

Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution - wallflower
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517341/douglas-engelbarts-unfinished-revolution/

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jacobolus
One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of these sources is that the
grants that funded Engelbart during that one decade that he worked on the
Mother of All Demos were approved by Bob Taylor (who later founded Xerox PARC
and then the DEC Systems Research Center).

To anyone who hasn’t read it, I very much recommend the “oral history”
interview Taylor did with Paul McJones at the Computer History Museum in 2008.
The whole thing is fascinating and full of amazing stories.

[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Taylor_Robert/102702015.05.01.acc.pdf)

The relevant excerpt:

McJones: Did you work for two different companies between teaching and going
to NASA or just one company?

Taylor: Two. I was at Martin for about a year, I guess, Martin Orlando. And
one of my colleagues there had gone to work for a flight simulation firm in
Riverdale, Maryland just outside of D.C. They were called ACF Electronics.
They built a wider variety of flight simulators than any other company in the
country. They made me an attractive job offer and we moved up there and I went
to work for them. While I was there, McNamara, who was with Kennedy, who had
just been elected president, was Secretary of Defense, standardized or
attempted to standardize many of the aircraft across the Navy and the Air
Force. Consequently, a company that based its reputation on building a wide
variety of flight simulators was no longer quite so important because we were
not going to have as wide a variety of airplanes. So ACF had been looking for
other things to do and NASA was just opening up. I was encouraged to write a
research proposal to NASA using flight simulators, but in a research context
rather than in a teaching context. For example, one of the flight simulators
that the company built was an anti-submarine warfare airplane flight simulator
where you could simulate all of the stations in the airplane that were
monitoring various sensor devices that were looking for submarines. There was
a lot of display technology to fool around with and things that NASA was
interested in. So I wrote this research proposal and sent it in. NASA called
me and asked me to come down and talk to them. I thought they wanted to talk
about the research proposal. And instead, they offered me a job in their
newly-formed office of advanced research and technology. The job of this part
of NASA was to fund the NASA research centers and also fund limited research
in limited areas in private industry, and sometimes universities. Then they
put me in charge of two research areas to manage the funding that went into
these areas, whether it was the NASA center or in the private world. The areas
were manned flight control systems and flight displays. While I was there I
created another area called simulation technology. So I managed research in
those three areas while I was at NASA. One of the unsolicited proposals that
came in was from a guy named [Douglas C.] Engelbart at SRI.3 I thought it was
an interesting proposal and he came into D.C. on his round of looking for
money, and we talked. I funded his proposal and the mouse was created by NASA
funding. Most people don’t know that. Remember when NASA was advertising Tang
as its big contribution to the civilized world? Well, there was a better
example, but they didn’t know about it.

McJones: Was that the beginning of Doug Engelbart’s major funding?

Taylor: He had some smaller amount of funding I think from the Air Force, but
the mouse work was actually done under a NASA project. And then when I went to
ARPA, I funded it more, but Licklider had funded him as well, as a result
partly of my funding.

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EdiX
A link to a version of the '68 demo easier to consume:

[http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Adougengelba...](http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Adougengelbartarchives%20AND%20subject%3A%221968%20Demo%20Presentation%2C%20FJCC%22)

And a link to the follow-up to the '68 demo that I explains how the text
editor works better:

[http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Adougengelba...](http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Adougengelbartarchives%20AND%20subject%3A%221969%20Demo%20Presentation%2C%20ASIS%22)

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spdegabrielle
This work is continuing under the guise of collaborative sensemaking (e.g.
Simon Buckingham-Shum at KMI) and the various Visual Analytics (academic)
communities working on everything from discovery(law), command and control(mil
and civ) to intellegence analysis.

