Douglas Engelbart

You are currently browsing articles tagged Douglas Engelbart.

“There Was No Official Driver. We All Had To Help Drive.”

July 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the wake of computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart’s death (1 + 2) and the renewed fascination with him, his 20-year-old granddaughter Emily Mangan just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit to discuss his life and work and his hopes for a hive approach to problem solving. A few exchanges follow.

________________________

Question:

If there’s one thing dream of Engelbart’s that you could have fulfilled what would it be?

Emily Mangan:

I’m not sure what it would look like or in which capacity it would be fulfilled, but his dream for the longest time was to raise the collective IQ. Collective problem solving, human minds working in tandem, to better solve the world’s problems. That’s what I’d go for.

Question:

Can you speak to what he thought might contribute most to raising the collective IQ?

Emily Mangan:

I don’t know what he thought would contribute most, but I do know he was hopeful the computer could function as a tool to aid in the communication required for collective problem solving to advance. Reddit is actually an interesting place, I think. It has most everything required to organize people in a manner beneficial for collective problem solving. However, the last few times it was tried, it didn’t work out so well (e.g. trying to catch the boston bombers). I think the potential is there though.

_______________________

Question:

This article says Doug was unable to find funding for four decades. Did he ever talk about that with you? Was he actively seeking funding for new ideas and development?

Emily Mangan:

It’s true that funding was difficult to find. I do not know the actual period of time, but funding was always scare. His ideas were often too big and grand to consider paying for. While his genius is undisputed, some considered him a crackpot and others a prophet. He always wanted to find a way to raise the collective IQ, but besides that goal, I do not know of other ideas/developments in his later years. It may have been that he just didn’t think to share them while eating ice cream with grandkids.

_______________________

Question:

Did your grandpa ever show you the future we’ll be living in 40 years from now? You can tell us.

Emily Mangan:

He actually did show me the world 40 years from now, in a way. I was probably ten years old at the time. He drew a school bus with tons of wheels with the entire world inside. The bus was rapidly approaching the future, but there was no official driver. We all had to help drive. I just through it was interesting. Might still have that drawing somewhere.

Tags: ,

“Blink, Blink, Blink, Found”

July 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A short passage about the recently deceased computer pioneer, Douglas Engelbart, from the landmark 1972 Rolling Stone tech article, “Spacewar,” written by Stewart Brand, who attended the “Mother of All Demos”:

“In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console – affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to ‘fly’ formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it’s changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend’s file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.”

Tags: ,

“I Don’t Know Why We Call It A Mouse”

July 3, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sad to hear of the passing of Douglas Engelbart, the computer pioneer most famous for his “Mother of all Demos” on December 9, 1968 in San Francisco, which introduced the mouse, video conferencing and word processing, among other pieces of the future. 

The mouse:

The whole demo:

Tags:

1968: The Year Technology Changed Forever

March 31, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

"Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator."

In Paul Allen’s forthcoming memoir, Idea Man, which is excerpted in the new Vanity Fair, the Microsoft co-founder pinpoints ten months when the technology we know today first became possible:

“That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary ‘mother of all demos’ in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a ‘killer’ application, and more.”

Tags: , , , ,

Featured Video: Demo Of Computer Mouse (1968)

December 16, 2010 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As the mouse is replaced by the touch-pad in the contemporary world of computing, let’s look back to San Francisco in 1968 when the first mouse was given a demo by its inventor, Douglas Engelbart. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” he said. “It started that way, and we never did change it.” From Engelbart’s ibiblio entry:

“Douglas Engelbart has always been ahead of his time, having ideas that seemed far-fetched at the time but later were taken for granted. For instance, as far back as the 1960s he was touting the use of computers for online conferencing and collaboration. Engelbart’s most famous invention is the computer mouse, also developed in the 1960s, but not used commercially until the 1980s. Like Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider, Engelbart wanted to use technology to augment human intellect. He saw technology, especially computers, as the answers to the problem of dealing with the ever more complex modern world and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technology to augment human intellect.”

Tags: , ,