Doug Engelbart

Person

A colour photograph of a smiling elderly man with white hair and a blue shirt, with a lawn and water behind him. — Doug Engelbart in Redwood City, 2006. Photo by Dennis Hamilton.Source: Dennis Hamilton, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)License: CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new tab)

Douglas Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925 and died in Atherton, California, in 2013. In the autumn of 1945, while serving in the US Navy on the Philippine island of Leyte, he read the essay “As We May Think”, which strongly influenced his later work.

On 9 December 1968 in San Francisco, his laboratory demonstrated a computer system called NLS, complete with a mouse, text editing and hypertext. The demonstration became known as “The Mother of All Demos”.

In my articles

In my second brain series, Engelbart is one of the pioneers whom Tiago Forte lists alongside Vannevar Bush, because they dreamt of technology that would enhance human intellect.