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Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart is a visionary and a pioneer in the design of modern collaborative computer environments. As
Principal Investigator at the Augmentation Research Center
(ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) starting in the
mid-sixties, Dr. Engelbart led his research group in the
development of the On-Line System (NLS), with tools to support
asynchronous use by project collaborators; the NLS is still
recognized today as one of the most comprehensive systems for
supporting wide-area collaboration. Dr. Engelbart's innovations,
as well as his active role in the formation of the ARPAnet
community, resulted in the choice of SRI as one of the first
four nodes of the ARPAnet. Other major technologies first conceived by Dr. Engelbart include the "windows" user interface, and the now ubiquitous mouse. The ARC mouse actually had three buttons which could be used for typing, so the user's hand never had to leave it. Invented and patented by Dr. Engelbart 30 years ago (among Dr. Engelbart's more than 20 patents and 25 publications), both have become standard features of the modern computer.
Today, Dr. Engelbart is the Director of the Bootstrap Institute, pursuing comprehensive strategies to optimize collaborative computing environments heading into the 21st century. His life's work, with his "big-picture" vision of organizational augmentation, and his persistent pioneering breakthroughs, continue to impact the past, present, and future of personal, interpersonal, and organizational computing.
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