Computing visionary's idea changed the world
By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 12/06/98
It was an unimposing little handcarved wooden box on wheels, looking more like a simple toy than an epochal invention that would change the world. But it was, and it did.
When Douglas Engelbart unveiled the first computer mouse at a computing conference 30 years ago this week, he thought it would catch fire and change the face of computing in short order. But to his surprise it took more than 16 years before a commercial version reached the marketplace, with the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984.
Nowadays, it's hard to find a computer that doesn't come with a mouse, or one of its offspring (such as trackballs or touch pads), as standard equipment. The transformation that was revealed that day laid the groundwork for the whole computer revolution and made possible an industry that today generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenues. For his trouble, Engelbart - who holds the patent for the mouse - eventually was paid $10,000.
''The 1968 demonstration of Engelbart's work completely blew people away,'' said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future at Stanford University - the campus where Engelbart made his pioneering developments in the 1960s. ''It was like a UFO landing on the White House lawn,'' Saffo said. ''Nothing has been the same since in computing.''
It wasn't just the mouse itself, of course. What Engelbart was demonstrating at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968, was a whole new approach to what computers were and how they could be used. On that December day, Engelbart unveiled a vision that was the first public marriage of ''personal'' with computers.
Until then, computers were huge, expensive, and impersonal number-crunching machines. For the most part, they had no screens or keyboards and were not too comfortable working with words, and even less so with pictures.
But the technology was there, and Engelbart saw the potential. As he described it in an interview last week, by then he had already been working with computers for 17 years, and had figured out - as few others had - that ''personally interacting with a computer is going to be a big thing.''
That was prescient thinking in an era when computer pricetags were in the millions, the hardware would fill large, climate-controlled rooms, and even professional programmers mostly interacted with a computer by handing a pile of punchcards to a computer operator, who would feed the cards in, wait for the computer to carry out its work, collect its output from a printer, and hand it back to the programmer hours, or even days, later. To most people at that time, the notion of ''personally interacting'' with computers made as much sense as thinking that average people could ''interact'' with a nuclear reactor or a battleship.
First steps
But Engelbart saw far beyond that, and set the stage for the revolution to come. He saw that computers had the power to become more than just the overgrown calculators they were at the time. They could become, he realized, a way of expanding and enhancing the human mind.
The first step toward that was to represent information in a visual way, on a television screen. Words, pictures and commands (menus) could all be displayed on the same screen, and could be manipulated by controlling a moving pointer, or cursor, on that screen. But then came the big question: How could you best control the movements of that cursor?
Engelbart and his Stanford Research Institute team tried a variety of devices, but the breakthrough came when Engelbart was ''drawing doodles during a boring meeting. That ended up being the principle for the first mouse.''
The system he developed also included the concept of the hyperlink - now widely familiar as the clickable links found on Internet pages, which connect you to another page or another site that contains additional information about the word or phrase that was clicked on. And it included ''windows'' on the screen that provided views of different kinds of information.
Those concepts were further developed during the 1970s by another group in the same town: the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox Corp., which developed the first truly personal computer - but never brought it to market. It was there that Steven Jobs saw the system demonstrated, and incorporated the basic concepts into the Apple Macintosh operating system.
To demonstrate these ideas to a packed audience of 2,300 at the 1968 conference, Engelbart and his team had set up a large work station at the auditorium, connected by special phone lines to a computer at Stanford. ''It was a real gamble,'' Engelbart says. ''We had a lot of expensive hardware and software to work the presentation. If at any time in that hour-and-a-half it had crashed, we would have been left waving our hands.''
And it was a further gamble, he said, because the people paying for the work - the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - didn't even know about the unauthorized demo. If it had crashed, ''people would have been upset.''
But much of the future of computing was right there that day. Engelbart himself - a modest and unassuming man, now 73 - admits that ''the whole thing had lots of revolutionary aspects.''
Others put it more strongly. ''Engelbart's demonstration that year was a watershed that fundamentally changed the course of the computing revolution, contributing not only ideas, but also many of the people who would later build the systems we use today,'' said Stanford librarian Michael Keller.
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of that watershed event, Stanford will hold a daylong symposium called ''Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution'' this week, featuring many of the leaders of today's computer industry. Some of the ideas demonstrated that day, as the symposium's title implies, are still awaiting commercialization.
A long way to go
Engelbart sees the computer revolution as a towering mountain, and he says we may be about 20 percent of the way up it so far. He is concentrating on the path ahead, not what's happened so far. He sees computers as a way for humans to gain ''collective IQ, knowledge management. It portends a very significant potential for society,'' where instead of just helping people do the things they did already, computers will make it possible to do things that could never even have been imagined before.
Someday, he says, ''I think we can start collectively tackling large issues in a way that we can't today. I'm still trying to get people to hear that.''
Engelbart himself never got rich from his vision, as so many lesser innovators did. But he has found himself a comfortable home for his own research. Back in the early 1980s, a company called Logitech, which has since become the world's leading maker of mice (they are about to ship their 200 millionth mouse) decided to provide Engelbart with office space and resources to continue his work. He has been at Logitech's headquarters in Fremont, Calif., ever since, though he is not on the company's payroll, preferring the independence of his own nonprofit foundation, the Bootstrap Alliance. He is deeply grateful for Logitech's help: ''It's been a huge thing,'' he said.
Back in 1967, Englebart and the Stanford Research Institute were granted a patent on the mouse - but not on other elements of the system, such as windows and hypertext. Those were software, and at the time only hardware could be patented.
But patents only last for 17 years - exactly how long it took for his device to become a commercial product. In any case, Stanford owned the rights to the invention, under an arrangement that was standard practice at the time. Engelbart was not legally entitled to any royalties, even if there had been any.
But he did get something for it. Several years ago, Stanford ''did give me a $10,000 check,'' Engelbart said - and then, without a trace of irony, he added, ''which was nice of them. They didn't have to.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 12/06/98. © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*****************
Wade T. Smith
morbius@channel1.com | "There ain't nothin' you
wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god."
******* http://www.channel1.com/users/morbius/ *******