| |
Douglas Carl Engelbart has
a thirty-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the
future of organizational computing.
The grandson of early pioneers
of the West, he grew up during the Great Depression on a small farmstead
near Portland, Oregon. After graduating from high school in 1942, he went
on to study Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University. Setting
his studies aside, he joined the Navy during World War II, serving for
two years as an electronic/radar technician in the Phillipines.
After completing his Bachelors
Degree in E.E. in 1948, he settled contentedly on the San Francisco peninsula
as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA).
However, within three years
he grew restless, feeling there was something more important he should
be working on, dedicating his career to. He thought about the world's
problems, and what he as an engineer might possibly be able to do about
them. He had read about the development of the computer, and seriously
considered how it might be used to support mankind's efforts to solve
these problems. As a radar technician he had seen how information could
be displayed on a screen. He began to envision people sitting in front
of displays, "flying around" in an information space where they could
formulate and organize their ideas with incredible speed and flexibility.
So he applied to the graduate program in Electrical Engineering at U.C.
Berkeley to launch his new crusade (at that time there was no computer
science department, and the closest working computer was in Maryland).
He earned his Ph.D. in 1955,
along with a half dozen patents in "bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices",
and then stayed on as Acting Assistant Professor. However, within a year
he was tipped off by a colleague that if he kept talking about his "wild
ideas" he'd be an Acting Assistant Professor forever. So he ventured back
down the Peninsula in search of a more suitable outpost.
He settled on a research position
at SRI (then Stanford Research Institute), where he earned another dozen
patents in two years working on magnetic computer components, fundamental
digital-device phenomena, and miniaturization scaling potential.
By 1959 he had enough standing
to get approval to pursue his own research. He spent the next two years
formulating a theoretical framework for a new discipline, which became
the guiding force for his seminal work.
This framework is based on
the assumptions that complexity and urgency are increasing exponentially,
and that the product of the two will soon challenge our organizations
and institutions to change in quantum leaps rather than incremental steps.
Therefore, in addition to aspiring to be increasingly faster and smarter
at their core missions (whether creating better widgets, or solving societal
problems), organizations will have to get increasingly faster and smarter
at how they keep improving. Engelbart saw both organizational missions
as relying on the same core capabilities, which he encapsulated in the
term human intellect (later switching to Drucker's knowledge work).
This thinking prompted an analysis
of what capabilities humans draw from, aside from what they are born with,
to boost their intellect. A myriad of technical and non-technical elements
emerged, such as tools, media, language, customs, knowledge, skills, procedures,
and so on. He recognized that these elements had co-evolved slowly over
centuries, but with the advent of digital technology, the technical elements
would shoot way ahead of the non-technical, and tend to automate rather
than augment human intellect. What would be needed would be to engineer
all the elements in an accelerating co-evolutionary process, setting up
advanced pilot "outposts" in which to experiment and explore future work
modes. He further surmised that an early target for application should
be to support improvement activities, especially the designers, implementers,
and deployers of these tools and practices (the essence of bootstrapping).
Then in 1963 he finally got
the funds to start his own research lab, which he later dubbed the Augmentation
Research Center. He began by developing the kind of technology he believed
would be required to augment our human intellect, and also to support
the bootstrapping/augmentation process. Throughout the '60s and '70s his
lab pioneered an elaborate hypermedia-groupware system called NLS (for
oNLine System), most of whose now-common features were conceived of, fully
integrated, and in everyday operational use, by the early 1970s.
In the spring of 1967, it was
announced that all the ARPA-sponsored computer research labs, including
Engelbart's, would be networked to promote resource sharing. Engelbart
was thrilled. He saw the ARPANET as an excellent vehicle for extending
NLS provisions for wide-area distributed collaboration. He also saw NLS
as a natural to support an online directory of resources, so he proposed
a Network Information Center (NIC), which he built up and directed until
around 1977, when it spun off as an independent operation. Because of
this early active role in the formation of the ARPANET community, his
site was the second host on the network.
NLS was first demonstrated
in public at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in a remarkable 90-minute
multimedia presentation, in which Engelbart used NLS to outline and illustrate
his points, while others of his staff linked in from his lab at SRI to
demonstrate key features of the system. This was the world debut of the
mouse, hypermedia, and on-screen video teleconferencing.
|
