Douglas Engelbart

Augmenter of Intellect

A systems thinker who asked how people could become better at solving difficult problems together. The mouse was one piece of a much larger dream.

Collective Intellect: Treats a group’s capacity to think as a design problem.
Living Hypertext: Connects ideas inside a shared working system.
Bootstrapping: Improves the means of making improvements.

19252013

Douglas Engelbart

Engineer & Pioneer of Human Augmentation

History of computing · Augmenting the human Start hereThe 1968 demonstrationWatch NLS in action, with an index that lets you follow individual ideas.Watch the indexed demo

1962

Choose the difficult problem

Engelbart framed his research around improving a person’s ability to approach complex problems. His report treats tools, language, methods and training as interdependent parts of that capacity.

A faster device alone would be insufficient. The question was how people could develop new ways of organising their work—and then use those ways to improve the system itself.

1968

A future demonstrated together

On 9 December 1968, Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center at SRI publicly demonstrated NLS. Editing, linked documents, structured text and remote collaboration appeared within a working system.

Bill English, Bill Paxton, Jeff Rulifson and many other collaborators were part of the effort. Watch the demonstration for the relationships between its capabilities, as well as the individual inventions.

1988

Getting better at getting better

Engelbart and his daughter Christina founded the Bootstrap Institute in 1988; it later became the Doug Engelbart Institute. He continued to emphasise improving how organisations learn and tackle problems together.

The institute’s indexed edition of the 1968 demo, made with Bret Victor, is a fitting way to revisit it: the archive itself becomes easier to explore, connect and learn from.