Douglas C. Engelbart (b.1923)
"Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking." 1 

Douglas Engelbart  is one of the true visionaries who has greatly influenced the way in which humans and computers interact. His goal has always been to use computers to augment the collective human capabilities for dealing with the complex, urgent problems. He work is greatly influenced by Vannevar Bush's,  As we may think . 

Every person who uses the personal computer owes a little bit to Doug Engelbart. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart revealed his revolutionary prototype NLS(oN Line System, see picture below). This system for the first time introduced  a select group of scientists to the first glimpse of many of Engelbart's brilliant inventions including the mouse, windows, display editing, groupwarel, word  processing, on-line networking and hypertext. This led on to the development of the the personal computer technology, that is so omnipresent today. 

Douglas Engelbart completed his Bachelors Degree in E.E. in 1948. He settled contentedly on the San Francisco peninsula as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA).  

However, within three years he grew restless, feeling there was something more important he should be working on, dedicating his career to. He thought about the world's problems, and what he as an engineer might possibly be able to do about them.  As a radar technician he had seen how information could be displayed on a screen. He began to envision people sitting in front of displays, "flying around" in an information space where they could formulate and organize their ideas with incredible speed and flexibility. So he applied to the graduate program in Electrical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley to launch his new crusade. 

He earned his Ph.D. in 1955, along with a half dozen patents in "bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices". He settled on a research position at SRI (then Stanford Research Institute), where he earned another dozen patents in two years working on magnetic computer components, fundamental digital-device phenomena, and miniaturization scaling potential. 

Then in 1963 he finally got the funds to start his own research lab, which he later dubbed the Augmentation Research Center. He began by developing the kind of technology he believed would be required to augment our human intellect, and also to 
support the bootstrapping/augmentation process. NLS was the product of his research here.  The list of pioneering technogical firsts in NLS is long and includes many things that we take for granted today.  

In keeping with his Augmentation framework, Engelbart incorporated psychology and organizational development into his research. He also believed very strongly that the human-tool co-evolution should be based on rigorous exploratory use in a wide variety of real-world applications. 

In 1977 Tymshare bought the commercial rights to NLS. There the focus switched from R&D to commercialization, and in spite of Engelbart's efforts, the human/organizational work was cut off.  In 1984 Tymshare was acquired by McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where Engelbart began working closely with the aerospace components on issues of integrated information system architectures and associated evolutionary strategies.  

In 1989 Engelbart founded the  Bootstrap Institute to to pursue in earnest his comprehensive strategy for bootstrapping organizations into the 21st century. The  focus of theBootstrap Institute, and Douglas Engelbart, is to help organizations transform into high-performance organizations. His focus continues to be in creating 
high-performance organizations by fostering bootstrapping communities, researching and developing and deploying these capabilities on a continuous improvement basis, with pro-active participation from stakeholders in government, industry, and 
society.  

Over the years Douglas Engelbart has received numerous awards for his pioneering work. He has authored over 25 publications and he holds 20 patents including the patent for the mouse.  

I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me "just a dreamer." That offended me, the "just" part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing your dreams.

Douglas Engelbart by his vision and invention has changed the way we work and create. 
 

 Pioneering firsts in NLS

  • the mouse
  • 2-dimensional display editing
  • in-file object addressing, linking
  • hypermedia
  • outline processing
  • flexible view control
  • multiple windows
  • cross-file editing
  • integrated hypermedia email
  • hypermedia publishing
  • document version control
  • shared-screen teleconferencing
  • computer-aided meetings
  • formatting directives
  • context-sensitive help
  • distributed client-server architecture
  • uniform command syntax
  • universal "user interface" front-end module
  • multi-tool integration
  • grammar-driven command language interpreter
  • protocols for virtual terminals
  • remote procedure call protocols 
  • compileable "Command Meta Language" 

Honors

  • 1987 PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award
  • 1990 ACM Software System Award
  • 1991 Coors American Ingenuity Award, presented at the NAM Congress of American Industry in Washington, D.C.
  • 1993 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
  • 1994 Price Waterhouse Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the 1994 Computerworld-Smithsonian awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. 
  • 1994 Honorary Doctorate Degree from Oregon State University 
  • 1994 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1997 Inductee into the Discovery Online Hackers' Hall of Fame.  
References:  
  1.  Dreaming of the future-Douglas Engelbart. 
  2.  Douglas Engelbart's home page at the Bootstrap institute. 
  3.  The timeline at San Francisco State University. 
  4.  Douglas Engelbart's photo gallery at ACM. 
  5.  Vannevar Bush symposium pages, MIT.