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98.10.19 ( d8
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Course (Information Media 1998)
Douglas C. Engelbart
Doug now has his own think-tank,
where they have
Doug Engelbart is one of the very great men of our time. He invented
the idea of reading and writing at computer screens in 1957; he invented
word processing, outline processing, text links, and (unfortunately*) the
computer mouse. But he thinks of all these things in much broader
terms he calls his vision of all this "the augmentation of human intellect,"
and believes that we have hardly begun.
Doug's vision spans a great spectrum of what we need for the human mind
and work: individual work, empowering workgroups, making human intellect
more deeply powerful.
Doug Engelbart
under the arbor at his home
This year (1998) is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the incredible presentation
he gave at a major computer conference, in which he showed two people working
together at shared computer screens many miles apart. Not only was
this a radical idea at the time, but the fact that the demo succeeded with
the equipment of that day still seems a miracle. (There will be a
conference at Stanford University on December 9 in honor of that anniversary.)
Doug with his chord keyboard 
A lot of people love the mouse, but resent having to type at the keyboard,
then pick up the mouse, then reach back to the keyboard, over and over.
Doug foresaw that problem in the nineteen-sixties, and built a little keyboard
on which he can type with one hand while he uses the mouse with the other.
Closeup of the chord keyboard (from the above picture)
Sadly, such a keyboard is still not available: no manufacturer has had
the intelligence or foresight to make available such a simple thing.
Doug's recent visit to Keio SFC
Doug Engelbart
at the SFC faculty club, with (right to left): Yoshiko Saito, unknown male
student, Ted Nelson.
