DOUGLAS C. ENGELBART, 1925-2013
Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88
July 05, 2013
Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be
married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950
that would change the world.
He had a good job working
at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do
something more with his life, something of value that might last, even
outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might
be safely called a complete vision of the information age.
The epiphany spoke to him
of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he
spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of
inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern
personal computer. Among them was something he called “the bug.”
In later years, it was
given a more warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to
scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.
Dr. Engelbart died on
Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary
Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.
Computing was in its
infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly
room-size calculating machines. Someone would feed them information in
stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers.
Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction.
But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.
In his epiphany, he saw
himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different
symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles
while in the Navy after World War II.
The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that
would organize all the information and communications for a given
project.
It was his great insight
that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if
researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called
the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called
their “collective I.Q.”
A decade later, during the
Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford
Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International
called Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC. In the main,
computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic
outsider.
In December 1968, however,
he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration
before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists
at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Dr. Engelbart
was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies
and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.
For the event, he sat on
stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected
the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In
little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive
computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among
collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented
just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He
demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.
In contrast to the
mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created,
called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share
information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form
of a structured electronic library.
The conference attendees
were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the
power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The
technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research
Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and
Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change
the course of modern life.
Years later, people in
Silicon Valley still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all
demos.” And it was the mouse, at least at first, that made the biggest
impression.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was
born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 25, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart.
He spent his formative years on a farm in suburban Portland and attended
Oregon State College. Toward the end of World War II, he was drafted.
He spent two years in the Navy, one of them in the Philippines, as a
radar technician.
After returning to Oregon
State and graduating, he was hired to work at Ames Research Center, a
government aerospace laboratory in California. While there, working as
an electronics technician, he saw how aerospace engineers started with
small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size
airplanes.
The idea of scaling
remained with him. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of
California, Berkeley, he wrote a seminal paper on the importance of
scaling in microelectronics. He grew convinced that computers would
quickly become more powerful. He was proved right.
The idea for the mouse — a
pointing device that would roll on a desk — occurred to Dr. Engelbart in
1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was
musing about how to move a cursor on a computer display.
When he returned to work,
he gave a copy of a sketch to William English, a collaborator and
mechanical engineer at SRI, who, with the aid of a draftsman, fashioned a
pine case to hold the mechanical contents.
The importance of Dr.
Engelbart’s networking ideas was underscored in 1969, when his Augment
NLS system became the application for which the forerunner of today’s
Internet was created. The system was called the ARPAnet computer
network, and SRI became the home of its operation center and one of its
first two nodes, or connection points.
SRI sold the NLS system in
1977 to a company called Tymshare. Dr. Engelbart worked there in
relative obscurity for more than a decade until his contributions became
more widely recognized by the computer industry. He was awarded the
National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize and the Turing
Award.
His first wife, the former
Ballard Fish, died in 1997. Besides his wife, his survivors include his
daughters, Gerda and Christina Engelbart and Diana Mangan; a son,
Norman; and nine grandchildren.
Dr. Engelbart was one of
the first to realize the accelerating power of computers and the impact
they would have on society. In a presentation at a conference in
Philadelphia in February 1960, he described the industrial process of
continually shrinking the size of computer circuits that would later be
referred to as “Moore’s Law,” after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
Speaking of the future, he said, “Boy, are there going to be some surprises over there.”
道格拉斯·恩格爾巴特 | 1925-2013
鼠標發明者恩格爾巴特逝世
2013年07月05日
1950年，道格拉斯·C·恩格爾巴特(Douglas C. Engelbart)25歲，剛剛訂了婚，思考着他的未來，突然，一個將會改變世界的靈感閃現在他的腦海。
他有一份好工作，在位於加利福尼亞的某政府航天實驗室任職，但他渴望在有生之年取得更大成就，做一些可能具有長久價值的事，甚至在他死後還能繼續發揮作用。於是這個靈感來了。僅憑一個點子，他就當之無愧地勾畫出了信息時代的全景。
這一頓悟讓他想到了科技延伸人類智慧的潛力，並以此發展出一個具有深遠影響力的職業生涯。這一頓悟也帶來了一系列發明，而這些發明又成為互聯網和現代個人電腦的基礎。其中就有他所說的「蟲子」(bug)。
後來，人們給它起了一個更溫情的名字，讓人想起一隻喜歡在平整表面上亂躥的毛茸茸的小傢伙：電腦鼠標。
恩格爾巴特博士於周二在加利福尼亞州阿瑟頓的家中去世，享年88歲。他的妻子卡倫·奧利里·恩格爾巴特(Karen O』Leary Engelbart)說他死於腎衰竭。
當恩格爾巴特博士剛剛進入計算機科學領域時，該領域還處在
發展初期。那時的電腦還只是笨拙的、房間般大的計算器。人們用一疊疊打孔卡向計算機輸入信息，然後等幾小時才能打印出答案。交互式計算還很遙遠，或僅在科
幻小說里出現。但它卻正在恩格爾巴特博士不知疲倦的大腦中萌芽。
靈光之中，他看見自己坐在一台大型電腦前，電腦屏幕滿是不同的符號——這一場景極有可能來自二戰後他在海軍負責雷達控制台的工作經歷。他認為，這個屏幕可以作為工作站的顯示器，而工作站則是針對某特定工程，用來組織所有信息和通訊。
他洞察到，如果以小組形式工作的研究人員能共享計算能力，那麼科學和工程領域的進步會得到極大的加速。他稱這一做法為「自舉」(bootstrapping)，並認為這會提高他所稱的「集體智商」(collective I.Q)。
10年後，他于越戰期間在斯坦福研究所（Stanford
Research
Institute，後來被重新命名為SRI，再後來是SRI國際）成立了一個實驗性的研究小組，該小組被稱為擴展研究中心（Augmentation
Research Center，簡稱ARC）。但總的來說，計算機領域的專業人士都認為恩格爾巴特博士是一個堂吉訶德式的外來者。
但在1968年12月舊金山舉行的秋季聯合計算機大會
(Fall Joint Computer
Conference)上，恩格爾巴特博士在一千多名世界頂級計算機科學家面前做了一次卓越的演示，讓整個計算機世界為之興奮。恩格爾巴特博士當時正在開
發一系列革命性的交互計算機技術，他認為這次大會是首次展示這些技術的理想時機。
在大會上，他坐在講台上，面前是一個鼠標、一個鍵盤和其他
控制設備，電腦顯示屏被投射在他身後一個22英尺（約合6.7米）高的屏幕上。在一個小時出頭的時間裡，他向在座的人展示了一個聯網的、交互的計算機系統
如何能讓相互合作的科學家快速共享信息。他還演示了如何使用他在四年前發明的鼠標來控制電腦，並展示了文本編輯、視頻會議、超文本和創建窗口。
和當時使用的大型主機不同，恩格爾巴特博士創建的計算機化系統（被稱為聯機系統）讓研究人員可以無縫共享信息，並能以結構化電子圖書館的形式來創建和讀取文件。
與會人員都被他的演示所震驚。在一次演示中，恩格爾巴特博
士展示了信息時代的電腦的實力和潛力。這一技術將最終在施樂公司(Xerox)的帕洛阿爾托研究中心（Palo Alto Research
Center，簡稱PARC）和斯坦福人工智能實驗室(Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory)得以改進。蘋果公司(Apple)和微軟(Microsoft)將在20世紀80年代把這一技術付諸商用，並從此改變現代生活的進
程。
多年後，硅穀人依然把這次演示稱為「演示之母」。但至少在最初，給人們留下最深印象的是鼠標。
道格拉斯·卡爾·恩格爾巴特於1925年1月25日出生在
俄勒岡州波特蘭，他的父母是卡爾和格拉迪絲·恩格爾巴特(Carl and Gladys
Engelbart)。他在波特蘭的郊區長大成人，後就讀於俄勒岡州立大學(Oregon State
College)。他在二戰快結束時應徵入伍，並在海軍服役兩年，其中一年是在菲律賓任雷達技術員。
在回到俄勒岡州立大學並畢業後，他在加利福尼亞州的政府航天實驗室艾姆斯研究中心(Ames Research Center)謀得一職。在那裡擔任電子技術員期間，他看到航天工程師如何從設計小模型開始，而後將它放大變成全尺寸的穿梭機。
他一直沒有忘記這種按比例生產的想法。從加州大學伯克利分
校(University of California,
Berkeley)取得博士學位後，他寫了一篇有重大意義的論文，探討微電子學領域的成比例生產。他開始確信，計算機將很快變得更強大。事實證明，他是對
的。
1964年，當恩格爾巴特博士參加一場計算機製圖大會時，他產生了鼠標——一種在桌面滾動的指針設備——這個創意。他當時在考慮如何能夠移動電腦顯示屏上的光標。
回到研究院後，他將一份草圖交給威廉·英格利希(William English)——他的合作者、斯坦福研究院的機械工程師。在一位繪圖員的幫助下，英格利希還給這個機械裝置做了一個漂亮的松木外殼。
恩格爾巴特博士的聯網理念的重要性，在1969年得到了強調，當時他的擴展型聯機系統(Augment NLS)被應用到現代互聯網的前身中。這一系統被稱為ARPAnet，斯坦福研究院成為它的運營中心，也成為它最早的兩個節點之一。
斯坦福研究院在1977年把聯機系統賣給一家名叫泰姆謝爾
(Tymshare)的公司。恩格爾巴特博士在那裡默默無聞地工作了十幾年，直到後來他的貢獻在計算機界得到更廣泛的認可。他被授予了國家技術獎章
(National Medal of Technology)、麻省理工學院萊梅爾遜獎(Lemelson-MIT
Prize)和圖靈獎(Turing Award)。
他的第一任妻子巴拉德·菲什(Ballard
Fish)於1997年去世。除了現在的妻子，恩格爾巴特的在世家人還有他的女兒格爾達·恩格爾巴特(Gerda
Engelbart)、克里斯蒂娜·恩格爾巴特(Christina Engelbart)、和戴安娜·曼根(Diana
Mangan)，兒子諾曼(Norman)，以及九個孫輩。
恩格爾巴特博士很早便認識到計算機的加速力以及計算機對社
會的影響力，他是這方面的先驅之一。在1960年費城一場會議的報告中，他描述了如何不斷縮小計算機電路的工業，這種想法後來被稱為摩爾定律
(Moore』s Law)，以英特爾(Intel)創始人之一高登·摩爾(Gordon Moore)命名。
談及未來，他說，「還能有什麼能讓我們驚訝的嗎？」
翻譯：陶夢縈、曹莉Widely described as the father of the computer mouse, Mr. Engelbart played a key role in inventing or refining other building blocks of personal computers and the Web—including word processing, bitmapped computer displays and navigating online using links.
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-YB664_engelb_DV_20130703211119.jpg)
SRI International
Douglas C. Engelbart, in 1968
Mr. Engelbart, who died July 2 at the age of 88, demonstrated many of the ideas at a jaw-dropping San Francisco event in 1968 that is still widely called the "mother of all demos."
But Mr. Engelbart never achieved the wealth or fame of entrepreneurs at companies like Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that would build on some of his ideas. Friends say he sometimes lamented that his broader goal—to fundamentally expand human capabilities with computers—wasn't understood or appreciated.
"Doug was the Moses of the information age," says Paul Saffo, a managing director of the research firm Discern Analytics, who had known Mr. Engelbart since the early 1980s. "He did quite a lot to lead us all to the digital promised land, but was left behind on the wrong side of the Red Sea."
Mr. Engelbart was the son of a Portland, Ore., radio-shop owner who died when his son was nine years old. The younger Mr. Engelbart studied electronic engineering in college and was a Navy radar technician during World War II. After the war he worked as a wind-tunnel engineer at the Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, Calif.
It was at Ames that Mr. Engelbart had what he later described as a vision of the information age, conceiving a world where people could interact with computers through cathode-ray tubes like the ones in television sets and use them to share information and solve problems collectively. His ideas germinated in an age when computers were room-size devices that produced answers to questions posed by computer tape or punch cards.
Mr. Engelbart "was moving toward the computer as a communications device, something for navigating knowledge," says Mark Weber, founder and curator of the Internet-history program at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "That was a really, really radical idea in the '50s and the '60s."
Like others of his era, Mr. Engelbart was inspired by a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by the government science adviser Vannevar Bush, which posited a hypothetical device, the Memex, that would help people efficiently store and retrieve books, records and communications. That idea planted seeds for the linking concept known as hypertext that became a foundation for the Web and later was advanced by Mr. Engelbart and another researcher.
After receiving a doctorate in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Engelbart joined Stanford Research Institute, a government-sponsored lab that eventually cut its ties to Stanford University. He led the Augmentation Research Center at the institute from 1959 to 1977.
Mr. Engelbart had said he got the idea for the mouse in 1961. It used two wheels—one turning vertically, the other, horizontally—to help position a cursor on a computer screen.
During the 1968 demonstration, Mr. Engelbart wowed the audience, showing off other concepts, like editing text on a computer display, use of multiple computer windows and videoconferencing.
Mr. Engelbart resisted being identified with the mouse or other specific inventions, preferring to see his broader role in a collaborative vision he called Collective IQ. "The mouse was just a tiny piece of a much larger project aimed at augmenting human intellect," Mr. Engelbart told Superkids Educational Software Review in 2003.
But he lost federal funding and SRI wound up selling his center. Some of his team went to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which worked on office automation items such as PCs and laser printers. Mr. Engelbart later worked at aerospace company McDonnell Douglas Corp., before founding the Bootstrap Institute—where he offered management seminars on his ideas. He also created the Doug Engelbart Institute, which has the mission of advancing his "lifelong career goal of boosting our ability to better address complex, urgent problems."
Mr. Engelbart was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000 and the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award in 1997.
Mr. Saffo, of Discern Analytics, says that many of Mr. Engelbart's ideas remain to be explored—or perfected, such as allowing several people to edit a document simultaneously. "How many times have you worked simultaneously on a shared screen on a shared document?" Mr. Saffo asks. "It's just too hard to do."
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com and Stephen Miller at stephen.miller@wsj.com
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