It's official!
Douglas Engelbart will be awarded the 2000 National Medal of Technology
by President Clinton at a black-tie, gala banquet in the National
Building Museum on the evening of Friday, December 1, 2000. Other
recipients of the NMT are Dean Karnen, Donald B. Keck, Robert D. Maurer,
Peter Schultz, and the IBM Corporation. President Clinton will also be
awarding National Medals of Science.
Related ceremonies will include a roundtable discussion between the
Laureates and young people who have demonstrated an aptitude for science
and engineering. This will enable young people to discuss their
interests and solicite guidance from the Laureates, who are role models
for America's youth. Plans are neing made for a webcast at approximately
10:45 a.m., November 30.
On Friday, December 1, at 10:30 a.m., a press roundtable will be held
for both science and technology Laureates in the International Trade
Center (Ronald Regan Building).
Following are the Citation and a brief biography of Doug Engelbart. In
the meantime, we are awaiting an electronic reproduction of the medal as
we are preparing a special home page (typo-free) for the
http://www.bootstrap.org
H.
Contribution Category: General Product & Process Innovation
Citation: For creating the foundations of personal computing including
continuous real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and
the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, online journals,
shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work.
Brief Biography: Dr. Engelbart, more than any other single person, set
the stage for that component of the computer revolution now called
personal computing. During the early 1960s, when the hallmark of
computing was large mainframe computers, he correctly saw that a close,
interactive, and continuous relationship between computer and its user
would yield enormous benefit in making that person motre efficient and
effective. Nor was it all vision. During that time he perfected the
notions of on-line, real-time systems that caused machines to deliver to
their users what they wanted when they wanted it, all interactively.
This work came to define the functionality of personal computing even
though some time would pass before the personal computer itself would be
affordable for an individual user. As Director of a laboratory at
Stanford Research Institute that grew to a staff of 40 to 50 members, he
and they created many of the concepts and tools of personal computing
that we take for granted over thirty years later. The concepts of
point-and-click and hypertext are just two that have come to define the
ease with which we now interact with computers. Over two dozen of the
properties and capabilities of present computers were demonstrated by
the mid-1970s (see Comprehensive Description).
As important as these contributions were, they were but stepping stones
toward Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goal of elevating the competency of an
entire organization through the augmentation of its members through
distributed computing systems. Most of the software innovations were
embedded in an integrated groupware system he called NLS, one of the
first interactibve systems anywhere. All this was made possible for the
first time at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968 in San
Fransisco. On a huge screen at the Conference, he jointly edited a
document (two cursors) with a collaborator 40 miles away at SRI in Menlo
Park.
Through video windows on each workstation, they had a full personal and
computer-based interaction. His conviction about distributed computer
systems led to his group being the second node on the fledling ARPANET
and later the Internet. His Network Information Center was the entryway
for anyone getting an address for these new networks for over twenty
years.
This early establishment of what personal and collaborative computing
should be helped create a prescription of what for how computers were to
evolve. These directions included hardware, such as cathode display
tubes and the mouse, which he invented, and network interfaces. They
included software directions such as windowing hypermedia and hypertext
shared-screen teleconferencing, and, importantly, the concepts and
methods of on-line text and graphics processing. These foundations made
it clear that computers would have this new role of continuous, proximal
support of an individual, working either alone or, through networking,
as part of a group. At least four of Dr. Engelbart's staff transferred
to Xerox Park where bit-map displays, icons and the desktop metaphor
with its overlapping windows were created. When Steve Jobs of fledgling
Apple Computer saw all this, he understood immediately the ingredients
of what came to be the MacIntosh. SRI has issued licences for the mouse
to both Xerox and Apple Computer.
So, the enablement of Moore's Law and this personalized functionality
for computers opened the doors to one of the most dramatic sector
growths in history. That Dr. Engelbart forsaw this kind of impact is
illustrated by this quote from his 1970-paper: "There will emerge a new
marketplace, representing fantastc wealth in commodities of knowledge,
service, information, processing, storage, ...." This anticipation of
the way computers should and would ultimately serve individuals clearly
helped establish the primacy of the United States in the information era
and it still enjoys the competitive advantage of that accelerated
growth.
The National Medal of Technology is "to recognize technological
innovators who have made lasting contributions to enhancing America's
competitiveness and standard of living" and whose solid science results
in "commercially successful products and services." This could not be a
more apt description of Dr. Engelbart and his life's work.
(to be continued on the site ...)
-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
eGroups eLerts
It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free!
http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/2/_/444287/_/974163684/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->
Community email addresses:
Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Nov 13 2000 - 17:11:33 PST