If you’re like me, chances are pretty good that you’ve been taught that all the elements of the modern computer user interface — programs running in windows, menus, icons, WYSIWYG editing of text documents, and of course, the venerable computer mouse — descended from the hallowed halls of the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s. And it’s certainly true that PARC developed these technologies and more, including the laser printer and object-oriented programming, all of which would grace first the workplaces of the world and later the homes of everyday people.

But none of these technologies would have existed without first having been conceived of by a man with a singular vision of computing. Douglas Engelbart pictured a future in which computers were tools to sharpen the human intellectual edge needed to solve the world’s problem, and he set out to invent systems to allow that. Reading a Twitter feed or scanning YouTube comments, one can argue with how well Engelbart’s vision worked out, but there’s no arguing with the fact that he invented almost all the trappings of modern human-computer interaction, and bestowed it upon the world in one massive demonstration that became known as “The Mother of All Demos.”

A Vision for a Better Future

While the Mother of All Demos occurred in 1968, its genesis goes back more than two decades earlier, to a little grass hut in the Philippines. There, in the very earliest days of the Cold War, a young man serving as a US Navy radar technician, happened upon an article by Vannevar Bush called “As We May Think.” In the essay, Bush described his vision for an information machine that could act as a collective memory device and spark an explosion in human knowledge.

The Bush article was heady stuff to Doug Engelbart, whose undergrad studies at Oregon State University had been interrupted by his call to service. When he returned, he finished his degree in electrical engineering and made plans to marry his college sweetheart. Like many veterans, he planned on the “get married, get a good job, live the good life” model, but something about that paradigm bothered him. In 1950, he mapped out an alternate path for his life, one that would concentrate on making the world a better place by leveraging human intellect through information systems of the kind Bush described in his essay. Engelbart reasoned that only by organizing human knowledge and providing easy access to it could he achieve his goal of solving the world’s problems.

Engelbart spent the first half of the 1950s on graduate work at Berkeley. With a doctorate in electrical engineering, he set out to make his vision a reality. By 1957 he had landed at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. Funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made it possible for him to create the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), a lab within the Institute devoted to bringing his vision of an …read more

Source:: Hackaday