sophisticated calculator. You give it a problem, it spits out an answer. Even the idea of artificial intelligence was framed this way. Engelbart realized the potential of the computer to augment human intelligence. High bandwidth, continuous interaction between human and computer allows the computer to be an extension of the mind. Chasing this vision led him and his team to naturally invent the mouse, bitmapped screens, hypertext, networked computers, etc. IMO, more important than these individual inventions is Engelbart's foundational principle that technologies change what the mind is capable of thinking. And by augmenting our thinking, we enable ourselves to create new technologies. Mind and technology co-evolve. This is "bootstrapping" in the purest sense and the source of that profound feeling many of us have experienced while augmenting our minds through programming and other rich, creative interactions with computers.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Sad to hear he is gone. I got to talk him at one of the Computer History Fellow awards ceremonies and was struck by how clearly he thought about things. He will be missed.
jgon 13y ago
I think that what most inspires me about Dr. Engelbart was not so much the physical manifestations of his work, although these were incredible, decades ahead of their time, and in some ways still not matched, but rather the philosophy that he used to guide his work. It was his goal of greatly increasing the abilities of an individual human, as well as increasing the ability of groups of people to work together towards a goal that will remain timeless and inspirational long after everything he created has entered the realm of the pedestrian. Ultimately, most of the problems we face on the planet are of human origin, and even for those that aren't the solution will need to be created by us as well. As a meta-machine, a machine that can embody and or imitate almost all other mediums, the computer offers a unique opportunity to augment and enhance the reach of humanity. As the last few weeks have shown us, this reach can be extended in a negative fashion, and can be used to complicate the problems we already face. But Doug Engelbart saw the other side of the coin, that the computer can be used to free and uplift us, and help us come together like never before. He saw this earlier than most and he pursued it further than most. And so we can follow along in his wake and add our efforts to his, and to the greater goal of extending humanity in a positive direction. I'll finish by encouraging everyone reading this to take a few minutes now, and perhaps every few days from here on out to think about what efforts we can each make towards furthering Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goals. Not in the spirit of guilt or of shame, but instead as an inspiration. If one man, guided by a vision of using the computer to positively affect the course of human development, can accomplish this much in a few decades, how much further could we get with each of us working as well? I hope to do what I can, and I thank Douglas Engelbart for his efforts to help guide my way.
pmelendez 13y ago
From Wikipedia article: "...after 1976 ... Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer." Go figure! A true visionary... He will be missed for sure.
lominming 13y ago
Mother of All Demos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY ... It is really amazing how he conceived all these in 1968 (45 years ago!). If you think about it, what we have today is just putting on a pretty UI on top of all these concepts. We hardly moved for those innovation breakthroughs that he demoed.
bdunbar 13y ago
A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written by one of Engelbart's team. It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain what word-processing did for text. It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss interested, and I moved on. Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called? Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never thought I could google that, today of all days.
- endlessvoid94 13y ago
  I just read whatever I could about this, but do you have any further information? I'm fascinated.
  - bdunbar 13y ago
    All I've got is what I wrote, and what's on NDMA's site about it. I wish I'd kept that floppy. It was a full working copy, and the printed instruction manual. I have no idea how I acquired it, at this late date. Perhaps it was sitting around in the server 'room' where I was working: lots of engineers there (including my boss) and it seems like the kind of thing he'd have been interested in.
    - endlessvoid94 13y ago
      It sounds very interesting. I just emailed NDMA to see if I can somehow acquire a copy. I'd be more than happy to pay for it. Big ideas definitely take time to catch on.
- DanBC 13y ago
  May I ask what search terms you used? I tentatively thought it was "TheBrain", but that's a bit later, and I was working out if there's any link between Harlan Hugh and Engelbart.
  - bdunbar 13y ago
    'engelbart inspired augment software' without quotes. Which led me to the wiki page for NLS which contains the line ... "The HyPerform program sold by NDMA Inc. is a descendant of NLS and Augment." Which made my brain go 'that's it' and google confirmed it.
bdcravens 13y ago
I hope this gets a few more articles: Doug Englebart is far more of an influence on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was, even if he's less known.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  In each field, there are the pioneers, then the entrepreneurs who make the market, then the commodity suppliers. In my opinion, you need all three to get where we are now, walking about with supercomputers in our pockets/handbags. I'm planning to project the MOAD at College tomorrow. And trying to persuade digital galleries and hacker spaces to do likewise. Moggridge's book on design Designing Interactions has a good section on Englebart and the activities of his students. Example: in this text box, I have a caret that fits in the space between the characters I am typing. I can insert text wherever I place that caret with my mouse.
SiVal 13y ago
Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk. At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Institute and had a conference. So few people showed up that we held it in the same little church. We thought, given the implications for such things as life extension, that it was pretty funny to have the speakers literally preaching from the pulpit with the listeners sitting in the church pews. Christine was in the church kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was the conference lunch banquet. A PBJ, a banana, and a napkin in a paper bag. I picked up my brown bag and walked into the small inner courtyard to sit. An older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life. I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something he'd seen again and again. I kept thinking that he looked familiar. I introduced myself. He stuck out his hand: "I'm Doug."
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Excellent, thanks for posting. I shall use this tomorrow with students
- wmat 13y ago
  Treasure that forever! And let it be a lesson in humility for us all.
racl101 13y ago
R.I.P. Mr. Engelbart.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
joegaudet 13y ago
Black bar ?
MortenK 13y ago
If you are an IxD or UX guy, you really owe it to yourself to read "Designing interactions" by Bill Moggridge. In it, Doug Engelbart is interviewed for an entire chapter regarding how he and some other guys designed the mouse. Very interesting stuff.
pmarca 13y ago
Doug was the Albert Einstein of our field. Oral history for people who want to learn more about him: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/engfmst1-ntb.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...
- ableal 13y ago
  http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge... (just the content framed in the bottom corner ;-)
mtraven 13y ago
Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain to be realized. The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely connected.
kyledrake 13y ago
Without Douglas Engelbart, none of the personal computing tech we have today would have been even this remotely far ahead. He was the first person to believe in the Personal Computer. He got to pass on after seeing his vision come to life. It must have been an amazing experience for him.
stefanix 13y ago
I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the future. I hold him in very fond memories.
touristtam 13y ago
Waiting for Google to have a doodle about him tomorrow.
kunai 13y ago
Like others on here have posted. Doug's true worth was not in the innovations he procured or the things he built, but rather what he saw as the future of computing, humanity, and technology. The way he was able to reach into the future and pull out the best bits, and then execute was something that not many innovators can claim to. The ideas that were built at SRI are nothing short of legendary, and the core principles still carry on. It may be a bit sad to think that so many don't know his name, blindly believing the mouse was invented by Xerox, that the Internet was invented by Tim-Berners Lee, but in the end, does it really matter? To Doug, all that mattered was being visionary and helping people. It would do good for all of us here at HN to follow his example. Humans only get one shot, and Dr. Doug Engelbart nailed it. P.S., thanks PG for the black topbar. A fitting sign of respect for a very great man.
icelancer 13y ago
.
joehewitt 13y ago
There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I enjoyed reading many years ago: Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Personal-Computing/dp/0804738718 http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Pe...
- ivanzhao 13y ago
  I think this is a better book on him. Less history, more ideas: http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-Douglas/dp/0615308902/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372918552&sr=8-1&keywords=engelbart http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-Dougl...
douge 13y ago
Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV Interview... amazing stuff http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011 http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011
staunch 13y ago
Nothing sad about well liked person, who accomplished a lot, dying at age 88. He won. RIP Doug Engelbart.
danblick 13y ago
Doug Engelbart has been a huge inspiration to me even though I never met him. I'm amazed at how much his group at SRI was able to accomplish. I think his vision - augmenting human intellect to help solve the world's complex problems - is still a vision worth sharing. Doug did help change the world, and I'll remember him for it.
mikecane 13y ago
From the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs: >>>Two other occasional visitors were high school students Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who hung out at SAIL [Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory], with an older friend, Allen Baum, who was working at the laboratory during the fall of 1970. Jobs later said that the “vibrations” he felt at SAIL would stay with him his entire life. The bewitched Wozniak rode his bike up to the laboratory from his home in Los Altos, and he later said that his experiences there contributed to his hunger for his own computer. SAIL was one of the core places of the computing revolution, from which The Mother of All Demos by Doug Engelbart was spawned. That demo happened in 1968, when Jobs was twelve or thirteen, and influenced everything that came afterwards in computing.
TheLegace 13y ago
One thing that strikes me really odd from the demo of the mouse, is how nervous and worried he looks. I mean I can understand the concept of computers were so foreign until people got use to it. I think he was really intimidated by the culture of people being close minded to things they don't understand.(I thing progress was more of a liability.)
shire 13y ago
He lived a life worth living and died accomplishing so much, this should be a motivation to us all to pursue our dreams and goals and make the most of it because this just proves how short life is no matter how great you are, death is the destination we all share.
hilko 13y ago
To my embarrassment, I didn't really know much about Doug Engelbart until Brett Victor brought him up in one of his excellent talks (Inventing on Principle). I quite like his eulogy: http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/
mentor 13y ago
Doug - The energy and light of your vision and inspiration still burns bright, still ignites, still guides... http://Collaborapologist.com/ http://Collaborapologist.com/ http://CommunityOfImpact.info http://CommunityOfImpact.info Thanks, Doug A friend - Sam
pagekicker 13y ago
Click.

1178 points by sbarre 13y ago

Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation.

thoughtsimple 13y ago
I can't find anything either though at 88, it isn't too hard to believe.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jamesbritt 13y ago
There's this: https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/352489027716386816 https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/352489027716386816 but I do not know how Rheingold get the news
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VLM 13y ago
There's an email from Christina (his daughter) on classiccmp cctalk, so I'd be inclined to believe it. (edited to add that Christina is his daughter, and if you can find a cctalk archive, or subscribe and just missed it, its dated 6:31 and AEK forwarded it onto the list this morning.)
astrodust 13y ago
The Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart) has already been updated with this link: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/ http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-invento...

kintamanimatt 13y ago

Do people not read the links they upmod? This source doesn't state that he's died. This just seems to be completely unsubstantiated at this point, especially as there's no mention of this anywhere else.

kintamanimatt 13y ago
When I posted this comment the link was to a completely unrelated page that made no mention of his death. As of right now the link has changed twice. For whatever reason HN had a snafu and didn't delete it when I hit the delete button. Now the comment is completely incorrect, undeletable, and uncorrectable!
- sbarre 13y ago
  Link submitter here (first time, too): My apologies, I saw the news via the Computer History Museum's twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/352485400973021186 https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/35248540097302118... ) , and they linked to that page. I googled around for a better link but couldn't find anything, but felt it was worth mentioning as a story to allow for discussion?
  - kintamanimatt 13y ago
    It just seemed like an elaborate troll and an unsubstantiated rumor at first because that link didn't mention his death, and as you said, there was nothing else mentioned about his death anywhere! Your link makes a lot more sense now, but I'm still confused why so many people upvoted it before it was corrected to a better link that corroborated the title! > first time, too Welcome! :-)

jonstewart 13y ago

Email here: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.h...

glhaynes 13y ago

If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in 1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt... Edit: link had been to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY but a user below posted this archive.org link which is better. Thanks, mxfh!

sandyarmstrong 13y ago
Thank you for posting, this version is much higher quality than the other youtube links.
- mxfh 13y ago
  The version hosted on archive.org seems to have even less compression artifacts. http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...
agumonkey 13y ago
No offense, but that metaphor is still an euphemism.
mtrimpe 13y ago
Another one of his hidden gems is the video where he discussed how they created a virtual tele-conferencing room by moulding CRT screens in the shapes of the head of each participant and projected their face onto it. It's the perfect example of a practical solution Doug invented decades ago that still hasn't been matched by today's technology. P.S. I was never able to find the link after I saw it once, so if someone here knows where to find it; please let me know.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>It's the perfect example of a practical solution Doug invented decades ago that still hasn't been matched by today's technology. I just told one my co-workers about this and he nearly broke down crying. I asked him who he was and he went into the same example you gave. To say he was ahead of his time is an understatement. Always sad to lose such a visionary. I'm just learning about some of these incredible people and their amazing contributions.

adamnemecek 13y ago

For anyone who is not sure who he was check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

recuter 13y ago

Obligatory link to 'The Mother of All Demos': http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs

oasisbob 13y ago
Better quality, full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

jgrahamc 13y ago

I'm just going to imagine that he's running in the background with no terminal attached.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
MWil 13y ago
love it!

bretpiatt 13y ago

He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "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." ( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart )

ThomPete 13y ago
Hmm so a kind of liberal vs. socialist philosophy of technology. You just gave me a new perspective on things. Thanks!
- triplesec 13y ago
  entirely not such a gross simplification
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    hence the expression "kind of"
- saraid216 13y ago
  I'd suggest checking out Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Encyclopedia Britannica on the term "communitarianism". It's far more relevant than applying the word "socialist" without meaning.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    That depends what you put in that word. To me socialism is not a bad thing.

rmason 13y ago

He was one of the keynotes at a conference I attended out in the Valley in the early nineties. Tremendously inspiring guy and a much better speaker than a lot of tech people. What I remember from that day was that he was very, very humble with a great sense of humor. He was truly one of those Xerox Parc giants upon whose shoulders our entire industry rests upon.

mtraven 13y ago
Don't think he was ever actually a member of PARC, although his ideas and collaborators certainly inhabited the place.

DanBC 13y ago

> Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI, theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but were unusual in those days. Sadly, the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural is becoming less and less automatic and natural as people put things in walled gardens using weird non-standard rapidly-changing protocols and close access to anyone not using The Official Client.

dlg 13y ago

Anyone who works in interactive computing should be familiar with Doug Engelbart's work. Years ago, at one of the first conferences on interactive computer, after people spent all day presenting their new work, Andy van Dam--builder of the first hypertext system with Ted Nelson who named it--stood up and said "you should all be ashamed that you don't know your history. Doug Engelbart invented almost everything presented here years ago." And he was right. I hope a lot of you are watching The Mother of All Demos http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt.... But it's worth reading and understanding the reasons why Doug was working on all of this. Doug and his crew at SRI had the goal of "human augmentation". Everyone else at the forefront of the computer industry thought we'd have general AI by the 1970s. They instead believed that GAI wasn't within reach. They believed that the things we wanted to build and accomplish as a society weren't doable with the communication tools we had. They had the idea that computers could be tools to help individuals work. Since computers were multi-million dollar calculating machines, the idea that people would have a computer at their desk and that they'd help us to communicate and manage information was beyond-out-there. http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html But after leaving Engelbart's group at SRI, lots of his team joined PARC and built the modern GUI and networking. For a history of the details, I highly recommend reading Markoff's What the Dormouse Said http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers... [Bonus: If you like Engelbart's MOAD, also watch Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo.] I only tend to comment about once-a-year on HN, but it would be impossible not to say something about Doug and the impact he's had on our world. Edit: Sutherland's Sketchpad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

mdkess 13y ago

What a remarkable life!

alayne 13y ago

It's amazing that he was working on augmentation already in 1962. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

tlrobinson 13y ago

I believe a black bar at the top of Hacker News is in order.

jrarredondo 13y ago
The best recommendation in the thread.

tqs 13y ago

Engelbart was perhaps the most important influence in realizing the computer as an interactive medium. Around 1960, most were still thinking of the computer as a sophisticated calculator. You give it a problem, it spits out an answer. Even the idea of artificial intelligence was framed this way. Engelbart realized the potential of the computer to augment human intelligence. High bandwidth, continuous interaction between human and computer allows the computer to be an extension of the mind. Chasing this vision led him and his team to naturally invent the mouse, bitmapped screens, hypertext, networked computers, etc. IMO, more important than these individual inventions is Engelbart's foundational principle that technologies change what the mind is capable of thinking. And by augmenting our thinking, we enable ourselves to create new technologies. Mind and technology co-evolve. This is "bootstrapping" in the purest sense and the source of that profound feeling many of us have experienced while augmenting our minds through programming and other rich, creative interactions with computers.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Sad to hear he is gone. I got to talk him at one of the Computer History Fellow awards ceremonies and was struck by how clearly he thought about things. He will be missed.

jgon 13y ago

I think that what most inspires me about Dr. Engelbart was not so much the physical manifestations of his work, although these were incredible, decades ahead of their time, and in some ways still not matched, but rather the philosophy that he used to guide his work. It was his goal of greatly increasing the abilities of an individual human, as well as increasing the ability of groups of people to work together towards a goal that will remain timeless and inspirational long after everything he created has entered the realm of the pedestrian. Ultimately, most of the problems we face on the planet are of human origin, and even for those that aren't the solution will need to be created by us as well. As a meta-machine, a machine that can embody and or imitate almost all other mediums, the computer offers a unique opportunity to augment and enhance the reach of humanity. As the last few weeks have shown us, this reach can be extended in a negative fashion, and can be used to complicate the problems we already face. But Doug Engelbart saw the other side of the coin, that the computer can be used to free and uplift us, and help us come together like never before. He saw this earlier than most and he pursued it further than most. And so we can follow along in his wake and add our efforts to his, and to the greater goal of extending humanity in a positive direction. I'll finish by encouraging everyone reading this to take a few minutes now, and perhaps every few days from here on out to think about what efforts we can each make towards furthering Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goals. Not in the spirit of guilt or of shame, but instead as an inspiration. If one man, guided by a vision of using the computer to positively affect the course of human development, can accomplish this much in a few decades, how much further could we get with each of us working as well? I hope to do what I can, and I thank Douglas Engelbart for his efforts to help guide my way.

pmelendez 13y ago

From Wikipedia article: "...after 1976 ... Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer." Go figure! A true visionary... He will be missed for sure.

lominming 13y ago

Mother of All Demos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY ... It is really amazing how he conceived all these in 1968 (45 years ago!). If you think about it, what we have today is just putting on a pretty UI on top of all these concepts. We hardly moved for those innovation breakthroughs that he demoed.

bdunbar 13y ago

A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written by one of Engelbart's team. It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain what word-processing did for text. It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss interested, and I moved on. Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called? Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never thought I could google that, today of all days.

endlessvoid94 13y ago
I just read whatever I could about this, but do you have any further information? I'm fascinated.
- bdunbar 13y ago
  All I've got is what I wrote, and what's on NDMA's site about it. I wish I'd kept that floppy. It was a full working copy, and the printed instruction manual. I have no idea how I acquired it, at this late date. Perhaps it was sitting around in the server 'room' where I was working: lots of engineers there (including my boss) and it seems like the kind of thing he'd have been interested in.
  - endlessvoid94 13y ago
    It sounds very interesting. I just emailed NDMA to see if I can somehow acquire a copy. I'd be more than happy to pay for it. Big ideas definitely take time to catch on.
DanBC 13y ago
May I ask what search terms you used? I tentatively thought it was "TheBrain", but that's a bit later, and I was working out if there's any link between Harlan Hugh and Engelbart.
- bdunbar 13y ago
  'engelbart inspired augment software' without quotes. Which led me to the wiki page for NLS which contains the line ... "The HyPerform program sold by NDMA Inc. is a descendant of NLS and Augment." Which made my brain go 'that's it' and google confirmed it.

bdcravens 13y ago

I hope this gets a few more articles: Doug Englebart is far more of an influence on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was, even if he's less known.

keithpeter 13y ago
In each field, there are the pioneers, then the entrepreneurs who make the market, then the commodity suppliers. In my opinion, you need all three to get where we are now, walking about with supercomputers in our pockets/handbags. I'm planning to project the MOAD at College tomorrow. And trying to persuade digital galleries and hacker spaces to do likewise. Moggridge's book on design Designing Interactions has a good section on Englebart and the activities of his students. Example: in this text box, I have a caret that fits in the space between the characters I am typing. I can insert text wherever I place that caret with my mouse.

SiVal 13y ago

Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk. At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Institute and had a conference. So few people showed up that we held it in the same little church. We thought, given the implications for such things as life extension, that it was pretty funny to have the speakers literally preaching from the pulpit with the listeners sitting in the church pews. Christine was in the church kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was the conference lunch banquet. A PBJ, a banana, and a napkin in a paper bag. I picked up my brown bag and walked into the small inner courtyard to sit. An older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life. I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something he'd seen again and again. I kept thinking that he looked familiar. I introduced myself. He stuck out his hand: "I'm Doug."

keithpeter 13y ago
Excellent, thanks for posting. I shall use this tomorrow with students
wmat 13y ago
Treasure that forever! And let it be a lesson in humility for us all.

racl101 13y ago

R.I.P. Mr. Engelbart.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

joegaudet 13y ago

Black bar ?

MortenK 13y ago

If you are an IxD or UX guy, you really owe it to yourself to read "Designing interactions" by Bill Moggridge. In it, Doug Engelbart is interviewed for an entire chapter regarding how he and some other guys designed the mouse. Very interesting stuff.

pmarca 13y ago

Doug was the Albert Einstein of our field. Oral history for people who want to learn more about him: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/engfmst1-ntb.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...

ableal 13y ago
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge... (just the content framed in the bottom corner ;-)

mtraven 13y ago

Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain to be realized. The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely connected.

kyledrake 13y ago

Without Douglas Engelbart, none of the personal computing tech we have today would have been even this remotely far ahead. He was the first person to believe in the Personal Computer. He got to pass on after seeing his vision come to life. It must have been an amazing experience for him.

stefanix 13y ago

I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the future. I hold him in very fond memories.

touristtam 13y ago

Waiting for Google to have a doodle about him tomorrow.

kunai 13y ago

Like others on here have posted. Doug's true worth was not in the innovations he procured or the things he built, but rather what he saw as the future of computing, humanity, and technology. The way he was able to reach into the future and pull out the best bits, and then execute was something that not many innovators can claim to. The ideas that were built at SRI are nothing short of legendary, and the core principles still carry on. It may be a bit sad to think that so many don't know his name, blindly believing the mouse was invented by Xerox, that the Internet was invented by Tim-Berners Lee, but in the end, does it really matter? To Doug, all that mattered was being visionary and helping people. It would do good for all of us here at HN to follow his example. Humans only get one shot, and Dr. Doug Engelbart nailed it. P.S., thanks PG for the black topbar. A fitting sign of respect for a very great man.

icelancer 13y ago

joehewitt 13y ago

There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I enjoyed reading many years ago: Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Personal-Computing/dp/0804738718 http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Pe...

ivanzhao 13y ago
I think this is a better book on him. Less history, more ideas: http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-Douglas/dp/0615308902/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372918552&sr=8-1&keywords=engelbart http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-Dougl...

douge 13y ago

Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV Interview... amazing stuff http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011 http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011

staunch 13y ago

Nothing sad about well liked person, who accomplished a lot, dying at age 88. He won. RIP Doug Engelbart.

danblick 13y ago

Doug Engelbart has been a huge inspiration to me even though I never met him. I'm amazed at how much his group at SRI was able to accomplish. I think his vision - augmenting human intellect to help solve the world's complex problems - is still a vision worth sharing. Doug did help change the world, and I'll remember him for it.

mikecane 13y ago

From the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs: >>>Two other occasional visitors were high school students Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who hung out at SAIL [Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory], with an older friend, Allen Baum, who was working at the laboratory during the fall of 1970. Jobs later said that the “vibrations” he felt at SAIL would stay with him his entire life. The bewitched Wozniak rode his bike up to the laboratory from his home in Los Altos, and he later said that his experiences there contributed to his hunger for his own computer. SAIL was one of the core places of the computing revolution, from which The Mother of All Demos by Doug Engelbart was spawned. That demo happened in 1968, when Jobs was twelve or thirteen, and influenced everything that came afterwards in computing.

TheLegace 13y ago

One thing that strikes me really odd from the demo of the mouse, is how nervous and worried he looks. I mean I can understand the concept of computers were so foreign until people got use to it. I think he was really intimidated by the culture of people being close minded to things they don't understand.(I thing progress was more of a liability.)

shire 13y ago

He lived a life worth living and died accomplishing so much, this should be a motivation to us all to pursue our dreams and goals and make the most of it because this just proves how short life is no matter how great you are, death is the destination we all share.

hilko 13y ago

To my embarrassment, I didn't really know much about Doug Engelbart until Brett Victor brought him up in one of his excellent talks (Inventing on Principle). I quite like his eulogy: http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

mentor 13y ago

Doug - The energy and light of your vision and inspiration still burns bright, still ignites, still guides... http://Collaborapologist.com/ http://Collaborapologist.com/ http://CommunityOfImpact.info http://CommunityOfImpact.info Thanks, Doug A friend - Sam

pagekicker 13y ago

Click.