A life in tech: Engelbart’s achievements

In the early 1970s some key members of Engelbart’s ARC team left to join Xerox PARC, and by 1975, when ARPA funding dried

up, only Engelbart was left. SRI sold NLS to a phone networking company called Tymshare, where Engelbart continued working on it in obscurity. Steven Levy interviewed him there in the early 80s and found him disappointed. From the late 80s onwards, he received some measure of recognition and several awards, such as the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1992, and the prestigious Turing Award in 1997, but still dreamed of seeing his system widely adopted – not just the tools but the intellect-augmenting organisational structures and paradigms.

His daughter Christina said he hated being pigeonholed as the inventor of the mouse. He was frustrated that of all his innovations only the simplest, the mouse, had been taken up. He was disparaging of the Mac’s focus on ease-of-use and WYSIWYG – “what you see is all you get,” he complained.

Engelbart died at the age of 88 in July 2013. Christina still runs the Doug Engelbart Institute, dedicated to his vision of augmenting human intellect. Find it at dougengelbart.org.