Engelbart, Douglas

1925–  ) American

Computer Engineer

Douglas Engelbart invented key elements of today’s graphi-cal user interface, including the use of windows, hypertext links, and the ubiquitous mouse. Engelbart grew up on a small farm near Portland, Oregon, and acquired a keen interest in electronics. His electrical engineering studies at Oregon State University were interrupted by wartime service in the Philippines as a radar technician. During that time he read a seminal article by Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” Bush presented a wide-ranging vision of an automated, interlinked text system not unlike the development that would become hypertext and the World Wide Web (see Bush, Vannevar).

After returning to college for his Ph.D. (awarded in 1955), Engelbart worked for NACA (the predecessor of NASA) at the Ames Laboratory. Continuing to be inspired by Bush’s vision, Engelbart conceived of a computer dis-play that would allow the user to visually navigate through information displays. Engelbart received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1955 at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley, taught there a few years, and then went to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a hotbed of futur-istic ideas. In 1962, Engelbart wrote a seminal paper of his own, titled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Concep-tual Framework.” In this paper Engelbart emphasized the computer not as a mere aid to calculation, but as a tool that would enable people to better visualize and organize complex information to meet the increasing challenges of the modern world. The hallmark of Engelbart’s approach to computing would continue to be his focus on the central role played by the user.

In 1963, Engelbart left SRI and formed his own research lab, the Augmentation Research Center. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked on implementing linked text systems (see hypertext and hypermedia). In order to help users interact with the computer display, he came up with the idea of a device that could be moved to control a pointer on the screen. Soon called the “mouse,” the device would become ubiquitous in the 1980s.

Engelbart also took a key interest in the development of the ARPANET (ancestor of the Internet) and adapted his NLS hypertext system to help coordinate network develop-ment. (However, the dominant form of hypertext on the Internet would be Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web—(see Berners-Lee, Tim.) In 1989, Engelbart founded the Boot-strap Institute, an organization dedicated to improving the collaboration within organizations, and thus their perfor-mance. During the 1990s, this nurturing of new businesses and other organizations would become his primary focus.

Engelbart received the MIT-Lemuelson Award and the a.m. Turing Award in 1997 and the National Medal of Tech-nology in 2000. Public recognition of Engelbart’s work and ideas about human-computer interaction was also reflected in a Stanford University symposium called “Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution.”