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 (originally named the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center' (AHIRC), later shortened to ARC), 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.
Many alumni of ARC later moved to Xerox PARC, where they were prominent early figures.
Further reading
- Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford University, Stanford, 2000
External links
- Doug Engelbart Institute
- Doug Engelbart - brief biography at the IEEE Computer Society
- Did Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" Launch the Connected World? - informative introductory article, useful links at the end
- 55 years ago, the ‘Mother of All Demos’ foresaw modern computing
