Doug Engelbart Passes Away

lpress writes "If you use a mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, WYSIWYG word processor, multi-window user interface, shared documents, shared database, documents with images & text, keyword search, instant messaging, synchronous collaboration, or asynchronous collaboration, you can thank Doug Engelbart, who passed away today."

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Doug never worked for Xerox.
He went from SRI to Tymshare.

Many people from Doug's lab went to work for PARC

worth reading his papers

[Trepidity]

In addition to the specific technical inventions, he did a lot of great work from the 1960s laying out how computers could augment human intellect. Most of his papers are available online [dougengelbart.org], not only open-access but in readable HTML versions.

Thanks, Doug. You were a good guy. I'll miss you.

[Eternal Vigilance]

You not only changed our world for the better, you were a good human being. Even with all your success you always remained thoughtful, generous, and kind. That touched my life even more than all the technological innovation. How you were with people was even more important than what you did for them.

Thanks for everything, and most of all thanks for being such a role model for me, Doug.

I'll miss you.

Re:The Mother of All Demos

[nyckidd]

Same video, much better quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY [youtube.com]

Re:Nope, not Xerox

[samkass]

Except Xerox actually contributed a lot of elements to the computer GUI.

Apple just added the "trashcan" (which many don't use today).

Except 1. Apple paid Xerox (one of the most lucrative agreements PARC ever made), and 2. Apple added way more than the "trashcan"... like noun-verb actions (click on something, then click a menu item to do something, rather than the other way around), overlapping windows, and, of course, don't forget rounded corners (and the general-purpose "region" algorithms that made them possible), and finally productized it in 1984 instead of just fiddling around in a lab like Xerox or taking over a decade to make a reasonable product like Microsoft.

Our collective memory

[Paul Fernhout]

Yes, it is amazing how quickly the next generation or two can forget (or never learn) history. It is a constant struggle to keep the best of the past alive in our collective memories. And I say that not just as a trustee of a historical society. How many people who read slashdot have read "As We May Think" about a hypothetical "Memex" by Vannevar Bush that helped inspire Doug Engelbart's work, or "The Skills Of Xanadu" that helped inspire Ted Nelson's own work on hypertext that contributed to the World Wide Web among other things including research in nanotechnology? One of the things Doug made possible was potentially improving our collective memory, but it is hard to avoid getting weighed down in trivia.

I participated in Doug's Unfinished Revolution II colloquium (Unrev-II) run as ten sessions through Stanford and then the mailing list continued related discussions for a couple more years.
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/ [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/ [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/ba-unrev-talk/index.html [dougengelbart.org]

It was one of the best on-line experiences I've had overall.

I feel Doug's story shows why our conventional means of funding computer research via companies and grants and such are flawed. Here is the inventor of the mouse and a variety of amazing things, a very nice guy personally, and he had lots of difficulty getting funding in later years to continue innovative work. If he couldn't funding to do work on computers to make the world a better place, better able to deal with pressing problems, than who can? So, that suggests a need for a basic income, a gift economy, or some other economic approach, so individuals who want to do such work will have the time to do it, regardless of a previous track record.

A few of my many posts to those email lists, covering predicting the OLPC, talking about the singularity and S-curve limitations, asking about the moral basis of our innovations, and linking poetry and knowledge management:
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0061.html [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0754.html [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/1881.html [dougengelbart.org]
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html [dougengelbart.org]

Anyway, it's a sad day. But I'm glad he got his chance to work on really cool stuff in hopes of helping humanity.

Also remember J.C.R. Licklider who funded Doug

[Paul Fernhout]

when all other funding was going to AI, Licklider also funded human-machine interaction via Doug.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider [wikipedia.org]
"He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age. Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that ""most of the significant advances in computer technology -- including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC -- were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all."[2] ... Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. In 1960 his seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System where the computer mouse was invented."

But there were others even before that, from Norbert Weiner to Vannevar Bush to Theodore Sturgeon and others. Doug's life was a link in a chain that stretches back to the first idea of a "standing bear" cave painting made by the "Walking People" thousands of years ago to instruct the young.
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Walking_People.html?id=-kTrc1oSkycC [google.com]

Just like our lives now are links in a chain the hopefully stretches out to new future possibilities.

But that is not to take away from the importance of what Doug did with his life. Otherwise maybe we'd have only AI and not human-machine symbiosis?