Today we live in a world where people edit text on screens, control computers with gestures or doing click with the mouse (“mouse”) communicate through audio, video, and shared screens, and use hyperlinks to navigate through knowledge.
All these actions were ideas created in a center of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, acronym in English), in the US state of California, in the 1960s.
However, the director of that center, douglas engelbarthe never got support for most of what he wanted to build, even decades later when he got recognition for his achievements.
the creator of the mouse
Engelbart was an engineer of Silicon Valley californian who invented the mouse (“mouse”, in English) of the computer and to which many of the concepts that underpin modern computing and the Internet are attributed.
Born in 1925 in the American city of Portland, Engelbart came of age as World War II raged in Europe. He joined the US Navy as an electronics and radar technician, and after the war studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University.
He went on to complete a master’s degree and a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was also an assistant professor. About a year later, in 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International), which was little more than a decade old. From 1959 to 1977 he headed the organization’s Research Center, and in 1963 he developed the concept of the computer mouse.
Engelbart in 1968. On the right, one of his mouse prototypes.
The protagonist of a historic conference
The mouse it revolutionized personal computing, but the public didn’t see it for the first time until several years later.
In a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in the Californian city of San Francisco on December 9, 1968, introduced the concepts of hypertext linkstext editing in real time, the use of multiple windows and teleconferences.
He also showed a set of three devices that worked together to control a computer. “We have a pointing device called a mouse.a keyboard standard and a set of keys special,” he told the audience, in a conference which was defined decades later as the “mother of all demos”.
In a world of keyboard controlled mainframe computers, the mouse was a new idea. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started out that way and we never changed it,” he said, explaining his name to the audience.
A year later, the research center headed by Engelbart underscored its importance in computing by becoming the second Arpanet nodethe predecessor of today’s Internet.
Engelbart received many awards for his work. during the last years of his life. They included the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Award in 1997, and the Turing Award, also in 1997.
He passed away on July 2, 2013 at his home in the Californian city of Atherton. She was 88 years old.
Much more than a mouse
For Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a greater end: amplify human intelligence to help us survive in the world we have created.
He listed the end results of boosting what he called “collective IQ” in a 1962 article, entitled “Augmentation of the Human Intellect.” It included concepts such as “faster understanding…better solutions and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that previously seemed intractable.”
Engelbart’s vision of humans with greater capabilities, enabled by computers, came to him in 1945, after reading the article by the inventor and wartime research director Vannevard Bush in Atlantic Monthly magazine, “As We May Think.” Bush wrote:
“The sum of human experience is expanding at a prodigious rate, and the means we use to traverse the resulting maze to the momentarily important item are the same as those used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
That inspired Engelbart, a young electrical engineer, to come up with the idea of people using screens and computers to solve problems in collaboration.
Changes far beyond computing
He worked on his ideas for the rest of his life, despite being repeatedly warned by people in academia and the computer industry that his ideas of using computers for anything other than scientific calculations or data processing commercials were “crazy” and “sci-fi.”
Engelbart in 2008, with one of his mouse prototypes.
Engelbart knew from the beginning that displays, input devices, hardware and software they could enable collaborative problem solving only as part of a system that included cognitive, social, and institutional changes.
But found that introducing new ways for people to work together more effectivelythe lynchpin of his overall vision was more difficult than transforming the way humans and computers interact.
Engelbart worked for most of his life and career to get anyone to think seriously about his ideas, of which the mouse was an essential but low-level component.
Only for one golden decade did it gain significant backing. In 1963, the US Department of Defense it provided the means for Engelbart to assemble a team, create the future, and wow every computer designer in the world in what is known as “the mother of all demos.” Engelbart noted with dismay that while the personal computer was evolving rapidly, the other elements of his plan were not.
The creator of the “collective IQ”
At the time, personal computers were not networked with each other, as large computer terminals could be at the time, and they lacked a mouse or point-and-click interface.
Engelbart claimed that the computer and the mouse were just the “artifacts” in a system that focused on “humans, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training.”
Engelbart’s mouse prototype.
In the late 1980s, Engelbart created his Bootstrap Institute self-funded to try to get their ideas on how to work more effectively with the acceptance their artifacts had.
developed ways to analyze how people acted within an organization and specific techniques that, according to him, would boost the “collective IQ”, which he defined as follows:
“Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a group of people can develop, integrate, and apply their knowledge toward their mission at the same time.”
the mouse maker Logitech it provided office space, but the Bootstrap Institute, staffed by Engelbart and his daughter Christina, never sold these companies to any funder, major company, or government department.
Engelbart’s final frustration
Engelbart’s failure to disseminate the less tangible parts of his vision is due to several circumstances. He was a engineer at heart, and the utopian solutions of engineers do not always account for the complexities of human social institutions. He just added a social scientist to his lab just before it closed.
Engelbart’s speeches about linked leaps in technology and organizational behavior probably sounded just as crazy to corporate managers of the 1980s as increasing growth did. human intellect with machines in the early 1960s.
In the end, the way Silicon Valley companies operate has changed radically in recent decades, not because established companies went through the kinds of internal transformations Engelbart envisioned, but because they were displaced by new companies..
Like Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, Engelbart never sought to appropriate what contributed to the knowledge capacity of the world. But he was frustrated until the end of his life by how so many people adopted, developed, and benefited from the digital media he had helped create, without accomplishing the important tasks for which he had created them.
