# Doug Engelbart: Biography ![[images/Engelbart-demo-p1-00125.webp]] *Engelbart on stage at the 1968 demo (frame from the Institute’s remastered film, [Part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpTiWyVa6k&t=125s)).* **Related:** [[Doug Engelbart]] · [[Doug Engelbart - Bibliography]] · [[Doug Engelbart - The Mother of All Demos 1968]] · [[AI Has Been Developing for Centuries - Douglas Engelbarts 1962 Paper]] > **How this was compiled.** Facts come from the Doug Engelbart Institute’s biography ("A Lifetime Pursuit", by his daughter Christina Engelbart), the ACM A.M. Turing Award biography by Thierry Bardini, the Cal Alumni obituary, the Stanford archive finding aid, Wikipedia, and the US patent. I checked each against at least one page I opened. Where two sources disagree I say so, and the differences are collected at the end. The spelling is **Engelbart**; "Englebart" is a common misspelling. ## At a glance | | | |---|---| | **Full name** | Douglas Carl Engelbart (Institute) | | **Born** | January 30, 1925, Portland, Oregon | | **Died** | July 2, 2013, at his home in Atherton, California, aged 88 (kidney failure per the NYT and Cal obituaries; see discrepancies for the date) | | **Education** | B.S. electrical engineering, Oregon State (1948); M.S. 1953 and Ph.D. 1955, UC Berkeley | | **Best known for** | The 1962 "Augmenting Human Intellect" framework; leading SRI’s Augmentation Research Center and the NLS system; co-inventing the computer mouse (patent US 3,541,541); the 1968 "Mother of All Demos"; bootstrapping and "collective IQ" | | **Prizes** | Lemelson-MIT Prize (1997, $500,000), ACM A.M. Turing Award (1997), National Medal of Technology (Dec 1, 2000), and more (below) | ## Life ### Early years and the Navy (1925–1948) - He was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up on a small farmstead nearby during the Great Depression, a grandson of early pioneers of the West (Institute). His father died when he was nine (ACM, Bardini). - He finished high school in 1942 and went to Oregon State to study electrical engineering. In 1944 he enlisted in the Navy and served about two years in the Philippines as an electronics and radar technician (Institute). There he read Vannevar Bush’s essay "As We May Think" (Institute). He returned to Oregon State and took his B.S. in 1948. ### The goal (1948–1957) - From 1948 he worked as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory, the forerunner of NASA (Institute). - In 1951 he got engaged, which made him think about his life goals. The Institute’s account says he had read about computers and, as a radar technician, had seen information shown on a screen, and he began to picture people at displays "flying around" in an information space, formulating and organizing ideas together. He applied to Berkeley to pursue it. - At Berkeley he took an M.S. (1953) and a Ph.D. (1955), with about six patents on "bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices", and stayed on as an acting assistant professor (Institute). He is also credited with a start-up, Digital Techniques, which closed in 1957 (ACM). A colleague warned him that if he kept talking about his "wild ideas" he would stay an acting assistant professor forever, so he left. In 1957 he joined Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). ### SRI and the Augmentation Research Center (1957–1977) - At SRI he first earned about a dozen more patents on magnetic computer components and miniaturization. By 1959 he had enough standing to pursue his own research, and he spent two years formulating the conceptual framework. His 1959 paper on microelectronics ("The Art of Similitude") is in the [[Doug Engelbart - Bibliography]]. - In October 1962 he finished his framework report "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (cover number printed as AFOSR-3223; often cited as AFOSR-3233). It defines the H-LAM/T system (Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained). The video note [[AI Has Been Developing for Centuries - Douglas Engelbarts 1962 Paper]] covers a modern reading of it. - Funding for his own lab began in 1963: ARPA, through J.C.R. Licklider, and NASA, through Bob Taylor (Institute). The lab became the Augmentation Research Center (ARC). The ACM page dates his directorship of ARC 1959–77. The Institute says the first two years of ARPA support were relatively unproductive, and that a NASA psychologist, Bob Taylor (later at ARPA, where he helped launch the ARPANET), funded the pointing-device experiments. - On the mouse the Institute says Engelbart had the basic idea several years earlier and sketched it as an addition to the NASA-funded screen-selection experiments, which Bill English designed and ran; English built the device, someone started calling it the mouse, and it won the tests. The Institute’s mouse page dates the first prototype to fall 1964. A US patent on an "X-Y position indicator for a display system" was filed on **June 21, 1967** and granted on **November 17, 1970** (US 3,541,541, assigned to SRI). The mouse was described publicly in a 1967 IEEE paper before the 1968 demo. - On **December 9, 1968**, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, he and his team ran NLS live, with colleagues linked in from SRI’s Menlo Park lab. The Institute says "1000-plus" attended and the screen was 20 feet wide. See [[Doug Engelbart - The Mother of All Demos 1968]]. - In spring 1967 ARPA announced it would network its research labs. ARC became the second host on the ARPANET, and Engelbart proposed a Network Information Center (NIC) (Institute). The first ARPANET message, from UCLA to SRI, was on October 29, 1969 (Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA). At its peak the ARC had 47 people (Institute). ### After SRI: Tymshare, McDonnell Douglas and the Bootstrap Institute (1977–2013) - In 1977 SRI sold its commercial rights to NLS to Tymshare, and ARC was transferred in 1978; the system was renamed Augment (Institute). Some of his researchers went to Xerox PARC; some stayed at SRI to run the NIC. The Institute says Tymshare cut his human and organizational bootstrapping work. McDonnell Douglas acquired Tymshare in 1984 and he worked there on information-system architectures. - In 1989 (the Institute; the ACM page says 1988) he founded the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina; in the early 1990s he founded the non-profit Bootstrap Alliance and dropped the Institute name. Logitech hosted the team from 1992 to 2007, and in October 2007 it moved back to SRI. In 2008 it was renamed the **Doug Engelbart Institute** with Engelbart as Founder Emeritus. - He coined "collective IQ" in 1994 (Institute) and kept pressing the idea of "improving our ability to improve" in talks through 2004; those papers are in the bibliography. - In 1998 a Stanford event, "Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution", marked the 30th anniversary of the demo, with a panel of his team and a conversation with Jeff Rulifson (Institute). ### Family, health and death - His wife, Ballard, died in 1997 after 47 years of marriage (ACM). He married Karen O’Leary in 2008. He had four children and nine grandchildren (ACM). - He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in November 2007 (Institute) and died on July 2, 2013, at his home in Atherton (Institute and ACM; the NYT obituary by John Markoff, July 2013, reports kidney failure). ## Ideas - **Augmenting human intellect.** The aim is to increase a person’s capability to approach complex problems, not to replace the person. Bardini’s ACM biography contrasts this with automation: "automation, like Artificial Intelligence, does not alter the fundamental capabilities of the human users", whereas Engelbart’s model is designed so that human abilities "will increase in response to using it" (as paraphrased and quoted there; [ACM page](https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_5078811.cfm)). This is the thread the [[AI Has Been Developing for Centuries - Douglas Engelbarts 1962 Paper]] note pulls on. - **H-LAM/T.** The 1962 report’s name for the whole human-plus-tools system: Language, Artifacts, Methodology, Training. - **Bootstrapping.** The team improves its tools by using them on its own work (the demo’s "bootstrapping" approach). - **Collective IQ.** A group’s ability to deal with complex problems; the Institute dates his coinage to 1994. - **Improving our ability to improve.** The late-career form of the same idea ([papers from 2002–2004](papers/2002-engelbart-improving-our-ability-to-improve-eic11.pdf)). ## Honors From the ACM biography page unless noted: - American Ingenuity Award (1991); IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1993); honorary doctorate, Oregon State (1994). - Lemelson-MIT Prize (1997; $500,000 per the Institute); **ACM A.M. Turing Award** (1997), "For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision." - ACM-CHI Lifetime Achievement (1998); IEEE John von Neumann Medal (1999). - **National Medal of Technology** (December 1, 2000, presented by President Clinton, per the Institute); honorary doctorate, Santa Clara (2001); British Computer Society Lovelace Medal (2001); Norbert Wiener Award (2005). ## Source discrepancies | Item | One source | Another source | What I used | |---|---|---|---| | Death date | July 2, 2013 (Institute, ACM) | July 3 (Cal Alumni obituary) | July 2 | | Demo date | December 9, 1968 (Institute, DARPA, the film’s own on-screen clock) | "May 1968" (ACM page; an evident slip); the film’s preface card says December 8 | December 9 | | Demo venue | Brooks Hall (Institute) | San Francisco Civic Auditorium (Wikipedia) | Not resolved; I name the conference and city | | Mouse conception | Fall 1964, first prototype (Institute) | 1963 (Cal Alumni) | Fall 1964 prototype | | Institute founded | 1989 (Institute) | 1988 (ACM) | 1989 | | Left McDonnell Douglas | 1989 (Institute) | 1986 (ACM) | 1989 | | Mouse patent grant | November 17, 1970 (patent text) | "01/17/1970" in the Institute’s patent table | November 17, 1970 | | Screen size at the demo | 22 ft × 18 ft (the film’s card) | 20 feet wide (Institute biography) | the film’s figure | ## Selected reading - Thierry Bardini, *Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing* (Stanford University Press, 2000), and his ACM Turing Award biography above. - John Markoff, *What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry* (Viking, 2005). - M. Mitchell Waldrop, *The Dream Machine* (Viking, 2001) and Howard Rheingold, *Tools for Thought* (1985), two other standard accounts. I have not re-read them for this note. - Fred Turner, *From Counterculture to Cyberculture* (University of Chicago Press, 2006). - The Stanford oral history of Engelbart (Henry Lowood and Judy Adams, ed. Bardini) and the web documentary *Invisible Revolution* (Hegland and Klijnsma), both linked from the ACM page. ## Sources - Doug Engelbart Institute, ["A Lifetime Pursuit"](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/183/) (biography by Christina Engelbart); [military service](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/352/467/); [the mouse](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/162/); and the Institute’s 1968 demo page, linked from the biography. - ACM, [A.M. Turing Award: Douglas Engelbart](https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_5078811.cfm) (Thierry Bardini). - Cal Alumni Association, [Douglas Engelbart 1925–2013](https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/online/douglas-engelbart-1925-2013/). - Stanford University Libraries, [Douglas Engelbart papers (M0638)](https://archives.stanford.edu/catalog/m0638); the Stanford [MouseSite paper archive](https://www.dougengelbart.org/mousesite/EngelbartPapers/Contents.html). - US patent [3,541,541](https://patents.google.com/patent/US3541541A/en), "X-Y position indicator for a display system". - John Markoff, [New York Times obituary](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html) (July 2013); I did not read it in full, so I used it only for the cause of death. - DARPA, [Mother of All Demos](https://www.darpa.mil/about/innovation-timeline/mother-of-all-demos); Smithsonian, [The Mother of All Demos](https://invention.si.edu/invention-stories/mother-all-demos); [Wikipedia: The Mother of All Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos). - Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA, [first message on the ARPANET](https://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/internet_first_words.html). ## Tags Applied: `history`, `science`. Proposed, not applied: `computing`, `human-computer-interaction`, `biography`.