Hi kids! Working on a report, or just here for fun? Come in and learn about Doug Engelbart, who was a computer pioneer as well as a grandpa. You can read about his computer stuff
below. As far as being a grandpa, he would always make up stories
about a really intelligent, really little magical dog named Fifi
who can make himself really tiny or even invisible and fly around
in a miniature spaceship and cause mischief. He especially liked
the mischief part.
Doug was a kid once too (and he swore he never stopped being one!).
He used to do tricks on his bicycle and tease his sister and stuff.
He grew up on the edge of a little creek near the woods up in Oregon
where he liked to go exploring. If you had met him he would
have probably shaken your hand and then said 'Hey, let go of my hand!' and no
matter how hard you tried to let go you just couldn't seem to and he
would just keep shaking your hand. One way to get him to let go of
your hand was to ask really nice 'Can you take off your thumb?'
and he just might do this magic trick with his thumb.
The main thing to know about Doug Engelbart
is not that he invented the mouse. The first
main thing to know is that he started out trying to find better
ways for people to work together on big problems so we could make
the world a better place to live in. So kids all over the world
can feel safe and happy and grow up to make the world even better.
He wondered "How can we get really good at solving problems
like world hunger, pollution and global climate change, war, making
schools better places to learn, and so on?" He started asking
"What would it take? What would help? How can I help make
it happen? What would it be worth to the world if we could get
really really good at solving big complex urgent problems?"
and this started his whole career, and this is what our Institute is still
working on today. Since he had studied in college to be an engineer,
and had been reading about the first computers, and had been trained
on fancy new stuff called radar in World War II, he figured he
could put that all together into a way that problem solvers could
sit at "workingstations" and fly around their information
space working on solutions together. That was in the 1950s.
The second main thing to know is that,
before he started experimenting in a laboratory and building his computer
stuff, he worked out a strategy for how he was going
to do it. He called this his bootstrapping strategy,
where he and his programmers and engineers would build the computer
in his lab, and they could all use it immediately
to help their teamwork in the lab. After all, they were working
together on a complex problem – how to build a revolutionary
computer system – so if it worked really well for them,
it should work for anybody working on any complex problem. And
then they got people outside their laboratory to start using it
so they could report back their ideas for making it better, and
then got them working together on the question of how
to help other people get started, and got it spreading out from
there. Because of Doug's vision and strategy, his lab had this
really fast learning curve, and out of that they created more
innovations than probably any other computer lab ever has. Also,
for Doug it was never about computers or being an inventor, it
was always about people and information linking together in new
ways, and computers were just the vehicle for being a pioneer
in that new frontier. He was not about inventing gadgets, he was about unleashing human potential.
"Father of the Mouse" - (actually he was the father of 4 kids and 9 grandkids, but hey) this is one of our many exhibits, about how he invented the mouse and why he wanted to in the first place, plus a link to a short video interview of him explaining it himself.
Watch highlights from the
"Mother of All Demos" (1968)
Want to see a demo? Check out Doug's very famous
1968
demo highlights on YouTube! To really appreciate this,
you have to understand that at that time almost everyone
else working on computers thought it was all about computation
- like computers are to compute stuff like giant
calculators working hard mathematical equations for people
working in labs; you get in line for your turn to feed
your data and instructions into a computer, and crunch,
crunch, crunch, for hours and hours, it would work those
calculations, and come back with results punched out on
some 'punch cards' or 'paper tape' and then the computer
would forget you ever asked because it had hardly any
memory or disk space. And next time you needed something
you fed in your punch cards from last time and gave more
instructions and so on.
And here is Doug Engelbart sitting
there using a computer through a display monitor (!) and
the computer was just sitting there responding to his every command (!) and he's using it
for writing stuff (!) and when he edits you instantly
see the changes on the screen POW (!). This is the first
time the world saw his vision for the future of team work, and his inventions like the mouse and the
keyset, hypertext, and online collaboration. Check out
where he has a 'bug fight'
with his co-worker! Visit our 1968 Demo Exhibit for more.
In the News - articles for kids in Kiddle, SuperKids, Nickelodeon Magazine, ... telling the story of some of Doug Engelbart's thinking and key inventions.
Check it out!
Timeline in Tech History
- this is a timeline of computer
history from "Soft Schools", where you'll see 1968 yours truly Doug Engelbart. Actually
he started on his work in 1959, published a huge report on his
ideas in 1962, got modest funding for his ideas in 1963, with a small team got his first working system in operation with
a display workstation while inventing the mouse in 1964, and
kept growing his team of researchers and expanding on what his
lab could do, and then gave the big
demo in 1968. He kept pursing this research and development for
another 10 years at SRI, gradually making it commercially
available to large government organizations and companies interested
in experimenting with new ways of working together. This was 1978,
still years before the first Macintosh computer, when half the people
believed you could only learn how to use a computer if you were
a math wiz, and the other half believed that computers in the
office should only be used by secretaries because professionals
should not be expected to type on a keyboard. And most all of
them believed that computers were only for grown ups. So all along,
Doug and his team were way ahead of their time! And we are still working away on his ideas for how to
get people to work together in more brilliant ways to make the world a better place!
Internet History -
By 1969 the computer in Doug Engelbart's lab was the second computer to be connected
to the first computer network (way before the internet). The reason they hooked him in so early
on is because, of all the labs they were planning to link up,
his lab was tasked with running the Network Information Center, where all the users coming online could
find out which computers were in the network and what you could use
them for. They even published names of all the users
and their email addresses so you could communicate with anyone
on the network. Can you imagine how thick that first directory of users
was printed out? Try half a page! It grew, of course, until now
it would be crazy to try to print out a list of all the email addresses
on the internet! Also, in those days we didn't have to worry about
spam or hackers or computer viruses or anything like that. And
most of the early users of the network logged in from their handy
dandy teletypes
since display technology back then was very expensive.
Older kids can learn more from browsing the rest of our site.
You might want to start with the:
Our Library - check out his biographical
sketch, and on the right there are links to his historical involvement
in the mouse, hypertext, the internet etc. for more in-depth background
information.
And while you're at it, you might want to test drive
this:
HyperScope
Tutorial - our HyperScope prototype adds some zooming buttons to your browser
and lets you zoom around, jump around, and get different views
of the webpage. A bit buggy still, the HyperScope lets you see first hand some of
the browsing features that Doug would like to see become as widespread
as the mouse.
One thing that can be really hard in life is feeling ridiculed
or embarrassed, especially in middle school and high school when
other kids can be especially cruel. When Doug was growing up,
he was poor and milked the cow before he walked across several
cow pastures to get to school in his dirty boots - you can imagine
how he might have been teased! And then, as an adult, his ideas
were so different from the rest of his peers, he was told over
and over that he was wrong, crazy, unacceptable, but he knew inside
that he was onto something important, so he thought of this quote
– and you might feel better remembering this too –
that if you can handle more and more embarrassment instead of
bending to peer pressure, you can mature alot faster! Here's how
Doug puts it:
"The rate at which a person can mature is
directly proportional to the amount of embarrassment
he can tolerate."
– Doug Engelbart
Can you guess who this is
shaking Doug's hand? President Clinton – when Doug was
awarded the President's Medal of Technology for his lifetime
achievements in Nov. 2000. And yes, Doug did let go of
his hand, and without even doing the magic trick with
his thumb.
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