Article last updated: Sunday, April 29, 2001   8:08 AM MST
Print this Article E-Mail to a Friend Link to this Article

MATHEW SUMNER -- Staff The first mouse -- called simply the X-Y Position Indicator -- in vented by Douglas Engelbart and built by Bill English.

Long-distance thinker

Tech visionary Doug Engelbart still crusading for new ideas

By Yung-pei Chen BUSINESS WRITER

IN THE 1950s, when computers were big bulky things that filled a whole room and cost millions of dollars, Douglas Engelbart's idea that every household would eventually own one was thought to be impossible. 

By August 2000, some 54 million households in the U.S. had computers, according to a report issued by the National Telecommunications and Information Agency. 

Engelbart may be best known for inventing the mouse, but he also came up with the concepts of hooking a monitor to a computer, networking, multiple window displays, hyperlinking and teleconferencing. 

With his pioneering visions firmly entrenched, Engelbart, 76, now strives to get the rest of the world to think like he does -- out of the box. He spends his days working to convince people that they need to be more open to, in effect, trading their tricycles for bicycles. 

"Doug has been pioneering technology since the 1950s. He and his team were way ahead of their times," said Patrick Lincoln, director of the computer science laboratory at SRI International. 

While Engelbart pioneered many of the concepts that led to the computer and dot-com revolutions -- and a whole new kind of economy -- his face sours at the mention of the word "corporations." 

He sees them as more an impediment than an initiator of change and has spent most of his career outside the corporate world. 

Big companies can't evolve as quickly or flexibly because they're always trying to come out with new tools every year and think of ways they can increase their market share, he said. 

"Change can happen a lot faster if we start accepting it and facilitating it more," said Engelbart. 

"Doug is a long-distance thinker," said Paul Saffo, director at the Institute for the Future, who is also a good friend of Engelbart. "Doug's most important ideas still haven't been developed yet." 

That belief, along with the skepticism his ideas met with over the years, may be why Engelbart is today focused on getting people to be more open to new ideas. 

To accomplish his goals of getting people everywhere to think out-of-the-box more, Engelbart uses The Bootstrap Institute to deliver his message. The organization was started by the Atherton resident in 1989, and mostly consists of Engelbart and his assistant, Mary Coppernoll. A group of volunteers helps out with keeping the organization's Web site running and getting Engelbart's message out to the world. 

Originally stationed on the campus of Stanford University for about two years, Engelbart decided it was time to relocate Bootstrap when university faculty members started getting antsy. They weren't thrilled that his organization was receiving funding for research while Engelbart wasn't a member of the faculty. 

In 1992, Logitech -- maker of mice and other computer peripherals -- offered Engelbart and his Bootstrap organization a space in its Fremont headquarters, where he holds court today. 

As a "thank you" for inventing the mouse -- which has brought millions of dollars to Logitech -- the company gives Engelbart "consulting money" to support his work with Bootstrap. 

Born in Portland, Ore., in 1925, Engelbart said he grew up in a nice environment. With his family's house, a winding creek, gardens and a cow on one acre of land, he said things were tranquil. 

Engelbart said he remembers turning his nose away from the electrical engineering books that his father had, not wanting to go into the same field. 

But when World War II started, 19-year-old Engelbart was drafted into the Navy -- which brought him to California for the first time -- and trained on radar technology, sonar technology and radio. 

"It was considered so secret that the books were kept in a vault and only taken out during class time. And after class, the books were put back into the vault," he said. 

Engelbart never had to fight in the war though, because the day his ship was sailing, it was announced that Japan had surrendered and the war was over. 

After leaving the Navy, Engelbart came back to California to live as a civilian and went to work at the NACA Ames Laboratory at Moffet Field in Sunnyvale (now run by NASA). He had multiple responsibilities, like maintaining the wind tunnels and installing paging systems. Engelbart worked there for three years before moving on to other things, which included finding a soul mate. 

The turning point in Engelbart's life, he said, was when he got engaged to his wife, Ballard, in 1950. After having his personal life taken care of, Engelbart had more time to devote to thinking about career goals. 

"I thought about what I can do to maximize the contribution of my goals to benefit mankind," he said. 

And that's when he made a trip to the library to do research on people who made changes in the world. After thinking and researching, Engelbart came up with an idea -- to focus on mankind's ability to deal with conflict by helping people communicate better. 

His concept of working with computers and displays, and the mouse, came half an hour later, he said. 

Armed with knowledge of how radar worked -- from his earlier Navy days -- Engelbart thought about how computers with displays can work together. During those days, computers were big, bulky boxes that filled a whole room and didn't have any monitors. 

It wasn't until after he got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and worked for six years at the Stanford Research Institute that Engelbart finally got government funding to work on the project he desired. 

In 1962, Engelbart published a paper titled "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," which led to getting funding from a variety of government agencies a year later to set up his research lab. And in that lab, with the help of Bill English, he gave birth to the mouse and ARPANET -- precursor to the Internet -- and his concepts for hyperlinking and word processing. 

The biggest contributors to Engelbart's research lab were ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Air Force and NASA. 

"I kept being hit by people who didn't think technology would become big on the West Coast -- and look at Silicon Valley," he said. 

Well, he showed them -- literally. 

At the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart debuted NLS (oNLine System), a hypermedia-groupware system that encompassed all of his concepts -- hyperlinking, use of the mouse, different window displays, text manipulation with graphics, sound and teleconferencing. 

Using a mouse with the workstation, it was the first time people saw what would become one of today's technology staples. A big projector screen also was set up with Engelbart's image and a computer screen showing in split panels, creating a video teleconferencing first as well. 

Engelbart also had a modem connected to the workstation, so he could communicate back and forth with researchers at SRI remotely. That was the birth of an early form of messaging. 

From 1968 to 1977, Engelbart and his research team worked on further improving the technologies debuted at the conference. Despite such groundbreaking concepts, the money for Engelbart and his team's research at SRI stopped flowing around 1977. 

"People started thinking we were going the wrong way," he said. 

One reason it took the Internet 30 years to come into being was the fact that Engelbart can sometimes be difficult to understand, said Lincoln. 

"When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon (in 1969, that) was when we had the windows system and the mouse, but it just didn't take off," Lincoln said. 

In 1977, Tymshare -- a phone networking company -- bought the rights to NLS and renamed it AUGMENT. When that happened, Engelbart's colleagues left to pursue other things, but he stayed with the company. That was when the system first became commercialized, said Engelbart. 

Aerospace company McDonnell Douglas Corp. bought Tymshare in 1984. Engelbart stayed with the company until it closed his research lab in 1989 and then left to do his own thing. Thus Bootstrap came about. 

Helping him get the nonprofit organization off the ground was his daughter, Christina, who worked alongside her father for about 10 years before leaving to pursue other things. 

Currently working on a project titled open hyperdocument system, Engelbart is getting help from SRI International -- a nonprofit research institute based in Menlo Park that grew out of the Stanford Research Institute -- to make his vision a reality. 

The term hyperdocument refers to an online document that allows hyperlinking of text to different objects -- an audio file, an image, or a particular paragraph in the document. 

"Based on the same concept of open source like Linux is, OHS can be thought of as a Web browser application on top of an operating system, which can allow collaboration and communication between a group of people," said SRI's Lincoln. 

Lincoln, who is involved with the project, said that they just started approaching companies and government agencies for funding. He said that with $10 million in funding, they believe they would be able to deliver an $11 billion value to the organizations that know how to use OHS. 

OHS can change the future of the Internet from allowing people to browse to allowing people to edit and change live code, Lincoln said. The value comes from the need to improve the organizational infrastructure, he said. 

For corporations, the know-how of doing business, how to interact with customers, and how to market the business -- in other words, knowledge management -- is of extreme value, said Lincoln. 

"Bootstrap's main goal now is to find a way to get people to understand the open hyperdocument system," said Engelbart. 

Aiding Engelbart in his crusade is SRI, which has agreed to help formulate a paper on OHS and help him get funding for the project. 

Lincoln said that "SRI hopes to take Doug to the next step in the revolution." 

As a sign that Engelbart's achievements aren't going unrecognized, he has received numerous awards over the past few years. The last award he got was the 2000 National Medal of Technology in a ceremony hosted by former President Clinton last December. 

Recalling the past when he used to do trick bicycle riding with his brother, Engelbart said that riding a bicycle is similar to learning new technology. 

"It may have been hard at first, but once you learned it, it was easy," he said. "It would make no sense to go back to the tricycle just because it's even easier to use."