Artifact Details

Title

CHM presents technology legend : honoring Douglas Engelbart

Catalog Number

102746816

Type

Moving image

Description

As a young Doug Engelbart could only imagine sixty years ago, much of the world’s population does the bulk of its reading, writing, and research tasks online. We sit at interactive screens, just as he foresaw, and click on the hypertext links he developed, with the mouse he invented. We chat and send emails, as his Augmentation Research Center staff did in the 1960s. We meet in videoconferences, the technology they showed the world at a famous 1968 public demo. We do all of this over computer networks including the Internet, both partly developed within his laboratory at SRI.

But when it comes to the kind of knowledge navigation and collaboration tools that were the heart of Engelbart’s oNLine System (NLS), we’ve climbed only the first rung of the ladder. And when it comes to the ambitious goal that drove him to build all his technology – to augment human intelligence so that we might better address the world’s big problems – we’ve barely even stepped off the ground. What can we learn today from this great inventor, whose idea of iterative “bootstrapping” anticipated the promises of the Singularity but with a human face – no machine intelligence required?

Join us for an evening of celebrating his achievements, and of challenging some of today’s pivotal leaders to think about how his unfinished revolution may be useful going forward. December 9 will be the 45th Anniversary of the “Mother of All Demos.”Douglas Engelbart died on July 2 this year. Some of the main records of his laboratory at SRI are in the Museum’s collection, and form a crucial part of the CHM Internet History Program. The Douglas Engelbart Memorial Fund helps support preservation and access for these materials.

Date

2013-12-09

Participants

Brand, Stewart, Speaker
Carlson, Curtis R., Speaker
Cheyer, Adam, Speaker
De Luca, Guerrino, Speaker
Engelbart, Christina, Speaker
Engelbart, Karen, Speaker
English, Bill, Speaker
Feinler, Jake, Speaker
Logitech, Sponsor
Markoff, John, Moderator
Nelson, Ted, Speaker
Saffo, Paul, Speaker
SRI International, Sponsor

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Format

MOV

Category

Lecture

Collection Title

CHM Lecture Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X7036.2014