Douglas Engelbart -- the father of the computer mouse and so many of the other basic concepts that drive our personal machines and the modern internet -- has died at the age of 88.
According to an email from his daughter, posted to a mailing list dedicated to classic computers, Engelbart died "peacefully" in his sleep at his home in Atherton, California.
In the late 1960s, at the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, in Menlo Park, California, Engelbart oversaw the creation of NLS, a system that provided instant communication over a computer network -- including what we now call video conferencing -- and paired a mouse with a graphical user interface 15 years before the arrival of the Apple Macintosh.
"Even way back then, we already had the concept of multiple windows," Engelbart told this reporter in 2005. "Any one application could manage multiple windows, and you could easily move objects, paragraphs, and words between them."
Short for "oN Line System," NLS directly inspired much of the seminal personal computing research at the famed Xerox PARC research center in the mid- to late-1970s, which, in turn, helped spawn the Mac.
"He had this vision of online systems helping society solve their problems," says Stuart Card, who worked at Xerox PARC alongside many of Engelbart's former SRI researchers and regularly brought the man inside PARC to discuss the concepts behind his online system. "But, also, he actually built systems that had so many of the specific components that became to be so important today -- not to mention him just realizing the notion of having people working together on an online system. When you consider the crude type of computer equipment he had to work with, it was amazing."
According to John Markoff of The New York Times, you can trace the roots of NLS to a moment in December 1950, when Engelbart, working at the Ames Research Center, a government aerospace lab, envisioned himself sitting in front of a "large computer screen full of different symbols." Apparently, he was inspired by the radar consoles he used in Navy during the Second World War.
After completing a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, he formed a new research group at SRI, backed by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, and the Air Force, and it was there he set to work on NLS.
Engelbart first revealed his creation to the rest of the world in 1968, at an event in San Francisco, about an hour's drive north from SRI, and the unveiling, before many of the world's leading computer scientists, has since become known as "The Mother Of All Demos" (see video below).
That December day, Engelbart not only provided a peek into the future of video conferencing, he showed off something much like today's "desktop sharing" tools, which let you visit someone else's computer from afar, and "hypertext," those links that let us so easily jump from page to page on the internet.
At the time, the demo wasn't exactly recognized as a work of genius. During an event in 2008 celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Mother Of All Demos, Bill Paxton -- an SRI researcher who was also part of the demo -- said that 90 per cent of the computer science community looked at Engelbart as "a crackpot."
"It's hard to believe now, but at the time, even we had trouble understanding what he was doing," he said, referring to Engelbart's fellow researchers. "Think of everyone else out there."
Even his boss failed to grasp the importance of his work. At that same anniversary celebration, Bob Taylor -- the NASA program manager who oversaw at least some of SRI's funding -- remembered that Engelbart's immediate boss flew cross-country just before the demo to ask him a single question. "He came into my office and he said: 'I want to talk to you about Doug. Why are you funding this guy?" remembered Taylor, who also played a key role in the creation of the ARPAnet (the forerunner of the internet) and Xerox PARC.
Nonetheless, the demo went ahead -- and the seeds were sown. In the audience that day in 1969, "shivering like mad, with a 104 degree temperature," was a young man named Alan Kay. Kay would go on to join Xerox PARC, where he worked on the research lab's seminal Alto computer and the groundbreaking object-oriented programming environment known as SmallTalk. He was among the few who saw the demo -- and Engelbart -- for what they were.
"He was one of the very few people very early on who were able to understand not only that computers could do a lot of things that were very familiar, but that there was something new about computers that allow us to think in a very different way -- in a stronger way," Kay said during the 40th anniversary celebration.
According to Stuart Card, Engelbart wasn't the best at conveying his ideas to others, but the ideas were there, in spades. "He had this way of being vague," Card says. "But on the other hand...he had this depth of understanding, a vision of the future. It was hard for people to grasp, but he not only had the vision, he instantiated it."
In addition to influencing much of the work at PARC, Engelbart and his team would help bootstrap the ARPAnet. SRI was one of the first two nodes on the government-funded research network -- the other was at UCLA -- and, yes, it ran NLS. "As a junior staffer responsible for documentation at the UCLA Arpanet project, I used the SRI-ARC NLS system tools over the net. Partly for the capabilities, but partly because it was always a cool group to interact with," David Crocker wrote on a mailing list, after hearing of Engelbart's death.
The internet would go on to deliver many of Engelbart's ideas to a mass audience. But in Kay's mind, the rest of the world still hasn't caught up to the man's original version. NLS was built to capture the power of "collective intelligence," to give us a deeper way of thinking by way of human interaction, but as Kay said five years ago, the modern machine and the modern web still fall well short of this lofty goal.
"The jury is still out on how long -- and whether -- people are actually going to understand," he said, what Engelbart created. But at least we have started to.
