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Doug Engelbart's Revolution
by Marcia Conner

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and a team of software developers gave the first public demonstration of a computer with a windows interface, videoconferencing, black on white text, context-sensitive help, and a mouse. They delivered this demo to 4000 stunned spectators at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Although the demo system linked to a remote mainframe computer, it sparked research that led to the development of personal computers, the graphical user interface, and more-advanced networks. It launched a disruptive revolution in the way people work, communicate and produce. If not for Douglas Engelbart, many of the technical innovations we consider vital to the personal computer revolution would not exist.

On December 9, 1998, Doug and many of the original team commemorated the 30th anniversary of the historic demo by meeting at Stanford to talk about what has happened in the last 30 years toward accomplishing the team's original goals.

While I was lucky enough to attend this event. If you were not, but have an interest in Learnativity, you will surely enjoy an intro to Engelbart and his work. His vision strongly relates to our vision. You can see a video stream of the speakers at Stanford's Unfinished Revolution web site.

Doug Engelbart's Vision

"The computer revolutionaries still fail to understand that the art and power of using a computer as a mind amplifier are not in how the amplifier works but in what amplified minds are able to accomplish." -Doug Engelbart

At 74-years old, Doug Engelbart has spent a lifetime working on creating social change through collaborative computing. His overriding vision has been that computers should augment human intelligence and the work that people are doing. He began his crusade in the 1950s and says today that his goals have changed little since then.

Most often referred to as the "father of the mouse" and groupware, his greatest innovation has been largely ignored. He envisions people using technology to "improve the collective IQ of organizations," and "build a collaborative community of knowledge workers." "The reason I invent," he says, "is to advance the evolution of society and its institutions. My crusade is to find much better ways for people to work together to make this world a better place."

Instead of going down the artificial intelligence road of his contemporaries, he believed that people already had amazing capabilities. They just didn't have the tools or techniques to dismiss tedious tasks or provide systems where people could benefit from the work of others. Later he added that systems assumed that people knew what they were doing, and that nothing was being provided to help them accomplish great things by helping them know what and how to work effectively in the system.

For instance, he didn't develop his now famous tools because they were nifty or marketable (the mouse, for instance was invented in the early 1960s but not widely used until the 1980s), but because he felt the world was in trouble and needed these tools to be more productive. He was driven by his assessment 35+ years ago that the "complexity and urgency [of world problems] are increasing exponentially, and the product of the two will soon challenge our organizations and institutions to change in quantum leaps rather than incremental steps." As a result, he set out to "to improve our collective capability to solve complex problems."

Though these ideas have driven him for the better part of 45 years, to the outside world they still remain largely ungrokked*. Engelbart's ideas, while influential, were stymied by the conventional wisdom that the best use for computers was to automate office tasks. "That notion killed us," recalled Engelbart. "I didn't see the computer as something to help us do what we already did, but to go beyond that." The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in what he calls an organization's "collective I.Q.," which would in turn supercharge a group's ability to improve itself over time. "The real power of computers lies not simply in automating work processes but in 'augmenting human intellect' to address environmental and social problems that are 'reaching the point of no return.'"

Sound familiar?

*Grok is one of Engelbart favorite terms. It means to comprehend immediately.

Why the Unfinished Revolution?

The session at Stanford was called the "Unfinished Revolution." Why unfinished?

During panel discussions throughout the day, Engelbart's former coworkers, futurists and other industry VIPs reflected on what has been accomplished in the 30 years since the demo and since Engelbart began to make his vision known.  

Denise Caruso, technology reporter for The New York Times, complained about how little progress has been made on Engelbart's vision: "It's staggering to me that we still don't have that level of ease of use [Engelbart had in that demo in 1968]."

Ted Nelson, a professor and software designer who coined the term " hypertext," spit out one-liners about the superiority of video games over interactive software: "Video games are made by people who love to play them. Office software is made by people who'd rather be doing something else on the weekend." Nelson also said that the computer has not met its fundamental goal of simulating or improving on paper. "At least with paper you can easily flip through a bunch of pages," said Nelson. "Using a computer to find anything is like opening a packing crate." Nelson also added that he's critical of most modern software applications, which he says were designed for clerks and engineers, "but not for people who think."

"The commercial packages have dumbed down computer usage into only this WYSIWYG document-oriented kind of usage," said Jeff Rulifson, who wrote 60% of the code shown in the 1968 demo, "rather than a vast information space with links in it and ways of collapsing information down and expanding it back and having different views organized in front of you. It's holding innovation back."

One of the problems with technology today, noted Engelbart, is that products seem to be developed simply because they can be. "When a groupware vendor wants to show a fancy demo, that's not good enough," said Engelbart. "He should be able to show how your organization can actually benefit from using the product."

What's the challenge still ahead?

"[In 1951] the interactive stuff was so wild that the people who knew about computers didn't want to hear about [using them to augment people's intelligence]. Back then, you didn't interact with a computer, even if you were a programmer. You gave it your question, in the form of a box of punch cards, and if you had worked very hard at stating the question correctly, you got your answer. Computers weren't meant for direct interaction. And this idea of using them to help people learn was downright blasphemy."

Engelbart's description of the lack of interaction 48 years ago isn't that different than what we have produced recently. We have systems that require input from someone who knows specifically what they are looking for. The larger challenge we have ahead of us is to build systems that augment the capabilities of each person using the system, regardless of how much they already know prior to beginning there work. If they know a lot, great, but necessary. The system should augment their intelligence too. Together we can do more than any one of us could do alone. Once again, sound familiar?

Want to learn more about Engelbart and his revolution?

Additional information and links

Organizations dedicated to Engelbart's vision

Unfinished Revolution event with links and speaker biographies http://unrev.stanford.edu

Video streaming of Unfinished Revolution session on 12/8/98 http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/

The Bootstrap Institute www.bootstrap.org

Books and interesting sites related to Engelbart's work

Howard Rheingold has put the original version of his book, Tools for Thought, online. This points you directly to the chapter entirely on Engelbart entitled, "The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker." MIT reissued this book in 2000 if you'd like you're own copy to thumb through. Wonderful! Tools for Thought, 2nd ed (MIT Press, 2000).

Engelbart's Colloquium: A class held at Stanford University in 2000. All class notes online at www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/index-.html

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. By Doug Engelbart for Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Available in HTML and Acrobat. This 133 page document was written in 1962 and explains his vision in an easy-to-read format.

The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush One of the people that inspired Engelbart's work was Vannevar Bush who urged "men of science to turn their efforts to making the increasingly unwieldy accumulation of human knowledge more accessible to individuals." [Article that Doug Engelbart read in 1951 that launched his vision]

Stanford and the Silicon Valley: Oral History Interview of Doug Engelbart December 19, 1986

A Short History of Hypertext from Jakob Nielsen's "History has a Lesson for HotJava," Alertbox (June 1995)

"A Hypermedia Timeline," Appendix A to "Entering the World-Wide Web: A Guide to Cyberspace" by Kevin Hughes, Honolulu Community College, October 1993. Updated for Integration Technologies, 1994. URL updated 12/29/01

Stanford University's MouseSite is a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.

"The Mouse that Roared: MouseSite as a Gateway to the History of Human-Computer Interaction" by Tim Lenoir, Stanford University. An introduction to MouseSite: Douglas Engelbart and the History of Human-Computer Interaction; part of the The Science and Technology in the Making project, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

History of the Internet and Web, Anthony Anderberg. URL updated 12/29/01

Timeline: Life on the Internet from PBS

A presentation entitled, "Boosting Collective IQ: For Quantum-Leap Improvement in Productivity, Effectiveness, Competitiveness" by Doug and Christina Engelbart in 1996. URL updated 12/29/01

Doug Engelbart Audio Interviews: This list is by design neither exhaustive nor alphabetical or even prioritized; the order is more or less the order in which it was recorded. It is intended to facilitate a casual atmosphere. It is really a fireside talk by Doug Engelbart on different topics, not a lecture or a strict reference work. added 12/29/01

Articles about Engelbart and the Demo

Fortune Magazine, December 23, 1996 Tools That Make Business Better and Better by Thomas A. Stewart "A Silicon Valley legend who invented the mouse and pioneered the Internet now tells us how companies can improve their ability to cope with problems..." URL updated 12/29/01

CIO, December 17, 1998 Father of the Mouse Speaks by Polly Schneider

Computerworld, 1/18/99 This revolution brought to you by ... By Sam Witt and Sean Durkin. The tree of liberty, Thomas Jefferson once wrote, must be refreshed by the blood of tyrants. "Can the PC revolution be refreshed by corporate money? That was the question that nagged us the entire day at Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, a daylong symposium at Stanford University..." URL updated 12/29/01

Leader to Leader, September 1996 (Premier Issue) a publication of the Drucker Foundation Improving Your Organization's IQ by Frances Hessselbein.

Computerworld, 4/18/97 Mouse inventor talks about groupware: Doug Engelbart believes more collaboration necessary for industry to grow. "Doug Engelbart will happily talk about inventing the first computer mouse more than 30 years ago -- but he quickly moves the conversation from the past through the present and into the future. 'The reason I invent,' he says, 'is to advance the evolution of society and its institutions. My crusade is to find much better ways for people to work together to make this world a better place.'" URL updated 12/29/01

PCWorld, December 10, 1998, 4:11 a.m. PT The Unfinished Revolution. by David Needle, special to PC World Thirty years ago Doug Engelbart gave "the mother of all demos," showing a windows interface and the mouse.

Marcia Conner and Doug Engelbart talking after a meeting at SRI in February 1999. Photo by Kent Vickery

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