Douglas C Engelbart

He served as an electronics technician during WWII and went to Oregon State University on his return, graduating in 1948 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. His first job was at the Ames Research Laboratory at Moffett Field, California. He left in 1951 to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, which he obtained in 1955. He stayed on at Berkeley for two years as an assistant professor. Engelbart then left for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, where he stayed for two decades. While at SRI, Engelbart pursued a number of interests. These included work on magnetic components, digital device phenomena, and issues related to the miniaturization of components. His most important work, however, began with his founding, in 1959, of the Augmentation Research Center within SRI, at which he developed some of the key technologies used in computing today. His primary test vehicle was his "oN Line System" (NLS), a suite of sophisticated software that explored the limits of human-machine interaction. Engelbart brought the various strands of his research together for his "mother of all demos" in San Francisco on December 8, 1968, an event that presaged many of the technologies and computer-usage paradigms we would use decades later. NLS was the focus of the event and showed actual instances of or precursors to: hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, shared screen collaboration, multiple windows, on-screen video teleconferencing, and the mouse as an input device. This demo embodied Engelbart's larger commitment to exploring methods of solving humanity's urgent problems by using computers as tools to improve communication and collaboration between people. In 1989, Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas (which had purchased NLS via its acquisition of Tymshare) and founded the Bootstrap Institute.