Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor who helped launch the field of human–computer interaction. He is most famous for his work at the Augmentation Research Center Lab at SRI International, where his team created the computer mouse, developed hypertext, linked computers into networks, and built early versions of graphical user interfaces. They showed off these innovations at a 1968 event now called The Mother of All Demos.

Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. His ancestry included German, Swedish, and Norwegian roots. He was the middle child, with an older sister, Dorianne, and a younger brother, David. The family lived in Portland until he was eight, then moved to the countryside along Johnson Creek. His father died a year later. He graduated from Portland’s Franklin High School in 1942.

During his undergraduate years at Oregon State University, he took a two-year break to serve in the U.S. Navy as a radio and radar technician in the Philippines. While on the island of Leyte, in a small hut on stilts, he read Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think,” which deeply influenced his thinking. He returned to Oregon State and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1948. At Oregon State, he was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He then worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Ames Research Center, maintaining wind tunnels. In his free time, he enjoyed hiking, camping, and folk dancing. There he met Ballard Fish, who was finishing her training as an occupational therapist; they married in Portola State Park on May 5, 1951. Soon after, he left Ames to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a master’s degree in 1953 and a PhD in 1955, both in electrical engineering with a focus on computers.

Engelbart’s career direction came into focus in December 1950, when he was engaged and realized he had no real goals beyond a steady job and marriage. Over several months, he reasoned that he should aim to make the world better, which would require organized efforts to harness collective human intellect. If he could dramatically improve how people worked together, he could boost every effort to solve important problems. Computers, he decided, could be the vehicle for that improvement. He had read Bush’s article in 1945 and knew from his radar work that information could be displayed on a screen. He imagined knowledge workers at display “workstations,” navigating information space and pooling their intellect to solve problems. This mission—harnessing collective intellect through interactive computers—became his life’s work at a time when computers were seen only as number crunchers.

As a graduate student at Berkeley, he helped build the CALDIC computer and earned eight patents from his research. After finishing his PhD, he stayed on as an assistant professor for a year but left when he realized he couldn’t pursue his vision there. He then started a company, Digital Techniques, to commercialize his storage-device research, but after a year he abandoned it to focus on the research he had dreamed of since 1951.

He joined SRI International (then the Stanford Research Institute) and led the Augmentation Research Center. With funding mostly from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (later DARPA), his team developed the oN-Line System (NLS). NLS included the computer mouse, bitmapped screens, word processing, and hypertext—all demonstrated at the 1968 Mother of All Demos. In the late 1970s, the lab moved from SRI to Tymshare, which was bought by McDonnell Douglas in 1984. There, NLS was renamed Augment (now managed by the Doug Engelbart Institute). At both Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas, Engelbart struggled with a lack of interest in his ideas and limited funding, and he retired in 1986.

In 1988, Engelbart and his daughter Christina launched the Bootstrap Institute (later the Doug Engelbart Institute) to promote his vision, especially at Stanford University. This effort secured some DARPA funding to update Augment’s user interface.

Engelbart received the 1997 ACM Turing Award. In December 2000, President Bill Clinton gave him the National Medal of Technology, the highest U.S. technology award. In December 2008, SRI honored him at the 40th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos.