Subject: Fwd: Doug Engelbart

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 10:51:29 -0700

> From: Christina Engelbart <[email-masked]>
> <mailto:[email-masked]>>
> Date: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 6:31 AM
> Subject: update on my father
>
> Very sorry to inform my father passed away in his sleep peacefully at
> home last night. His health had been deteriorating of late, and took
> turn for worse on the weekend. I will circle back around soon, for now
> just wanted to give you all advance notice and look forward to
> discussing your thoughts as I am a bit fuzzy at present.

Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at 
SRI, theirs was a group that did much to create the open and 
collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as 
automatic and natural, but were unusual in those days.

As a junior staffer responsible for documentation at the UCLA Arpanet 
project, I used the SRI-ARC NLS system tools over the net.  Partly for 
the capabilities, but partly because it was always a cool group to 
interact with.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 12:10:52 -0700

Wikipedia defines "genius" as "a person who displays exceptional 
intellectual ability, creativity, or originality"
All three applied to Doug Engelbart. He belongs up there with other 
creative  geniuses I have had the privilege of meeting during 50 years 
in computing -- Al Perlis,   Dick Hamming, John McCarthy,and Don Knuth 
come immediately to mind.

Bob Braden'

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2013 16:27:46 -0700

On Jul 3, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Bob Braden <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 
> Wikipedia defines "genius" as "a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality"
> All three applied to Doug Engelbart. He belongs up there with other creative  geniuses I have had the privilege of meeting during 50 years in computing -- Al Perlis,   Dick Hamming, John McCarthy,and Don Knuth come immediately to mind.

Dear Bob,

Here is a video of Doug Engelbar's 1968 demo of SRI's work.
http://vimeo.com/32381658

In the early seventies, most work used mini computers where faults were diagnosed using the front key panel and bit light displays.  I even had the misfortune of debugging early production of MITS Altar systems that were flakey by connecting front panel LEDs directly to the data bus. As a consultant in 1985, I worked at Xerox Parc on the Xerox Star 6085 adding a cartridge tape drive.   They relied on the tape drive to distribute OS updates in a timely fashion because their 10 Mbit Ethernet offered less than 3 Mbit throughput across dozens of test systems.  By then, they were using Bill English's mouse design.  Being relatively sheltered in the lab, this was my first encounter with a GUI interface.  I needed to access my test programs but was dumbfounded by a display that did nothing when you typed on the keyboard.  The secret was to drag the arrow icon over the terminal icon and click.  This finally provided access to a terminal display that responded to the keyboard.

Until then, my editing made use of multiple screens navigated with the use of key combinations.  To this day, I don't think GUI really offered improved productivity.  It was sexy and you did not need to remember all those damn key sequences.  The systems at Xerox Parc made use of the SRI developments which then spawned Windows and Macs introducing personal computers to the masses.  Keeping the masses safe has been an ongoing struggle requiring creative genius often evidenced in algorithms rather than hardware.  The evolution of computers has been awe inspiring, and Steve Jobs proved genius makes a difference in hardware as well.   As Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Regards,
Douglas Otis