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Back to the Table of Contents Page | Publication Date: Wednesday, February
21, 2001
Douglas Engelbart: Computer visionary seeks to boost people's collective ability to confront complex problems coming at a faster paceBy Marion SoftkyAlmanac Staff Writer D Even as the Atherton scientist stacks up awards for creating the foundations
of today's communications revolution -- such as the mouse and the computer
systems it serves -- Dr. Engelbart himself focuses on the even greater
challenges we still face -- collectively.
Through his long career, Dr. Engelbart has endeavored to devise models
and equipment to meld computers with humans in ways that would allow people
and organizations to address the kinds of problems that come up in an increasingly
complex world.
"The scale of change, and the rate of change, and the pervasiveness
of change are dizzying," he says in a wide-ranging interview in his Atherton
living room. "We've never had to deal with that. It could absolutely collapse
our society."
Meanwhile, Dr. Engelbart is getting more and more recognition for past
contributions to the technology that has revolutionized the way the world
communicates.
In December, he traveled to Washington to receive the National Medal
of Technology for 2000, for "creating the foundations of personal computing."
In presenting the award, Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta cited Dr.
Engelbart, "whose invention of the computer mouse, whose concepts of point-and-click,
hypertext linking, and other innovations, helped move the incredible power
of computing into the hands of ordinary people."
Dr. Curtis Carlson, president and CEO of SRI International, where Dr.
Engelbart did his seminal work in the 1960s, added, "His work touches the
lives of nearly everyone in the world -- in business, education, entertainment
and our daily lives."
Back in the 1950s, the Atherton resident forged a vision of how computers
-- then considered only as fancy calculators -- could be used to magnify
human intelligence. In the 1960s at then-Stanford Research Institute, he
and his team of computer whizzes crafted a set of tools that could enable
people and organizations to harness the growing power of computers to meet
the exploding challenges of the coming times.
Besides the omni-present mouse, they developed hypertext linking, which
allows you to hop around documents and Web sites; real-time text editing;
integration of text and graphics; on-line journals; shared-screen teleconferencing;
and technology that allowed people to collaborate on problems from different
remote locations.
In 1969, Dr. Engelbart's SRI laboratory received the first message on
the ARPAnet, predecessor to today's Internet.
Turning point
Dr. Engelbart presided at the famous demonstration December 9, 1968,
that launched today's computer-driven revolution in communications. He
sat on the stage at San Francisco Civic Auditorium at a major computer
conference and demonstrated the technologies developed at SRI to a packed
house.
For 90 minutes, Dr. Engelbart used his mouse to manipulate text and
pictures on a giant screen. He reorganized a grocery list, communicated
with co-workers at SRI in Menlo Park, 35 miles away, and put their pictures
on the screen. He collaborated on-line with a colleague in Menlo Park;
pointers from both their mice flicked around the screen as they jointly
revised a document.
Two thousand people gave him a standing ovation. And all at once people
began to realize what computers could do.
"It was stunning," says Bob Taylor of Woodside, who won the 1999 Medal
of Technology for his contributions to developing personal computers and
the Internet. "It really waked a lot of people up to a whole new way of
thinking about computers -- not just as number crunchers."
Dr. Engelbart's reaction was simpler. "I was so relieved. So many things
could have broken," he says, recalling the jury-rigged setup, and the antennas
carrying the message from Menlo Park to a truck on Skyline with antennas
that connected to roof of the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. "It took
a lot of nerve."
Takeoff
After that, the economic juggernaut that led to personal computers and
the Internet took off.
And Dr. Engelbart was left behind, pursuing his vision of far more powerful
systems that would help people collaborate more effectively to solve the
big problems -- many of which were complicated and speeded up by the technologies
he helped launch.
"That's the big, big thing that's so important: How do we increase the
capability of people to deal collectively with urgent complex problems?
That's been my pursuit all these years," he says.
For 30 years, Dr. Engelbart has plugged away at developing the human
and organizational side of the equation as the computer-tool side zoomed
ahead. Until 1978, he continued at SRI, then moved to Tymshare, where his
project was renamed AUGMENT. In 1984, he moved on to McDonnell Douglas
when it bought Tymshare.
When McDonnell-Douglas shut down his program in 1989, Dr. Engelbart
founded the Bootstrap Institute to pursue his concepts of "bootstrapping"
-- human-computer systems to promote collaboration and raise people's collective
IQ. Ironically, he's working in offices in Fremont provided by mouse-maker
Logitech, which has sold more than 300 million of the skittery devices
first invented at SRI about 1964.
Thirty years after the demonstration, Stanford sponsored an all-day
seminar devoted to looking at how far the computer revolution had come,
and how far it would go. It was called "Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution."
Are Dr. Engelbart's ideas still valid and important? Yes, says futurist
Paul Saffo of Menlo Park's Institute for the Future. "Doug Engelbart stands
as the single most misunderstood pioneer in the history of computing. His
ideas are still ahead of their time."
Patrick Lincoln of Woodside, current head of computer science at SRI,
is another Engelbart fan. "Yes, he's outdated," he says. "He's a thousand
years ahead of his time."
Vision
Doug Engelbart got his calling in 1951 when he had just become engaged
to marry. Driving to work as an electrical engineer at Ames Laboratory
in Mountain View, he contemplated his professional future.
"I looked downstream at work into one long, uneventful hallway," he
recalls. "I had no proper goals that interested me."
He thought of the 5-1/2 million minutes before he was 65, and wondered
what he wanted to do with his life.
In the rigorous order in which he still thinks, young Mr. Engelbart
decided: "Step 1. Why don't I try to maximize the value of my career in
the sense of how to benefit mankind?
"Can you imagine that?" he says, in the spare living room designed by
his late wife, Ballard, who died three years ago. "To this day I don't
know where that came from."
Over the next months, he pondered various crusades, eventually focusing
on how to solve problems that are so complicated they have to be solved
collectively by a lot of people.
Enter computers. The bulky, new-fangled machines were cumbersome and
expensive then, but they offered unexplored possibilities to improve people's
ability to deal collectively with complex and urgent problems. "That gave
me a goal," he says.
Oregon childhood
The future visionary grew up in an idyllic setting on a one-acre farm
near Portland, Oregon, during the Depression. He helped milk the cow and
tend the chickens and garden. He played in the creek and rambled in the
90 acres of untouched forest behind the farm.
"Those woods and that creek made such a marvelous environment," he reflects.
"They shaped the way I think."
Young Doug took two years off from studying electrical engineering at
Oregon State University to serve in the Navy at the end of World War II.
As an electronics technician in the Philippines, he worked with radar
-- and learned you can display information on a screen. Later he realized,
"If a radar screen can do that, so can a computer."
After receiving a degree in electrical engineering in 1948, Mr. Engelbart
came to the Bay Area, and began developing his vision for computers.
Swimming upstream already, he looked for a place to get a Ph.D. and
found there was no such thing as a computer science department; he settled
on the University of California at Berkeley, where they were at least building
an experimental computer. In 1955, he got his doctor's degree; his thesis
was on plasma devices, not computers.
Looking for a job where he could pursue his dreams of enlisting computers
to augment human endeavors, Dr. Engelbart found that Berkeley, Stanford,
and Hewlett-Packard were not interested. In 1957, he went to work at Stanford
Research Institute.
In 1962 Dr. Engelbart published the seminal paper outlining his vision.
In 132 pages, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" laid
a path toward much of what has happened to this day in computers, and even
more than hasn't.
Speed
When Dr. Engelbart first started dreaming, a computer was made with
vacuum tubes. It filled a room; it got instructions from punched cards.
"It was so hard to find people to take us seriously when computers were
so big and expensive," he recalls. "But I realized that inevitably they
would get smaller and smaller, and faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper.
I realized that might happen in my lifetime"
During these technically tumultuous years, Dr. Engelbart, a soft-spoken
man with a quirky sense of humor, lived in Atherton with his family. He
and Ballard raised four children who went through local schools. Now he
enjoys nine grandchildren.
His daughter, Christina, who helped found Bootstrap Institute, remembers
enjoying outdoor activities with her father -- hiking, camping, canoeing,
and folk dance parties on Skyline at the late Gerda Isenberg's. In fact,
Dr. Engelbart's oldest daughter is named Gerda, after Mrs. Isenberg.
There was also a dark time. In 1976, as SRI was winding down Dr. Engelbart's
project, his house burned down in the middle of the night, as the family
escaped in pajamas. It took years and lawsuits to rebuild. "It was very
depressing," Dr. Engelbart acknowledges.
Takeoff
Dr. Engelbart winces at the word "user-friendly." It typifies the direction
that the computer revolution took after his 1968 demonstration wakened
the world to their power.
Several of his staff scientists went to Xerox PARC, where the foundations
of the personal computer and the Internet were developed.
At PARC and later Apple and elsewhere, the emphasis was on office automation,
and making computers accessible, while Dr. Engelbart was still pushing
for more attention to larger questions of building better human systems.
"They were not into hypertext and collaboration," he says.
They didn't even use all the power in the SRI programs, he grumbles.
In SRI's hypertext, one could jump to any word or line in a document, not
just a location, he says. And he believes his 1970 version of Windows was
better. "We used them in a more usable way," he says. But he particularly
objects to the dumbing down of computers for the most basic user, and the
philosophy of "easy to use; natural to learn." He is more interested in
developing capability than ease of use.
Dr. Engelbart likes to use the metaphor of a bicycle and tricycle. The
tricycle is easier to learn, but a bicycle does more.
Dr. Engelbart then suggests having different user interfaces available
for people of different skills or purpose -- like pilot licenses, which
can be issued for daytime only, instrument flying, or higher levels.
From hunter-gatherers
Dr. Engelbart takes the long view.
Ever since hunter-gatherers evolved into farmers, people have evolved
to accommodate new technologies, he argues.
"Just think," he says. People stopped roaming and settled down. They
got better housing, discovered commerce, created villages and then towns,
aristocracies, war, and writing.
"Every really significant technical inventions was followed by years
of evolution of society," he says. "Society changes in all sorts of ways
to get value from inventions.
Phones and railroads changed the way we communicate. "They changed the
whole way a community operates."
And so it should be with computers and the new wave of communication,
Dr. Engelbart says. "If you suddenly get an invention, you have to expect
co-evolution -- evolution of the social and cultural life that goes along
with the invention."
Bootstrapping into the future
Because computer power and speed are doubling every few years, there's
a tremendous challenge to co-evolve human systems to match them.
"We're going full speed ahead with no headlights," is the way his daughter
Christina Engelbart puts it. "To solve the problems of today and the future,
organizations need better ways to work together."
Dr. Engelbart lays his hope for managing the computer future in the
concept of bootstrapping -- derived from the metaphor of pulling yourself
up by your bootstraps.
"As soon as we make headway, we should be able to improve the improvement
process. That is, the better I get, the better I get at getting better,"
Dr. Engelbart says. "It's compound interest; it's positive feedback."
Ever since his 1962 paper, Dr. Engelbart has been developing models
to improve the co-evolution of computers with human organizations to boost
collaboration, and to create what he calls "high performance organizations."
Now his Bootstrap Insitute aims to help companies and organizations
utilize his techniques.
Dr. Engelbart has had it with commercial development. "People keep telling
me the marketplace will take care of it. It won't" he says.
Instead, he is planning a system of open software that can be distributed
free over the Internet. People can download it, adapt it, change it, use
it. "It's got to have an evolving capability and more flexibility than
any proprietary software can have," he says.
For example, he and enthusiastic volunteer helpers are working to refine
his system for open hypertext documents to be released to the public. "It's
going to evolve. We've got to get the process going," he says. "It can
apply in different domains -- engineering, medicine, music, poetry, biology,
business."
Now SRI has rejoined the effort, and is looking for government funding
to prepare Dr. Engelbart's systems for launching over the Internet. Dr.
Lincoln calls it a viral model. "We give it to people and they give it
to one another, and it spreads," he says hopefully.
What about examples? "How can we collectively develop an energy plan?"
Dr. Engelbart asks. "What are we going to do about the inevitable depletion
of fossil fuels, which is 25-30 years off?"
The Bootstrap Institute is located 6505 Kaiser Drive, Fremont, CA,
94555. Call 510-713-3550, or log onto www.bootstrap.org.
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