One of the Greatest Men of All Time
Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013),
whose vision of collaboration using computer technology to help solve
the urgent and complex problems of all of humanity, died on July 2,
2013. His comrades believed that his ideas were never fully realized due
to his ideas and generosity of spirit. For example, he resisted
patenting the "mouse" he'd invented and it eventually fell into the
public domain. The robotic rigidity of institutions is also to blame --
most powerful technology companies in American relegated him to R&D.
Ted Nelson, professor and inventor of the first hypertext project, delivered Engelbart's eulogy
on December 9, 2013. In his tearful delivery, he said the "...real
ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision,
that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his
ideas of structure and collaboration...Perhaps his notion of
accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this
dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and
euphemizing evil." Engelbart articulated his ideas for collaboration
publicly in what is known as The Mother of all Demos
delivered on December 9, 1968, nearly half a century ago. Some of what
he described is still in the process of being realized in commercial
forms such as Skype, Google Docs, and more.
