Douglas Engelbart: The Augfather
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Douglas Engelbart is the founder of augmented intelligence and creator of the mouse and so many other inventions central to computing that no one bio can really capture it all.
Engelbart gave the mother of all demos in 1968 introducing some of his most famous innovations and ideas about intelligence augmentation that augments our ability to improve our intelligence augmentation and so on, which he called bootstrapping:
Watch the mother of all Demos
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
Bootstrapping Collective IQ
Beyond all his engineering inventions, Engelbart contributed an idea that goes to the very heart of Primer and Code Hero: Bootstrapping our collective IQ.
Learn more about Collective IQ at the Douglas Engelbart Institute.
