Doug Engelbart: More Than the Inventor of the Mouse

“We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help inparticular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain wherehunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation,sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.”

I had the privilege of meeting Douglas Engelbartduring the later years of his life. If you aren’t already aware of him, it’simportant to note that his contributions have provided much more of the basisof the world we live in than is commonly known. His frameworks continue toprovide a powerful opportunity to improve our human capability.

Early in his career, Doug had seen Vannevar Bush’s July 1945article in the Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think,” andsimultaneously was working with early computers. Doug was inspired to reflecton what he was doing and on what could be his life’s work. He realized thatthere were complex problems facing humanity, and he believed that our individualminds alone could not address the issues. Doug believed that we needed to findways to work together to address these problems. Further, he saw us augmentedby computational devices that “could help people work, and not just withnumbers, but with the kind of thinking symbology that we employ now,” as hetold authors Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg (see References). This led to aninspired stream of work that has presaged much of what has subsequently come topass. It can easily be said that his work foresaw the Internet and the WorldWide Web.

The “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, where Doug demonstrated a computer system that capturedmost of what we now take for granted in computer systems (mouse, hyperlinks, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, word processing, and more), wasn’t theculmination of his genius. (Video of the demonstration is available here.) The system he designed, NLS(“oN-Line System”), was the first operational hypertext system. Even so, NLS itselfwas merely a tool to manifest the grander concepts that would provide us withthe ability to raise what Doug termed the “collective IQ.” He was simplybuilding the minimal infrastructure that was necessary to realize his vision.

Why was (and is) this significant?

Doug saw that we needed ways to represent complex conceptsthat we could collaboratively explore and use as the basis for understandingand solving. He recognized that the world was more complex than most of thelinear models then extant were capable of handling. He recognized that linearprose was not sufficient and that richer representations were key.

People needed ways to capture the complexity of knowledgethrough links that expressed the nature of relationships between concepts, and theyneeded the ability to communicate as they built and revised these models. Doug proposed“dynamic knowledge repositories” composed of networked computer systems as ageneral-purpose symbol-manipulating environment that could support thiscollaborative sense-making. He included the ability to converse via video whilesimultaneously editing these representations. His goal was “augmenting humanintellect” (see References), recognizing how computation is a complement to ourown cognition. We are still developing capabilities to achieve what he had foreseen.

However, in Doug’s mind, augmentation was always a completesystem, not just a box. He saw that the creation of these repositories wouldtake the continuing commitment of a collection of people working together to developand apply this knowledge to address the world’s issues. He called for “networkedimprovement communities” (NIC), “cooperative alliances of organizations … todevelop and apply new collective knowledge,” as he told Landau and Clegg. Thushe anticipated the concept of what are now called “communities of practice.”

Doug’s explicit focus was on improving not just theknowledge, but also the practices, of the communities themselves as ameta-level endeavor—improving not only the work, but the way the work was done.He saw the “co-evolution” of humans and technology as a facilitated processthat continued to develop the computational capability, the human processes,and the way they worked together. This finds expression today in the conceptsof intelligence amplification and distributed cognition, the fundamentalsbehind technology-supported collaborative, social learning.

Unfortunately, Doug was not as skilled at expressing hisvision in ways that got support. Insightful leaders would provide him resourcesto continue, but then changes in management and ownership would create impedimentsto the continued development of his work. As a consequence, his work remainedsomewhat obscure, though influential amongst a small cadre. He was a supremelykind and gentle man, with a quiet persistence that may have been as much abarrier as anything.

Yet Doug Engelbart’s foresight has provided us with a “bootstrap”(what he called the Bootstrap Alliance, now named the Doug Engelbart Institute)that he created to carry forward his vision and that pulls up our own abilityto address the problems we face. He saw technology going far beyond justpresenting information or learning, and serving as a complement to our owncognition in ways that could help us get smarter faster. As the mission statement ofthe Doug Engelbart Institute puts it so simply, his goal in life was to findout how to “dramatically boost our collective ability to solvecomplex, urgent problems on a global scale.” He told a reporter in 2001,“That’s been my pursuit all these years.” A noble pursuit, and a valuableendeavor, it was and is.

References

Bush,Vannevar. “As We May Think.” TheAtlantic Monthly. July 1945. Accessed 5 May 2016.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Engelbart, Douglas C. Augmenting HumanIntellect: A Conceptual Framework. Stanford Research Institute. October 1962.
https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

Landau,Valerie, and Eileen Clegg. TheEngelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (2008 edition:Evolving Collective Intelligence). Berkeley, CA: Next Press, 2009.
https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com 

Markoff,John. What the Dormouse Said: How the 60sCounterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York, NY: PenguinBooks,2005.