As we wrote back in March, he went on to demonstrate other technologies taken for granted today:. He speculated about the future of ARPANet, then barely on the horizon of technical possibility, which he believed would soon allow him to demonstrate NLS anywhere in the country. After all, he was already videoconferencing with his colleague behind the scenes in Menlo Park, some 30 miles away. That presentation, commonly referred to as "the mother of all demos," would serve as inspiration for countless up and coming technologists in the earliest days of computing.
As it turned out, Engelbart wasn't a fan of his creation being dubbed a "mouse. Engelbart referred to it as the "X-Y position indicator for a display system" but unsurprisingly, the simpler monicker proved more popular. President Bill Clinton honored Douglas Engelbart with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in — an esteemed recognition of all that Engelbart accomplished in his lifetime.
Specifically, the medal recognizes Engelbart "for creating the foundations of personal computing including continuous, real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, on-line journals, shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work.
Christina Engelbart confirmed her father's death in a message to professor David Farber's "classic computers" email list. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Doug's Early Vision: From the introduction of his Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework : 8a.
Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side; this is his working surface, and is controlled by a computer his "clerk" with which he can communicate by means of a small keyboard and various other devices. He is designing a building. He has already dreamed up several basic layouts and structural forms, and is trying them out on the screen. The surveying data for the layout he is working on now have already been entered, and he has just coaxed the clerk to show him a perspective view of the steep hillside building site with the roadway above, symbolic representations of the various trees that are to remain on the lot, and the service tie points for the different utilities.
The view occupies the left two-thirds of the screen. With a pointer he indicates two points of interest, moves his left hand rapidly over the keyboard, and the distance and elevation between the points indicated appear on the right-hand third of thescreen. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.
It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. Read more They also curate video of the demo and other significant archives from Doug Engelbart's work. Robert Foote at Wabash College , and this photo of geographers using planimeter for the census thanks to the National Archives.
See also Wikipedia's more complete Planimeter article with links to other resources. English, Douglas C. Engelbart and Melvyn L. Berman, March This paper describes an experimental study into the relative merits of different CRT display-selection devices as used within a real-time, computer-display, text-manipulation system in use at Stanford Research Institute. The mouse was tested against other devices and found to be the most accurate and efficient. See also the Report and the Quarterly Report detailing their screen-selection experiments.
See for example how he envisioned an architect might work interactively with a computer in in the Introduction's summary of Section IV quoted at right. Site Map Home. Historic Firsts: "Father of the Mouse" 0. I was riveted. After our program aired, Engelbart asked us to produce a video about his ideas. We never did make the video, but as I sat down to talk to him, I realized that what he was describing could actually change the world. It certainly changed me. I went to graduate school at Harvard and studied educational technology, and we worked closely together until his death in The philosophy that informed Doug Engelbart's revolutionary inventions for personal computing.
He realized he had achieved both of his major life goals: a good job and a good wife. He pondered what he should aim for next. Then it hit him. At that time, there were relatively few computers in the world. He outlined innovative ways of manipulating and viewing information, and then sharing it over a network so people could work together. He was asking them to take too big a leap, from doing calculations on punch cards to creating a new information superhighway.
Engelbart, who had three daughters himself, believed that women were ideally suited to building new cultures. This got him in a lot of trouble. He wanted them to bring together thinkers who could, collectively, change the way the networks collected and analyzed information.
Although the Alto didn't go anywhere, the pattern had been set. With Apple's launch of the Macintosh and Microsoft's debut of Windows 1. Graphics-driven machines and software helped propel the mouse -- now equipped with a grime-collecting rubber ball instead of two wheels -- to its present ubiquitous status [sources: Alexander ; Biersdorfer ]. But before the mouse roared, there was a man with a vision, and that vision extended far beyond a brick with a button.
In , Douglas Engelbart envisioned a wired world very like our own; because he couldn't see how to get there, he set about helping to invent it [source: Markoff ]. Although he was best known for the mouse, Engelbart pioneered a slew of personal computing and Internet technologies. More than that, he articulated a vision of an information society that we are only beginning to realize today [source: Markoff ].
While the politicians of his childhood might have touted a chicken in every pot, Engelbart envisioned a computer terminal in every office, connected to a central computer through which workers could share data, files and ideas.
This augury of the office network came to him in , in an era of room-sized computers, vacuum tubes and punched-tape programming [sources: DEI ; Markoff ; MIT ]. His stint as a radar technician in World War II had convinced him of the potential uses of screen displays, but how to get from massive corporate mainframes to a network of desktop terminals remained unclear -- until the integrated circuit debuted in [sources: CHM ; Markoff ; MIT ].
Engelbart saw great potential in integrated circuits. He believed that the same principles of scaling that he had witnessed while working in aerospace research could be applied, in reverse, to scale down integrated circuits.
He laid out his arguments in a paper, "Microelectronics and the Art of Similitude. Moore was influenced by Engelbart's work in formulating his famous law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years [source: Brock ; Markoff ]. But it was Engelbart's belief that computers could improve our daily experience, add value to our work and boost our brainpower -- a phenomenon he called "bootstrapping" -- that truly set this electrical-engineer-turned-computer-scientist apart [sources: Flynn ; Markoff ].
The extent of Engelbart's vision and accomplishments became clear in his Dec. As he walked the audience through the work he and 17 researchers at SRI's Augmented Human Intellect Research Center had accomplished, he also lifted the curtain on early examples of videoconferencing, word processing, hypertext and networking -- the building blocks of his vision for boosting intelligence and productivity through computers [sources: DEI ; Markoff ; Stanford ; UC Berkeley].
Today, it's hard to imagine that the mouse's future was ever uncertain. We sometimes forget that it once competed for dominance with the light pen, the trackball and stranger gadgets, such as knee-guides, foot pedals or helmet-mounted devices. While light pens, trackballs and styluses persist and have resurged on tablets and smartphones , the mouse has multiplied and evolved. Optical and laser mice removed the troublesome ball, wireless mice untangled us and gyroscopic mice unchained us from our desks.
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