Doug Engelbart

Long ago, back during my years in grad school, I worked with Doug Engelbart's small group at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where some crazy new ideas were being explored about ordinary people sitting in front of displays, using computers "on-line" to do "knowledge work" by pointing at things on the screen using a little device called a "mouse" that Doug had invented. Just for fun, here's a link to the 1968 demo site with video of the debut of the mouse and the first implementations of the ideas of hypertext, dynamic linking in documents, multiple windows, shared-screen teleconferencing, and on and on. If you go about 2/3's of the way toward the end, you'll see me as a youngster with incontrovertible evidence that I was a smart-aleck even then.

Here's what the Office of the Secretary of Commerce had to say in a press release at the time that Doug was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the highest award for technological achievement the United States has to offer. (There's more about Doug at the Bookstap Institute site.)

"Dr. Engelbart, more than any other single person, set the stage for that component of the computer revolution now called personal computing. During the early 1960s, when the hallmark of computing was large mainframe computers, he correctly saw that a close, interactive, and continual relationship between a computer and its user would yield enormous benefit in making that person more efficient and effective."

Article about Doug and Moore's Law: This article originally appeared in the April 17, 2005 issue of The New York Times and reveals that not only did Doug invent the mouse, it seems that he also invented Moore's Law before Moore did!