SAN FRANCISCO - Douglas C. Engelbart, a technologist who
conceived of the computer mouse died on Tuesday Engelbart had suffered from
poor health and died peacefully in his sleep, his daughter, Christina, told
friends in an email.
Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in
his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long
presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to
decades later as the "mother of all demos."
Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists
in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research
Institute, showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y
position indicator for a display system." It was the mouse's public debut.
Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 30
miles away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of
how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea
that would later form the bedrock of the Web's architecture.
At a time when computing was largely pursued by government
researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or
enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon
Valley success. He never received any royalties for the mouse, for instance,
which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple Computer.
He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers
could be used to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described
with zeal and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly
productive workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating
information on shared computers.
"The possibilities we are pursuing involve an
integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction
with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and
-portrayal skills," he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.
His work, he argued with typical conviction, "competes
in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power,
exploring outer space, or conquering cancer."
By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including
the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award. He lived in comfort in
Atherton, a leafy suburb near Stanford University.
At the same time, he wrestled with his fade into obscurity
even as technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates built fortunes
off of the personal computer and became celebrity billionaires by realizing
some of his early ideas.
In 2005, he told Tom Foremski, a technology journalist, that
he felt the last two decades of his life had been a "failure" because
he could not receive funding for his research or "engage anybody in a
dialogue."
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in
Portland to a radio repairman father and a homemaker mother.
He enrolled at Oregon State University, but was drafted into
the U.S. Navy and shipped to the Pacific before he could graduate. He resolved
to change the world as a computer scientist after coming across a 1945 article
by Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research, while
scouring a Red Cross library in a native hut in the Philippines, he told an
interviewer years later.
After returning to the United States to complete his degree,
Engelbart took a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley,
after Stanford declined to hire him because his research seemed too removed
from practical applications.
He took a job at SRI in 1957, and by the early-1960s
Engelbart led a team had begun to seriously investigate tools for interactive
computing.
After coming back from a computer graphics conference in
1961, Engelbart sketched a design and tasked Bill English, an engineering
colleague, to carve a prototype out of wood. Engelbart's team considered other
designs, including a device that would be affixed to the underside of a table
and controlled by the knee, but the desktop mouse won out. SRI would later
license the technology for $40,000 to Apple, which released the first
commercial mouse with its Lisa computer in 1983.
By the late 1970s, Engelbart's research group was acquired
by a company called Tymshare, and he struggled to secure funding for his work
or return to the same heights of influence.
In his later years he founded a management seminar program
called the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina.
He is survived by Karen O'Leary Engelbart, his second wife,
and four children: Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman. His wife Ballard died in
1997.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment