Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Q&A With Douglas Engelbart Email This Print This View My Personal Library Back Door April 2002 • Vol.2 Issue 4 Page(s) 108 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Q&A With Douglas Engelbart Summing up Douglas Engelbart as "the inventor of the mouse" is like giving Benjamin Franklin the epitaph "He invented bifocals." Recent recipient of the National Medal of Technology, one of this country's highest tech-related honors, Engelbart is also the principal inventor of the windows interface concept, the pointer cursor, hypertext, e-mail, and numerous other breakthrough concepts and devices. Engelbart is too humble to parade a list of his 50 years of achievements. Instead, at age 80, he would rather maintain focus on pursuing his lifelong humanitarian dream: to revolutionize the ways in which individuals and organizations cooperate to solve massive problems. He calls this process bootstrapping. (See Douglas Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute at www.bootstrap.org.) What exactly is bootstrapping? Engelbart: Well, I guess it's a strategic concept. My professional goal is to improve our collective capability to cope with complex problems. I've sort of given that capability the basic name "collective IQ." Improving the collective IQ itself is a very complex, urgent problem. Say you take an activity and feed back all of the gains it makes into improving collective IQ rather than spreading those gains out into the world. You pump it back into the improvement process. The better you get at collective IQ, the better you're going to get at almost any other collective thing. So it's like lifting yourself up by the bootstraps. Take three categories: A, B, and C. A is what you do every day anyway and the way you do it: your work. B is the research and development designed to improve your A. C is any activity that is trying to improve the B capability. Now, in organizations, they may say, "I want to keep the A and B stuff for myself and not give it away, because that's my competitive edge." But if you look at the C stuff, it's pretty easy to show that the organization would be better off if it pooled a lot of its C investment collectively into the right community of participant organizations. Once you get collectively better at understanding complex situations, then you can look around the world and start collectively pooling resources to get a better and better picture of the problems that exist and how people are trying to solve them. This all goes into an integrated knowledge dynamic repository so participants can see the ways in which people are successfully improving. You know what the examples are out there and how they go about their improvements. Then the organization can decide to pick this or that as an approach and invest in it. So that's where pooling resources can help. It's much more efficient than each organization going out on its own to do that kind of study and assessment. Are there any organizations that have adopted bootstrapping you could point to as examples? Engelbart: No. Which means that my own little institute is not working efficiently. But we are getting closer and closer. The World Wide Web helped a great deal because a big part of all the innovative progress we made in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were with hypermedia systems and messaging processes. Now people are beginning to examine the powerful ways that you can integrate knowledge in a collective way and make use of it. A major change happened in your life 50 years ago that some have called an epiphany. What was this? Engelbart: In December of 1950, there was a minor epiphany: I got engaged. Then the next Monday while driving to work, I was sort of light-headed, thinking that my private life was going to be great, I'm going to build a family, and all that. Then I turned my mind to my job and all of a sudden it just looked like a long, long hallway—well lit, not unpleasant looking, but almost featureless. That was my career. I realized with a sudden swat (this was another minor epiphany) my God, I've never really assessed what I want to get out of my career. I just sort of followed my nose about what interested me. Growing up in the Depression, just to get a steady job that was interesting was a big goal. Anyway, so then I said OK, what kind of goal would be worthwhile to set for a career? Of course, I thought of earning a lot of money, but I was and still am such a naive country boy that I just couldn't take that seriously. That seemed like an empty sort of thing do. I just wanted to earn enough to raise my family comfortably. For some reason, very soon that morning came the kickoff epiphany: Hey, why don't I try to maximize the return on my career investment with the goal of improving mankind's situation. And no kidding, I said to myself, "Oh, gee, that sounds exciting." So I started looking into all the different kinds of career changes and targets I could consider doing in order to pursue this. What would be the best for mankind that I could contribute? Gosh, I just ran into so many complex issues—economics, education. You know, the world needs lots of improvements. Two months later, I sat there one Saturday morning banging myself on the head, thinking. I'd read someplace that some idealist had gone out and drained the swamps in a tropical area where the natives were really suffering from malaria. It was a big success and everybody got healthy and happy. The only problem was they started multiplying, then ruined the environment because they were overcrowded. That's when I realized that these really big issues needed to be clarified and handled collectively, yet our collective ability to cope with complex problems wasn't increasing as fast as the complexity of the problems. What if I could contribute something significant to how humanity could cope better with complex sorts of problems? That was the epiphany. That was—BANGO! I had a degree in engineering and a bunch of experience in electronics, but who needs more of that? I'd just as soon junk all of it and go into something else, but suddenly I started thinking I'd write a book about computers. Maybe computers could help. I'd just gotten some radar training, and I could clearly see that if computers could punch cards, you could make electronics that could draw any kind of dynamic thing on a screen. And if a radar set could monitor an operator turning cranks and all that, computers could certainly monitor an individual in other ways. You could be working and interacting with your displays. I wasn't stopping to think of the economics of it or anything. In an hour, I committed that this was what I was going to do. And I've stayed committed to it ever since. You've spoken a lot about the need to update our paradigms. What do you mean by this? Engelbart: As the rate and degree of change increases, if our paradigm shifting doesn't get up to speed, we're going to be looking for solutions with older and older paradigms. For instance, we couldn't get people to use hypermedia. By 1974, we had a very elegant system that could do much more in some respects than the Web can today. We kept customers working with it, but the research world said we were bonkers. Our system was set up so that you had different interface categories people could very quickly learn, but you could also start increasing the interface's vocabulary very simply. But if you just have one too-simple vocabulary for everybody, you've anchored the capability of everybody to that limit. At the time, everybody involved in interactive systems was interested in office automation and AI, and all of their proposals seemed to be pointing at us as the bad example. They were going to make things easy and natural to learn, so in 1977 it just threw us right out of the research world. These are very important lessons. The prevailing paradigm just blew us out of the water. We were working for the knowledge worker of the future, not the secretary of today. Why aren't we looking for interfaces and functionality in computers that can really give us more capability? Shouldn't we be looking at it in that light? Let's try and see how much we can boost the capability and then make it as easy to learn and natural to use. With the push to get kids educated on and with computers, though, isn't simplicity a must? Engelbart:Lots of people are trying to bring the computer into the elementary school, high school, college, but what are they teaching? Just a whole bunch of miscellaneous ideas. Grade schools learn one way; high schools do things a different way. When kids go to college, the whole idea about how you boost knowledge work goes off in a different direction. Meanwhile, corporations are constantly having to adapt changes. So when you get out of college, where are you going to go? The world's knowledge is increasing ever more rapidly. Really serious people have estimated that by 2015, the world's knowledge will double every three months. How much of that knowledge are you supposed to keep track of? Is there a certain percentage required in order to do your job well? If that doubles every three months, how are you going to stay up with what your job requires? How's your organization going to keep adapting that fast? There just aren't answers for how you're going to do all of this in some sort of synchronized way. That's why I feel it's terribly important to take this challenge seriously and hunt for a scalable strategy that society can start developing. What year did you invent the mouse? Engelbart: 1964. But this was before graphical user interfaces were developed, yes? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Engelbart: Yeah. I'd been thinking by then how we were going to want to use computers and displays. I knew that you would want to be able to tell the computer what objects on the screen to do something to, so you would need a screen selection device. There were a number of candidates, including a sort of light pen you use in radar equipment. So you invented the mouse, but did you patent it? Engelbart: The mouse got a patent, issued in 1967. To you? Engelbart: No, because in those days everything automatically belonged to your employer. But I've gotten a lot out of that because the office I'm sitting in now is a very nice, well-lit office with a big window view and my secretary outside. Logitech donates it. We've been living in their world for about 11 years, and it's just been a huge boon for us. What was your role in developing hypermedia? Engelbart: In 1945, I was in a transit base for the Navy in the Philippines waiting to get assigned, and I found a Red Cross library in a hut on stilts. I found a Life magazine that had a story about Vannevar Bush. After reading it, I realized that one of the basic things you'd want to be able to do with a computer is talk about any object in any file, and to do this you need links. I can't remember honestly whether I took that from the Bush article, but after I'd done a lot of work and further research, somehow I was reminded of those concepts. I have no trouble at all sort of crediting him for the first idea about hypermedia, but I guess I was the first one to get it working in a computer and build a whole system around it. You also developed the one-handed chording keyboard, but this never seemed to catch on like the mouse. Why? Engelbart: Gee, I'd like to know. Possibly because it defied the existing paradigm? Engelbart: Sure. It looks hard to learn. But before we tried it out publicly, I experimented with it in the early 1960s and taught it to my twin daughters and another daughter who is only a year older. I got all three to realize, hey, with your fingers you can learn to count—the sum is 1, 2, 4, 8. Then look at school, you can cheat! You can tell a friend an answer by making a list—1 to 26, A to Z—and talking with your hands. Within a week they were talking together and I'd tell them bedtime stories that way. On the computer, you can specify your commands flexibly with character strings, then, in almost every case, by the time you've moved the mouse over with your right hand, your left hand can already have said what you want. Verbs and nouns, one or two characters for each. As soon as you hit them, they would pop up, like the word "delete," just pop right up. It got to be very fast and flexible. In fact, people operated so fast that another skilled user watching them couldn't really keep up with what they were doing. How fast of a typing speed could you achieve? Engelbart: You'd never get much over 30 words per minute, which isn't very fast. But that isn't what you're trying to do. If you've got short inputs like directing or talking in short bursts or numbered sequences, that's fine. You'd always move both hands over the keyboard to enter anything lengthy. It's not the input that's fast, it's the coordinated way in which you can specify and point for editing and moving around. I wonder if another paradigm we're stuck in is print-on-paper. The e-book seems like a phenomenal idea, but all attempts to make it a popular product have bombed so far. Engelbart: Well, the display qualities and all of that are just going to be moving up steadily, so that's not going to last. So you think the interface technology is the inhibiting factor? Engelbart: Well, yes, but also people's perceptions, their paradigm. Once they realize that electronic media is inevitable, then there are a whole bunch of other functional things you can innovate: high resolution, linking, a very flexible means of moving around documents, different views, and options like that. This will produce a lot more value than just replicating a book page on a screen. It's very important in my mind that we move ahead and construct what I call an open hyperdocument system. This doesn't belong to any enterprise. It's an open standard. In fact, open source will be the only way that this technology can evolve with the kind of flexible, multidimensional coordinated changes that are necessary. You couldn't possibly get that with vendors having to compete. Do you perceive that the computer industry has seen the same degree of innovation during the last 25 years as in the 25 preceding them? Engelbart: If anything it's even more, because as innovation starts to accelerate, it stimulates all kinds of government agencies and businesses to put in more money. I would say that high-quality innovation is rising. >William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family like outside of Portland, Ore. Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.