The year after Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech, Doug Engelbart got funding for his dream. Engelbart’s, now decade-old vision (of augmenting human intelligence through the use of computers) finally attracted funding after the publication of his paper “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” which laid out his vision. [link] Engelbart and his co-workers at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) revolutionized the world. Engelbart was the first to desire a better way for people to interact with computers, and he invented the cathode ray display, the mouse, the chord keyboard as well as other visionary aspects that have still not been fully implemented. Each time you point and click, or cut and paste, or go from window to window on your computer, you have Doug Engelbart to thank, and yet most people do not even know about him. Let us look a little closer at the man behind this mouse, because without him we literally would not be where we are today, and if I had not met him, my dissertation may very well have taken a very different form. So, join me if you like on an Engelbart background excursion. Let us take a few paragraph tangent to bring us up to speed, and into the 1960s.
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