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Doug Engelbart anticipated it all, August 11, 2009
By Gary Newman (Sebastopol, CA)
By 2009, computers have become ubiquitous; their use plays some part in nearly everything we do. Even as little as 20 years ago, who could have foreseen the impact computers would have on our lives today? Doug Engelbart did. From getting information from our minds to the computer screen, to sharing the information with others, to making it available to the whole world over the Internet, if Engelbart didn't foresee it or directly create it, he laid the groundwork for it. He didn't work alone, but collaboration was part of what brought his dreams to reality.
The Engelbart Hypothesis not only gives us the story of the man and his work, but offers pointers for a style of thinking that could benefit everyone.
Father of collaborative computing, August 25, 2009
By Jay Cross (Berkeley, CA USA)
While Doug Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the mouse, the man is responsible for so much more. Englebart conceptualized social networking more than 50 years ago! He described using connections to boost collective intelligence before computer networks existed. The first connection of the internet ended in his office at SRI. You've probably heard the tale about Steve Jobs lifting the Mac's windows, icons, and mouse from Xerox PARC; PARC got them from Doug Engelbart.
Valerie and Eileen talked with Doug for several years to tease out his amazing story. They've succeeded in capturing Doug's thoughts in 140 pages of simple, accessible language and graphics. If you want to know where Web 2.0 came from, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
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The Man Who Leaped the Information Age, September 19, 2009
By Karl F. Hebenstreit Jr.
This book provides invaluable insights into the life of Doug Engelbart, who in my opinion is the most important visionary of the 20th Century (or more accurately, the century from 1950 - 2050). I often refer to Doug as the 'man who skipped the Information Age', which I define as a brief overlap between the Industrial Age and the emerging Knowledge Age.
This past December marked the 40th anniversary of 'The Demo', the first comprehensive demonstration of interactive computing, and provides a blueprint for an approach to solving the tremendously complex challenges confronting us. Beyond the intellectual aspects of Doug's work, this book also provides insights into Doug's mental models, his reflections on why he has been able to persevere through decades of resistance to his ideas.
I discovered Doug's work in the early 1990s, and his ideas are the reference perspective of my worldview, and have guided my professional career ever since. As I have been reading this book, I recognize its importance for addressing the most fundamental challenge of the Knowledge Age -- how we resolve the issues surrounding intellectual property. At the core of this intellectual property challenge is the tension between maintaining the integrity of a visionary's ideas, safeguarding these ideas from a blurring dilution as these ideas become more widely known, and the need for developing shared understandings necessary to continue the quest to realize the vision.
For further reference regarding Doug's work and "The Demo", visit the Doug Engelbart Institute site, http://dougengelbart.org Also see the 40th Anniversary Celebration event videos at: http://www.sri.com/engelbart-event-video.html, especially the highlights from The Demo and his daughter Christina's presentation, "Driving Vision", http://www.sri.com/engvideos/c_engelbart.html
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This book should be compulsory reading for all IT and Business students around the world September 8, 2009
By Jan Freijser
This is a remarkable book. A gem. It tells the story of a man with a mission, who started a revolution in the 1950s, which has yet to get going for real, in the 2010s.
The story emerged from a series of interviews and dialogs taking place over six years, about the many groundbreaking themes that arose in Engelbart's mind more than half a century ago.
The book is extremely readable and compact, divided into three main sections, the first dedicated to Engelbart's ideas, work, and life (about 70 pages), the second presenting "Reflections by Fellow Pioneers of the Computer Age" (30 pages), and the third containing case studies by scholars, teachers and scientists about their work and life applying Engelbart's concepts (40 pages). It is the kind of book that you cannot put down until you've read the last page.
In the 1950s Douglas Engelbart started to think about ways of turning the computer into a machine that could help us solve problems.
It is difficult to zap back to the mid 20th century and imagine what it must have been like for a person to start thinking and developing ideas for concepts many of which we now take for granted: we use graphical user interfaces, word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, hypertext, video conferencing, the internet, social networking, and we may use wikis or a collaborative platform in which working knowledge and expertise evolves into an additional random access organizational brain, available on tap. Yet, Engelbart envisaged all those uses and applications over the years when he ran the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He did not only envisage them, but built a system that incorporated all those functionalities. He also invented the mouse, featuring in the original system as just one device of several to aid human interaction with the computer.
It is no wonder that Engelbart himself describes the moment that he became aware of his mission in the early 50s (he came to call it his crusade), as an epiphany. He must have felt the power of that brainwave in every sinew of his body, and understood intuitively that the potential of computer technology could unimaginably revolutionize everything we do, everything we make, and how we live our lives in our different societies all over the world.
His two co-authors Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg point out in the introduction that Engelbart was far ahead of his time, and that is true, if understated. If you put together a team of the world's top innovators, inventors, IT experts now, in 2009, they would be hard put to come up with any idea or notion that had not already been thought of, proposed, or implemented by Engelbart in the 1960s.
An important aspect stressed by the authors is the underlying philosophical framework Engelbart applied to all his endeavours, which were uncompromisingly aimed at augmenting the human intellect. Augmentation, and not automation, was the key concept that fed all his thinking and actions. This is an essential distinction which was also creating separate camps in the small computer community at the time. The automation camp would think cybernetics, AI, and robots, aiming to replace the brain, whereas the augmentation camp would aim at creating some kind of symbiosis between man and machine.
To quote Charles Irby, Information Architect at the ARC for seven years:
"I think a lot of the things that he [Engelbart] was doing had to do with the combination of developing a technology and, at the same time, developing the human side -- ways of dealing with that technology and incorporating that technology into the way you get things done". (p. 40)
There are so many details in the book that anyone reading about them for the first time will find mind-blowing, but I particularly loved the biographical section when Engelbart talks about his youth, and early influences. One story characterizing the man is about how as a teenager he found this 1916 Model T Ford, and spent 7 years working on it, finding out how it worked, and in fact getting it to running condition.
When he was barely 20, just after WWII, he read that seminal Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" ([...]), remembering being greatly "intrigued" by it. Another crucial idea he picked up from reading William James, was that humans actually employ only a small proportion of their mental capability.
Then on to his working life, how he invented the mouse, how he was right there when the first two computers were connected in 1969, the first computer network, that became the Arpanet, and later the internet. His thoughts about scalability inspired Gordon Moore (founder of Intel) to formulate Moore's Law.
He talks about Capability Infrastructure, Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of knowledge, the Networked Improvement Community, and the ABC Improvement Infrastructure.
And, of course, he talks about the great demo, held in 1968, in which he and his team actually demonstrated the system they had been building. This demo, with an audience of 3000, was so totally mind-blowing, that some attendees could not believe what they had seen, and angrily quizzed Engelbart afterwards, believing he had faked the whole thing. Many, if not all, leading pioneers of the computer age were present at the demo, which has come to be called "the mother of all demos".
The second half of the book presents the reflections and comments of fellow pioneers like Alan Kay and Vint Cerf, and provides illustrations of how Engelbart's principles and methods were put into practice. Their contributions are highly valuable, as they give you a kind of 360 view on Engelbart's achievements, increasing understanding and bringing home the realization what a giant Douglas Engelbart was, and is.
A final note about the medium: it's a book, printed on paper. Before it was printed, however, it lived on the web for a while, in the form of a weblog, inviting comments from readers. In fact, it's still there, http://engelbart, and still open for comments. Paradoxically perhaps, I think it's great that the book exists in print. I called the book a gem, but I feel that is too static an image. It's really a grain of sand, aimed at irking the mind, stimulating new connections, movements of thought into new territory, providing the potential for developing those softer jewels.
Please participate in the dialog by posting your comments on our blog
http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com
 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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