Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart was an American computer scientist who played a very important role today's modern-style interactive computing, using graphical user interfaces. Much of the work was done at the Augmentation Research Center, at SRI.

He is perhaps best known for the "Mother of All Demos", at 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference; he and several collaborators from the Augmentation Research Center did a public demonstration of the mouse-driven graphical user interface they had produced. The FJCC was in San Francisco that year, and they set up to use the ARC computer (which was located in Menlo Park) remotely; not at all simple, at that point in time. The demo completely blew the audience (to whom the current standard of user interfaces used Teletypes) away - hence the name by which it is now known.

Further reading

• Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford University, Stanford, 2000