Engelbart, Douglas

1925–

U.S. Inventor, Theorist

Doug Engelbart is a pioneer in the area of human-computer communications, and is one of the early visionaries of both the personal computer and the Internet. His theories on using computers and software to augment the human intellect led to the development of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the computer mouse. Believing that the complexity of the problems facing the world are growing faster than our ability to solve them, Engelbart has dedicated himself to the notion of using computers to augment the collective human intelligence.

Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925. After spending two years at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he learned radar technology, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy, where he served from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he returned to Oregon State and received his B.S. in electrical engineering. Upon his graduation in 1948, he took a job at the Ames Navy Research Center in Mountain View, California, where he worked as an electrical [Page 183]engineer. While there, he began to work on his personal crusade to improve human capability–what he called the “augmentation of the human intellect.”

Influenced by cybernetics (the science of communication and control), Engelbart proposed a technical solution to the development of human intellect—using the computer. He enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1956. That year, Engelbart also joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, a center for sponsored industrial research. His interest as an engineer was not in the technical side of things, but in the social and human aspects of technology, and particularly in how the computer could be used as a tool to serve the desires of the user. He was influenced by Vannevar Bush (who wrote “As We May Think,” an early precursor to hypertext's development) and by J. C. R. Licklider's “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which conceptualized interactive computing. In 1962, Engelbart published “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect,” in which he made an argument for the development of online libraries, and for storing and retrieving documents electronically.

In the late 1950s, the U.S. federal government developed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), whose objective was to fund new research projects to boost technological innovation. In 1963, ARPA funded Engelbart's research at SRI on a process designed to move computer technology into a new realm. Engelbart dubbed this process “bootstrapping,” derived from the metaphor of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Bootstrapping, which refers to an iterative and co-adaptive learning environment, did not focus on a specific product, but on a process that involved the coevolution of the user along with the computer. Engelbart's laboratory was called the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), and the research program the Framework for the Augmentation of Human Intellect. Engelbart's premise was that computers should serve as a powerful auxiliary to human communication. Augmentation would allow for the development of greater human intellect by allowing machines to perform the mechanical part of thinking and idea sharing.

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