Douglas Engelbart: Father to the Modern Computer

The year 2007 brought the world Apple's OS X Leopard and Microsoft's Windows Vista. Most college students have an iPod or some form of MP3 player, and the ability to use a computer is required for almost any job. Computers have not always been such a common commodity. Like cars, computers have changed and evolved a great deal. The computer we use today has many features that were originally conceived by Douglas Engelbart, a computer engineer of the 1950s. Engelbart is responsible for the mouse, GUI, the concept 'windowed' applications and is called the father of the Internet for his fortification of hypertext.

Douglas Carl Engelbart is still known for his record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. Born January 30, 1925, Engelbart was the grandson of early pioneers of the West. He grew up during the Great Depression on a small farmstead near Portland, Oregon. After graduating from high school in 1942, he went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He suspended his studies during the Second World War as he was drafted into the Navy. In the Navy, Engelbart served as an electronic and radar technician for two years. After his service he returned to his studies and earned his bachelor's degree (Engelbart, C.).

Engelbart received his Bachelor's Degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and settled with satisfaction on the San Francisco peninsula as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory. NACA is the forerunner program for NASA. After spending three years at NACA, Engelbart grew restless. He thought about the world's problems, and considered how he could work to improve or even solve them. Engelbart had read a great deal about the development of the computer and as a result he thought of the different ways a computer could be improved and used to support mankind's efforts to solve these problems (Engelbart, C). Englebart figured that mankind could solve its own problems, if it only had a way to think and process information faster. Englebart envisioned a computing technology that would enhance human understanding, but he also knew that he could not pursue his theory working at NACA.

In 1955, Engelbart received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. By 1957, Englebart had begun working at the Stanford Research Institute in what is now known as Silicon Valley. In his beginning years at SRI, Engelbart managed to obtain dozen patents for magnetic computer components, fundamental digital-device phenomena, and miniaturization scaling potential. Engelbart quickly became well respected at SRI and this allowed him to use the Institute's reputation to further his work concerning computers and the enhancement of human understanding. Stanford Research Institute nurtured Engelbart's idea and allowed him to pursue a project that was geared toward Augmenting Human Intellect. In 1959, Engelbart began drawing formal plans for his new computer.

The plans for his project began to form while he was serving in the military. The radar technology that he had been exposed to utilized a line of communication between the device's instrumentation and a video output display. Radar operators were able to interpret data with great ease, as they could visualize a target on a screen, as opposed to having to look at numbers and illustrate mentally what a target's location was. Engelbart saw that the radar operator's direct interaction with the device yielded helpful results that the operator could understand and so he conceived that for a computer to be truly intellectually augmenting it must work the same way (Engelbart, C).

Engelbart's plan required that a computer allow the user to interact with it. This meant that he had to develop an operations environment that is understandable by even the most basic users. Engelbart's operations environment was designed to run programs in English, and output them to a cathode ray tube monitor (Engelbart, C).

In 1962, Engelbart took steps to bring his vision into fruition. Engelbart had contracted with the United States Air Force to develop his system so they could use it to train their pilots (Engelbart, C.). In a summary report that he sent to the Unites States Air Force Engelbart simplified and illustrated the general layout of his computer. His illustration is still very similar to the computers used today.

"Joe has two display screens side by side, but one of them he doesn't seem to use as much as the other. And the screens are almost horizontal, more like the surface of a drafting table than the near-vertical picture displays you had somehow imagined. But you see the reason easily, for he is working on the display surface as intently as a draftsman works on his drawings, and it would be awkward to reach out to a vertical surface for this kind of work. Some of the time Joe is using both hands on the keys, obviously feeding information into the computer at a great rate" (Engelbart, D).

Upon reviewing his proposal in its entirety, the Air Force gave Engelbart's project their stamp of approval, and Engelbart had the funding he needed to begin building.

Engelbart proceeded to form his team and build his vision. In 1968, Englebart and his much large team of professionals had prepared their product for its first demonstration. Rumors of Engelbart's new, user friendly, Graphical User Interface had spread far and wide and its arrival was so heavily anticipated by the world of computers that the demonstration was held in front of more than a thousand professionals and a TV news crew. The crew, not knowing what to expect, had three cameras trained on Engelbart. One camera was on his face, another on his screen, and the third on his hands.

Engelbart called his new computer the oN Line System or NLS. After a reasonably short production period, Engelbart had integrated interactivity and usability fairly successfully. The computer, although very different, had a similar layout and concept to today's machine.

Engelbart had achieved his desired interactivity by inventing what he called the 'mouse.' The computer was interfaced by a standard QWERTY keyboard and a second five character chording keyboard. In chord keyboards the user presses multiple key combinations to enter an input instead of using one key for each character. "General Braille writers, a typical chord keyboard, have a keyboard of only six keys and a space bar for all Braille characters. These keys can be pushed one at a time or together at the same time to represent Braille symbols for visually impaired people" (Lee). Engelbart's mouse was a small rectangular box made of wood. It was about the size of two juice boxes with three buttons near the top, connected to the computer with a long wire. Engelbart said the wire looked like a tail and that is where the device derived its name from.

The mouse's cursor, then called a bug, was a perfectly vertical line (|) about one character high. Whenever the user would select an object or text on the screen, the bug would leave a dot as a marker. The user could use the mouse to maneuver the cursor, which was then called a 'bug', and click on an interactive region within the interface. By doing so the computer would generate a program or document within a 'window' or section of the screen that was generated and dedicated to the file or program. The technology that allowed a user to execute a program or open a file with a 'click' was called hypertext. On top of all of this, the computer was also networked to another computer allowing it to share data and information.

In Engelbart's one demonstration he had given the world the predecessors to the modern day mouse, the 'user-friendly' operating system and the internet. Today the mouse uses an arrow on the screen (as opposed to the bug which was a vertical line '|'), operating systems are completely graphical, and the internet is written in HTML which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The NLS and the work that followed continued at the institute until 1989 when it was shut down due to lack of funding. Today, the internet, the mouse and the windowed applications are a way of the world. They have moved from a commodity to a requirement in most industries. Although he was not recognized for it at the time, Engelbart founded all of the master components and advantages to the computer of today.

Works Cited

Engelbart, Christina. "Bootstrap Institute: Engelbart biography." Bootstrap Institute. 24 June 2003. 10 May 2008 .

Engelbart, Douglas. STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE. AIR FORCE OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH .AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. Menlo Park, CA: STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE, 1962.

Lee, Seongil. Sungkyunkwan University. UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO MOBILE COMPUTING BY MODULAR I/O DESIGN.