Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Carl Engelbart (30 January 1925, Portland, Oregon – 2 July 2013, Atherton, California) is remembered as the inventor of the mouse. To him that was never the subject; it was a by-product of the subject. What he worked on for half a century was a single proposition: that the human capacity to deal with complex, urgent problems can itself be raised.

Where It Started: A Hut on Leyte

He graduated from Portland's Franklin High School in 1942 and, partway through his undergraduate years at Oregon State, joined the US Navy, serving two years in the Philippines as a radio and radar technician. It was there, in a stilt hut on Leyte, that he read Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" (1945). Bush's argument — that a recording machine might extend human memory and thought — became the floor his later work stood on.

After the war: a BS in electrical engineering from Oregon State (1948), then an MS and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1955), on gas-conduction electronics for digital computers. In 1957 he settled at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), initially working for Hewitt Crane on magnetic devices and the miniaturisation of electronics, earning patents of his own in the field.

1962: Write the Framework First

What sets Engelbart apart is that he wrote the theory before he built the apparatus. In October 1962 SRI published his report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (AFOSR-3223), funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The argument runs roughly thus. A person confronts a problem not alone but as a system of language, artefacts, methodology and training — H-LAM/T in his notation — and a computer should be designed as a component of that whole system rather than as a faster calculator. Capability is raised recursively: you improve your own tools while using them to improve your tools. He called that bootstrapping, and it was the organising principle of everything he built afterwards.

Every concrete artefact that followed — the mouse, the windows, the links — has its design rationale in that report.

ARC and NLS

With Air Force funding secured, he established the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) inside SRI around 1963; it grew to 47 people at its peak. The system it produced was NLS, the oN-Line System. The 1968 paper describes it running on an SDS 940 serving twelve CRT workstations at once.

The mouse was conceived in 1961, during a conference on computer graphics: two small wheels rolling on a tabletop, one turning horizontally and one vertically, would let a computer track a position from the combination of their rotations. The first prototype — perpendicular wheels in a hollowed-out wooden block with a button on top — was built in the autumn of 1964 by Bill English, ARC's lead engineer. A patent application was filed in 1967 and granted in 1970 as "X-Y position indicator for a display system", US 3,541,541. Engelbart said he could not remember who first called it a mouse, and was surprised the name held.

ARC ran comparative experiments against joysticks, light pens and a knee-operated control; the mouse won on both speed and error rate. It was not a hunch. It was measured and then chosen.

Then came the ninety-minute demonstration in San Francisco on 9 December 1968, where the mouse, on-screen windows, link-following, structured editing and shared-screen collaboration with remote colleagues were all shown as one working system.

Into the Network

In 1969 ARC became the second host on the ARPANET. When UCLA sent the first host-to-host message on 29 October that year, the machine at the other end was ARC's SDS 940. Engelbart proposed a Network Information Center to make resource sharing workable, and ARC ran it. The first shared directory of knowledge on a computer network lived in his laboratory.

Afterwards

SRI sold the commercial rights to NLS to Tymshare in 1977, and Engelbart moved there in 1978. Tymshare was acquired by McDonnell Douglas in 1984; he left in 1989 and founded the Bootstrap Institute — later the Doug Engelbart Institute — with his daughter Christina Engelbart.

Most of his ideas reached the world through other people's products. ARC staff moved to Xerox PARC, where the work became the Alto and Smalltalk, and from there — by way of the Macintosh — it reached ordinary desks. The mouse became a commodity in the mid-1980s, after the 1970 patent had run.

Honours

• 1997 — ACM A.M. Turing Award
• 1997 — Lemelson–MIT Prize ($500,000)
• December 2000 — US National Medal of Technology, presented by President Clinton
• 2001 — BCS Lovelace Medal
• 2005 — Computer History Museum Fellow

The Unfinished Part

In later life Engelbart said repeatedly that only the apparatus half of his idea had been adopted. Mice, windows and hypertext became unremarkable. What sat at the centre of his framework — groups building knowledge together and continuously improving the method by which they do it — largely did not. His work was taken up as a set of tools for individual productivity and declined as a discipline for collective intelligence. Of everything shown in 1968, that is the part still outstanding.