Douglas Engelbart: An inventor of yesterday or a pioneer of tomorrow?
- lukephair
- Nov 27, 2020
- 3 min read
Source: Theconversation.com
Douglas Engelbart was an American inventor born in Portland, Oregon, on January 30, 1925. As he grew older, he attended Oregon State University to study in electrical engineering. However, this was disrupted due to him leaving to serve as a radio and radar technician in the Philippines with the United States Navy for two years. Douglas Engelbart was an American inventor born in Portland, Oregon, on January 30, 1925. As he grew older, he attended Oregon State University to study in electrical engineering. However, this was disrupted due to him leaving to serve as a radio and radar technician in the Philippines with the United States Navy for two years.
Source: dougengelbart.org
Engelbart’s career began to flourish when he realised he had already completed his life goals, leaving him to wonder, “what now?”. In the following few months, Engelbart decided to set out a few regulations in accordance with his following approach to life. He decided that his focuses would now surround the idea of making the world a better place, using:
”some kind of organised effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions.” (En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Douglas Engelbart. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart> [Accessed 26 November 2020].)
Douglas found a position of work within the Stanford Research Centre where he was granted funding due to his obtainment of multiple patents. With this funding he started up the “Augmentation Research Centre”, where he, alongside his crew, developed multiple project using his “bootstrapping strategy“. His projects dominantly surrounded computer elements, such as the invention of the mouse, hypertext and the cursor. According to dw.com, the total number of mouses sold was one billion on it's 40th anniversary, by 2008. So it is undeniable to see how influential Engelbart's work truly was.
"The Original Mouse" Source: history-computer.com
As Engelbart's inventions began to gain notoriety, a demonstration was held by himself in order of showing his inventions to the world, other wise known as "The mother of all demos", held on December 8, 1968. The demonstration included the introduction of an entire computer hardware and software system, formerly known as the "oN Line System". The presentation substantially displayed almost all of the constitutional elements of the modern PC, including: windows, hypertext, graphics and command input, video calls, the computer mouse, word processing and much more! Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. (Fisher, A., 2020. How Doug Engelbart Pulled Off The Mother Of All Demos. [online] Wired. Available at: <https://www.wired.com/story/how-doug-engelbart-pulled-off-the-mother-of-all-demos/>.) The ideology involved in this demonstration provided much influence to many more currently known names such as: Microsoft, Apple and Macintosh.
Engelbart followed on to write many books surrounding his research and ideology. He had four children, some of whom took keen interest into his line of work such as his daughter, Christina. Unfortunately Douglas Engelbart passed away on July of 2013, due to kidney failure. (Los Angeles Times. 2020. Douglas Engelbart Dies At Age 88; Computer Visionary. [online] Available at: <https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-douglas-engelbart-20130704-story.html> .) However, his aspirations and work successes live on today, in the world in which are heavily incorporated within, the world of technology. The world would be a different place today without the work of Engelbart, so the real question is, will you stand up today in order of making a change for tomorrow, or will you just let it pass by?
Comments