

Doug Engelbart was unable to find funding for his work - hackerbob
http://www.zdnet.com/the-shocking-truth-about-silicon-valley-genius-doug-engelbart-7000017660/

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pmarca
Doug was our Einstein, but he largely punched out in the mid-70's, right as
the PC and the commercial software industry took off. Later, I met him in 1998
and by that point he had no interest in talking about anything. He had any
number of opportunities to build products, start companies, get research
funding, etc. beyond what he did. That he didn't was a choice on his part,
unfortunate for our industry, and not everyone else's fault like Tom seems to
think.

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calibraxis
It's hard to fully trust anyone's impressions of anyone, particularly if
they're confident about it. (I don't particularly trust even my own. :)

Perhaps he sat down with you and said, "I have no interest in talking about
anything. I have many opportunities to build products, start companies, get
research funding, etc; but I simply choose not to, because... it bores me and
that's how I roll now." Ok, then your reasoning is impeccable. (Or maybe you
offered him carte blanche and he turned you down?) But from this one post,
it's unclear you got into his head, or that he felt comfortable engaging with
you.

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psadri
This sad story demonstrates the importance of owning your ideas and directly
benefiting from them (financially, public recognition, etc.), instead of
giving them away to people who will like you one minute and forget you the
next.

~~~
mjn
I suppose you can make some effort to get credit for them, but in a lot of
areas trying to own and monetize everything can significantly distract from
actually making progress. You end up spending all your time worrying about
trade secrets and licensing and patents, and less of it worrying about science
or engineering. It's actually a common failure case ("failure" from the
scientific POV, at least) for inventors who come up with genuinely good stuff
and then end up sidetracked for years with all their energy focused on
ownership and licensing disputes.

~~~
fijal
I would like to second that with a simple fact that people who are good with
monetizing and people who are good with science are often (but not always) a
distinct set of people.

~~~
lutze
See: Woz and Jobs.

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roel_v
"Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing
mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large
central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and
run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps."

Well I guess we can't expect journalists to know much about computers, but
anyone who writes something like this ought to never write a word on computers
again, nor should they be publishing attention-seeking articles like this one.

~~~
yvdriess
Feel free to point out the errors exactly. We went from a collaborative
environment to near-zero connectivity as the norm. You could even see the fact
that people still swap out .ptt and .doc files via e-mail as direct result of
that.

We have far advanced the time-sharing era systems in terms of connectivity,
but the comparison is not such a hyperbole as one might think. A lot of
research today is a revitalisation of work developed for time-shared machines.

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ScottBurson
It surprises me, in retrospect, that Sun Microsystems didn't give Englebart an
office, some equipment, and a couple of assistants, at least. This doesn't
seem like a huge expense for a company the size that Sun got to be, and I was
under the impression they had a few groups doing exploratory stuff, of various
kinds, already.

But I know no specifics, such as whether he approached them or what they might
have said.

~~~
fijal
Did you ever try finding funding for an ambitious project? Companies generally
laugh at you, unless you can achieve something within 3 months (which is a
typical time scale) or already work there and do other jobs. Speaking from
experience here, despite the fact that my stuff is nowhere near as interesting
as Engelbart's.

~~~
wslh
But companies such as IBM have a longer time span.

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snorkel
Couldn't get funding for what? I didn't see any mention of what he was trying
to fund.

~~~
seferphier
I would be interested to know as well.

Regardless, he is a proven genius that deserves to be funded - given that
college dropouts can raise angel easily. I find this to be sad.

