
Doug Engelbart has died - sbarre
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html
======
SiVal
Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to
meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a
little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple
of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk.

At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was
getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Institute and had a
conference. So few people showed up that we held it in the same little church.
We thought, given the implications for such things as life extension, that it
was pretty funny to have the speakers literally preaching from the pulpit with
the listeners sitting in the church pews. Christine was in the church kitchen
making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was the conference lunch
banquet. A PBJ, a banana, and a napkin in a paper bag.

I picked up my brown bag and walked into the small inner courtyard to sit. An
older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the
amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life.
I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas
could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something
he'd seen again and again.

I kept thinking that he looked familiar. I introduced myself. He stuck out his
hand: "I'm Doug."

~~~
keithpeter
Excellent, thanks for posting. I shall use this tomorrow with students

------
jgon
I think that what most inspires me about Dr. Engelbart was not so much the
physical manifestations of his work, although these were incredible, decades
ahead of their time, and in some ways still not matched, but rather the
philosophy that he used to guide his work.

It was his goal of greatly increasing the abilities of an individual human, as
well as increasing the ability of groups of people to work together towards a
goal that will remain timeless and inspirational long after everything he
created has entered the realm of the pedestrian.

Ultimately, most of the problems we face on the planet are of human origin,
and even for those that aren't the solution will need to be created by us as
well. As a meta-machine, a machine that can embody and or imitate almost all
other mediums, the computer offers a unique opportunity to augment and enhance
the reach of humanity.

As the last few weeks have shown us, this reach can be extended in a negative
fashion, and can be used to complicate the problems we already face.

But Doug Engelbart saw the other side of the coin, that the computer can be
used to free and uplift us, and help us come together like never before. He
saw this earlier than most and he pursued it further than most. And so we can
follow along in his wake and add our efforts to his, and to the greater goal
of extending humanity in a positive direction.

I'll finish by encouraging everyone reading this to take a few minutes now,
and perhaps every few days from here on out to think about what efforts we can
each make towards furthering Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goals. Not in the spirit
of guilt or of shame, but instead as an inspiration. If one man, guided by a
vision of using the computer to positively affect the course of human
development, can accomplish this much in a few decades, how much further could
we get with each of us working as well? I hope to do what I can, and I thank
Douglas Engelbart for his efforts to help guide my way.

------
glhaynes
If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's
an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in
1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as
if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is.
[http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...](http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect)

Edit: link had been to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) but a user below posted
this archive.org link which is better. Thanks, mxfh!

~~~
oasisbob
In the demo video, there are some noises in the background, I'm assuming from
his workstation -- rather pleasant and atmospheric. Anyone know what they are?
Is it a transmission artifact? Feedback intended for the user (maybe related
to the chorded keyboard)?

I've read several accounts of this presentation ( one is in _What the Dormouse
Said_ ), but don't recall an explanation.

~~~
glurgh
The account in _What the Dormouse Said_ says the sound was intentional audio
feedback:

"Engelbart referred to the on-screen cursor as a "bug" or a "tracking spot,"
and there were occasionally odd buzzing sounds in the background as he
executed commands at the keyboard. The group had been experimenting with using
the computer to generate different tones depending upon what was being
executed, as a way of creating auditory feedback."

Looks like a pretty uniform buzz, too

[http://i.imgur.com/BbaGsCu.png](http://i.imgur.com/BbaGsCu.png)

------
bretpiatt
He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "Engelbart
slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of his researchers became
alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to
frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing.
Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-
server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal
computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers
came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal
computing was just barely on the horizon." ( Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart)
)

~~~
Uhhrrr
Heh - I think the younger programmers were right on that one.

~~~
robotresearcher
They were both right. The web brought them together. We didn't have to choose
after all.

I have a fabulously powerful personal workstation on my desk, a slimmer, more
modest one in my bag, a thin client in my pocket, and a bunch of upstream data
centers that provide amazing services.

Some people might hanker for a completely decentralized P2P model of the
Internet, and BitTorrent shows this is still hugely relevant. But practical
issues of bandwidth mean that there will always be a place for locality-
exploiting concentrations of CPU and storage in data centres.

~~~
Uhhrrr
I meant the part about centralized power being highly suspect. We have
certainly seen all too well recently that that part is true.

~~~
robotresearcher
True enough. I guess every generation needs their reminder.

Still, the meta-point holds: centralized power lacks robustness (e.g. to
corruption and/or the stupidity of a relative few), but has big advantages
over widely distributed systems in terms of communication latency and
bandwidth that enable efficiency. We're sloshing around dynamically trying
combinations, but we should expect to always see some centralized
(opportunities for efficiency) and some distributed (opportunities for
robustness) stuff going on.

------
jgrahamc
I'm just going to imagine that he's running in the background with no terminal
attached.

~~~
MWil
love it!

------
dlg
Anyone who works in interactive computing should be familiar with Doug
Engelbart's work.

Years ago, at one of the first conferences on interactive computer, after
people spent all day presenting their new work, Andy van Dam--builder of the
first hypertext system with Ted Nelson who named it--stood up and said "you
should all be ashamed that you don't know your history. Doug Engelbart
invented almost everything presented here years ago." And he was right.

I hope a lot of you are watching The Mother of All Demos
[http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...](http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect).
But it's worth reading and understanding the reasons why Doug was working on
all of this.

Doug and his crew at SRI had the goal of "human augmentation". Everyone else
at the forefront of the computer industry thought we'd have general AI by the
1970s. They instead believed that GAI wasn't within reach. They believed that
the things we wanted to build and accomplish as a society weren't doable with
the communication tools we had.

They had the idea that computers could be tools to help individuals work.
Since computers were multi-million dollar calculating machines, the idea that
people would have a computer at their desk and that they'd help us to
communicate and manage information was beyond-out-there.

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html)

But after leaving Engelbart's group at SRI, lots of his team joined PARC and
built the modern GUI and networking.

For a history of the details, I highly recommend reading Markoff's What the
Dormouse Said [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Personal/dp/0143036769)

[Bonus: If you like Engelbart's MOAD, also watch Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
Demo.]

I only tend to comment about once-a-year on HN, but it would be impossible not
to say something about Doug and the impact he's had on our world.

Edit: Sutherland's Sketchpad
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA)

------
pmarca
Doug was the Albert Einstein of our field.

Oral history for people who want to learn more about him:

[http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www-
sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/engfmst1-ntb.html)

~~~
ableal
[http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www-
sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html) (just
the content framed in the bottom corner ;-)

------
tqs
Engelbart was perhaps the most important influence in realizing the computer
as an _interactive medium_.

Around 1960, most were still thinking of the computer as a sophisticated
calculator. You give it a problem, it spits out an answer. Even the idea of
artificial intelligence was framed this way.

Engelbart realized the potential of the computer to _augment_ human
intelligence. High bandwidth, continuous interaction between human and
computer allows the computer to be an extension of the mind. Chasing this
vision led him and his team to naturally invent the mouse, bitmapped screens,
hypertext, networked computers, etc.

IMO, more important than these individual inventions is Engelbart's
foundational principle that technologies change what the mind is capable of
thinking. And by augmenting our thinking, we enable ourselves to create new
technologies. Mind and technology co-evolve. This is "bootstrapping" in the
purest sense and the source of that profound feeling many of us have
experienced while augmenting our minds through programming and other rich,
creative interactions with computers.

------
tlrobinson
I believe a black bar at the top of Hacker News is in order.

~~~
jrarredondo
The best recommendation in the thread.

------
bdunbar
A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written
by one of Engelbart's team.

It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain
what word-processing did for text.

It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss
interested, and I moved on.

Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called?

Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never thought I could google that, today
of all days.

~~~
endlessvoid94
I just read whatever I could about this, but do you have any further
information? I'm fascinated.

~~~
bdunbar
All I've got is what I wrote, and what's on NDMA's site about it.

I wish I'd kept that floppy. It was a full working copy, and the printed
instruction manual. I have no idea how I acquired it, at this late date.

Perhaps it was sitting around in the server 'room' where I was working: lots
of engineers there (including my boss) and it seems like the kind of thing
he'd have been interested in.

~~~
endlessvoid94
It sounds very interesting. I just emailed NDMA to see if I can somehow
acquire a copy. I'd be more than happy to pay for it.

Big ideas definitely take time to catch on.

------
DanBC
> Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI,
> theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone
> of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but
> were unusual in those days.

Sadly, _the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we 've come to
consider as automatic and natural_ is becoming less and less automatic and
natural as people put things in walled gardens using weird non-standard
rapidly-changing protocols and close access to anyone not using The Official
Client.

------
adamnemecek
For anyone who is not sure who he was check this out

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs)

------
joehewitt
There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I
enjoyed reading many years ago:

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal
Computing [http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-
Pe...](http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Personal-
Computing/dp/0804738718)

~~~
ivanzhao
I think this is a better book on him. Less history, more ideas:
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-
Dougl...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs-
Douglas/dp/0615308902/ref=sr_sp-
atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372918552&sr=8-1&keywords=engelbart)

------
jonstewart
Email here: [http://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html)

------
justinjlynn
Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual
primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation.

~~~
VLM
There's an email from Christina (his daughter) on classiccmp cctalk, so I'd be
inclined to believe it.

(edited to add that Christina is his daughter, and if you can find a cctalk
archive, or subscribe and just missed it, its dated 6:31 and AEK forwarded it
onto the list this morning.)

------
kintamanimatt
Do people not read the links they upmod?

This source doesn't state that he's died. This just seems to be completely
unsubstantiated at this point, especially as there's no mention of this
anywhere else.

~~~
kintamanimatt
When I posted this comment the link was to a completely unrelated page that
made no mention of his death. As of right now the link has changed twice.

For whatever reason HN had a snafu and didn't delete it when I hit the delete
button. Now the comment is completely incorrect, undeletable, and
uncorrectable!

~~~
sbarre
Link submitter here (first time, too): My apologies, I saw the news via the
Computer History Museum's twitter feed (
[https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/35248540097302118...](https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/352485400973021186)
) , and they linked to that page. I googled around for a better link but
couldn't find anything, but felt it was worth mentioning as a story to allow
for discussion?

~~~
kintamanimatt
It just seemed like an elaborate troll and an unsubstantiated rumor at first
because that link didn't mention his death, and as you said, there was nothing
else mentioned about his death anywhere!

Your link makes a lot more sense now, but I'm still confused why so many
people upvoted it before it was corrected to a better link that corroborated
the title!

> first time, too

Welcome! :-)

------
kunai
Like others on here have posted. Doug's true worth was not in the innovations
he procured or the things he built, but rather what he saw as the future of
computing, humanity, and technology. The way he was able to reach into the
future and pull out the best bits, and then execute was something that not
many innovators can claim to. The ideas that were built at SRI are nothing
short of legendary, and the core principles still carry on.

It may be a bit sad to think that so many don't know his name, blindly
believing the mouse was invented by Xerox, that the Internet was invented by
Tim-Berners Lee, but in the end, does it really matter? To Doug, all that
mattered was being visionary and helping people. It would do good for all of
us here at HN to follow his example. Humans only get one shot, and Dr. Doug
Engelbart nailed it.

P.S., thanks PG for the black topbar. A fitting sign of respect for a very
great man.

------
bdcravens
I hope this gets a few more articles: Doug Englebart is far more of an
influence on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was, even if he's less
known.

~~~
keithpeter
In each field, there are the pioneers, then the entrepreneurs who _make_ the
market, then the commodity suppliers. In my opinion, you need all three to get
where we are now, walking about with supercomputers in our pockets/handbags.

I'm planning to project the MOAD at College tomorrow. And trying to persuade
digital galleries and hacker spaces to do likewise.

Moggridge's book on design _Designing Interactions_ has a good section on
Englebart and the activities of his students. Example: in this text box, I
have a _caret_ that fits in the space _between_ the characters I am typing. I
can insert text wherever I place that caret with my _mouse_.

------
rmason
He was one of the keynotes at a conference I attended out in the Valley in the
early nineties. Tremendously inspiring guy and a much better speaker than a
lot of tech people.

What I remember from that day was that he was very, very humble with a great
sense of humor.

He was truly one of those Xerox Parc giants upon whose shoulders our entire
industry rests upon.

~~~
mtraven
Don't think he was ever actually a member of PARC, although his ideas and
collaborators certainly inhabited the place.

------
danblick
Doug Engelbart has been a huge inspiration to me even though I never met him.
I'm amazed at how much his group at SRI was able to accomplish. I think his
vision - augmenting human intellect to help solve the world's complex problems
- is still a vision worth sharing. Doug did help change the world, and I'll
remember him for it.

------
mikecane
From the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs:

>>>Two other occasional visitors were high school students Steven Jobs and
Stephen Wozniak, who hung out at SAIL [Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory], with an older friend, Allen Baum, who was working at the
laboratory during the fall of 1970. Jobs later said that the “vibrations” he
felt at SAIL would stay with him his entire life. The bewitched Wozniak rode
his bike up to the laboratory from his home in Los Altos, and he later said
that his experiences there contributed to his hunger for his own computer.

SAIL was one of the core places of the computing revolution, from which The
Mother of All Demos by Doug Engelbart was spawned. That demo happened in 1968,
when Jobs was twelve or thirteen, and influenced everything that came
afterwards in computing.

------
mentor
Doug - The energy and light of your vision and inspiration still burns bright,
still ignites, still guides...

[http://Collaborapologist.com/](http://Collaborapologist.com/)
[http://CommunityOfImpact.info](http://CommunityOfImpact.info)

Thanks, Doug

A friend - Sam

------
staunch
Nothing sad about well liked person, who accomplished a lot, dying at age 88.
He won. RIP Doug Engelbart.

------
stefanix
I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and
my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He
was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the
future. I hold him in very fond memories.

------
mtraven
Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into
working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to
work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more
important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain
to be realized.

The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or
IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got
more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more
generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the
borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely
connected.

------
alayne
It's amazing that he was working on augmentation already in 1962.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html)

------
douge
Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV Interview... amazing stuff
[http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011](http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011)

------
ChuckMcM
Sad to hear he is gone. I got to talk him at one of the Computer History
Fellow awards ceremonies and was struck by how clearly he thought about
things. He will be missed.

------
recuter
Obligatory link to 'The Mother of All Demos':
[http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs](http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs)

~~~
oasisbob
Better quality, full: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

------
lominming
Mother of All Demos: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) ... It is really amazing
how he conceived all these in 1968 (45 years ago!). If you think about it,
what we have today is just putting on a pretty UI on top of all these
concepts. We hardly moved for those innovation breakthroughs that he demoed.

------
TheLegace
One thing that strikes me really odd from the demo of the mouse, is how
nervous and worried he looks. I mean I can understand the concept of computers
were so foreign until people got use to it. I think he was really intimidated
by the culture of people being close minded to things they don't understand.(I
thing progress was more of a liability.)

------
hilko
To my embarrassment, I didn't really know much about Doug Engelbart until
Brett Victor brought him up in one of his excellent talks (Inventing on
Principle). I quite like his eulogy:
[http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/](http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/)

------
kyledrake
Without Douglas Engelbart, none of the personal computing tech we have today
would have been even this remotely far ahead. He was the first person to
believe in the Personal Computer.

He got to pass on after seeing his vision come to life. It must have been an
amazing experience for him.

------
shire
He lived a life worth living and died accomplishing so much, this should be a
motivation to us all to pursue our dreams and goals and make the most of it
because this just proves how short life is no matter how great you are, death
is the destination we all share.

------
MortenK
If you are an IxD or UX guy, you really owe it to yourself to read "Designing
interactions" by Bill Moggridge. In it, Doug Engelbart is interviewed for an
entire chapter regarding how he and some other guys designed the mouse. Very
interesting stuff.

------
pmelendez
From Wikipedia article: "...after 1976 ... Engelbart saw the future in
collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger
programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer."

Go figure! A true visionary... He will be missed for sure.

------
joegaudet
Black bar ?

------
touristtam
Waiting for Google to have a doodle about him tomorrow.

------
mdkess
What a remarkable life!

------
racl101
R.I.P. Mr. Engelbart.

------
icelancer
.

------
pagekicker
Click.

