This collection documents that activities of Douglas C. Engelbart, a computer scientist whose pioneering work in the 1950s
and 1960s (first at SRI International, later at Tymshare, Inc.) led to the development of the interactive personal computer.
Most of the publications in this collection were produced while Engelbart was at SRI. Includes professional papers, correspondence,
research proposals, technical reports, notes, journals, and computer disks, as well as audiovisual meterial on a variety of
Born January 30, 1925. In the late 1940s, Douglas Engelbart was stationed in the Philippines when he read Vannevar Bush's
"As We May Think" in a Red Cross library. He became an early believer in Bush's idea of a machine that would aid human cognition.
Later, he worked at Ames aeronautical lab, and developed the idea that would form the basis of today's computer interfaces.
In the early 1960s, Engelbart began the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), a development environment at the Stanford Research
Institute (SRI, Inc.). Here, he and his colleagues (William K. English and John F. Rulifson) created the oN-Line System (NLS),
the world's first implementation of what was to be called hypertext. Yet this was only a small part of what ARC was about.
As he states in "Working Together," Engelbart was particularity concerned with "asynchronous collaboration among teams distributed
geographically" (245). This endeavour is part of the study of Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW); software which
supports this goal is often called groupware. "Augmentation not automation" was the slogan, the goal being the enhancement
of human abilities through computer technology. The key tools that NLS provided were: outline editors for idea development;
hypertext; linking; tele-conferencing; word processing; electronic mail; and user configurability and programmability. The
development of these required the creation of: the mouse pointing device for on-screen selection; a one-hand chording device
for keyboard entry; a full windowing software environment; on-line help systems; and the concept of consistency in user interfaces.
Itemizing these accomplishments using today's terminology emphasizes their detachment from one another. However, NLS was an
integrated environment for natural idea processing. The emphasis was on a visual environment--a revolutionary idea at a time
when most people (even programmers) had no direct contact with a computer. Input was by punched cards and output by paper
tape. Engelbart's work directly influenced the research at Xerox's PARC, which in turn was the inspiration for Apple Computers.
Ted Nelson cites him as a major influence. In 1991, Engelbart and his colleagues were given the ACM Software System Award
for their work on NLS.
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