<nettime> RIP: Douglas Engelbart

[nettime's historical fader <nettime@kein.org>]

Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse and so much more,
dies at 88

In December 1968, his "Mother of all Demos" changed computing forever.
-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yJDv-zdhzMY

by Cyrus Farivar - July 4 2013, 12:09am CEST

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/douglas-engelbart-inventor-of-computer-mouse-and-so-much-more-dies-at-88/


If you’ve used a mouse to click this article, you can thank Douglas 
Engelbart. The longtime inventor passed away in the late hours of July 2 
at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88 years old.

In addition to inventing the computer mouse, Engelbart helped develop 
other technologies that have become commonplace in the computing world, 
including pioneering hypertext, networking, and the early stages of 
graphical user interfaces. He will always be one of the giants of 
Silicon Valley.

Most famously, Engelbart gave a now-legendary presentation on December 
8, 1968 in San Francisco later known as “The Mother of all Demos.” In 
it, he gave the world’s first demonstration of the computer mouse, video 
conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, 
object addressing and dynamic file linking, and a collaborative 
real-time editor.

Today, many across the tech world lamented the loss of Engelbart. Howard 
Rheingold, a noted tech writer, tweeted: “I'd say that most of what I've 
written was inspired by the day I met Doug Engelbart in 1983.”

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation added: “We gave him our 
Pioneer Award in 1992, but it's impossible to express his impact as a 
computing pioneer.”

“Augmenting Human Intellect”

Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of 
the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, 
“Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”

In the paper, he described a “writing machine” that is certainly 
recognizable to all Ars staff today:

    This writing machine would permit you to use a new process of 
composing text. For instance, trial drafts could rapidly be composed 
from re-arranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or 
passages which you stop to type in. Your first draft could represent a 
free outpouring of thoughts in any order, with the inspection of 
foregoing thoughts continuously stimulating new considerations and ideas 
to be entered. If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft became 
too complex, you would compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be 
practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of 
thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs.

    You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your 
creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change 
your working record. If it is easier to update any part of your working 
record to accommodate new developments in thought or circumstance, you 
will find it easier to incorporate more complex procedures in your way 
of doing things. This will probably allow you to accommodate the extra 
burden associated with, for instance, keeping and using special files 
whose contents are both contributed to and utilized by any current work 
in a flexible manner—which in turn enables you to devise and use 
even-more complex procedures to better harness your talents in your 
particular working situation.

UPDATE, Thursday, July 4 12:55am CT: In an e-mail sent to Ars, Vint 
Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, had this to say about 
Engelbart:

    Doug and [J.C.R. Licklider] were going two of our farthest seeing 
visionaries. Doug's [oN-Line System] was as close to Vannever Bush's 
vision of Memex as you could get in the 1960s. He had a keen sense of 
the way in which computers could augment human capacity to think. Much 
of what transpired at Xerox PARC owes its origins to Doug and the people 
who created NLS with him. The [Web] is a manifestation of some of what 
he imagined or hoped although his aspirations exceeded even that in 
terms of human and computer partnerships.




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