Douglas Engelbart and the Mouse
Douglas Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925. In childhood, he was the most ordinary boy. He grew up on a farm in the vicinity of Oregon. After graduating from school in 1942, he entered a local university, believing later to work as an electrical engineer.
But fate decreed otherwise he was able to get a diploma only after the end of the Second World War.
During the Second World War, served as a radio technician at a base in the Philippines. Even then, he seriously thought about the prospect of using the most sophisticated military equipment in civilian life. Instead of horrible loops and curves on the radar screen, he imagined pictures of peaceful life and the great creations of mankind. After reading the Vannevar Bush article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In which the question was raised of the difference in the structure of storing information on external media in and our memory. After all, in our head everything is far from being in alphabetical order, human thinking is associative.
After the end of the war and obtaining a diploma, Engelbart was invited to work at the NACA laboratory with a degree in electrical engineering. In connection with his job, he had to move to California where the laboratory was based.
Deciding that the ideas of creating artificial intelligence require more serious preparation, in 1951 he entered Berkeley (University of California at Berkeley) with a degree in electronics.
But for a start it was required at least to get the coveted computer into its own undivided use. Doug began searching for such a place.
The place was soon found. Although at first one didn’t have to count on one-on-one meetings with a computer. The newly minted assistant to Professor D. Engelbart harnessed to the collective yoke on the design of a monstrous supercomputer within the walls of the University of Berkeley (the staff affectionately called their brainchild Neanderthal, on which it looked very much like dimensions and intelligence). For a while, Doug had to pretend to be an ordinary executive-headed technician, for expressing incomprehensible ideas about the possibility of gradually growing Man from Neanderthal could deprive him of such a “profitable” place. He fed the foolish child of the mountain of punched cards and lived the dream of the miraculous transformation of a stubborn piece of iron into a rational being. In general, over the period from 1954 to 1958, he patented 7 bistable gas-plasma digital devices and 12 magnetic devices. In particular, those that were born in preparation for a doctoral degree. He tried to sell them for more than a year, but the idea was not crowned with success.
Engelbart for the first time proposed using a cathode-ray tube to display symbols on a computer.
In 1955, having received the degree of Doctor of Science in the same field of computer technology, Douglas University, however, did not quit. Instead, he quit NACA and began a new job as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Finally, he was closer to his dream - computers. In the same 55th he was attracted to the project CALDIC, on which the work at the university had been boiling for more than a year. The development was financed by the military, and the abbreviation was decoded as California Digital Computer. It is easy to understand that in the walls of Berkeley developed a supercomputer.
Since 1957, goes to the Stanford Research Institute, where he organized the Augmentation Research Center (ARC).
At the same time, he actively assisted the engineer Hewitt Crane in working on magnetic components of computers, participated in the fundamental study of the phenomenon of digital devices and their potential miniaturization. Such a stormy activity did not go unnoticed.
Despite the plain (compared to Berkeley) location, it was breathing much easier there. In order to cajole the fathers of Silicon Valley, for a couple of years, Dr. Engelbart made up with a dozen more of any difference and asked for freedom. Freedom he was not given (who will be scattered so valuable kadramN), but allowed to conduct their own project.
Gradually, a very conspicuous company began to rally around Engelbart, wholly endorsing his insane ideas. Among the theses put forward by the company, the most amusing (and at the same time repulsive) was the thesis about the need to “increase the intelligence of a computer user for the sake of creating a generation cooperating with a computer, rather than sucking juice out of it”.
In 1959, at Stanford, the Engelbart Laboratory of the Augmentation Research Center, whose staff then numbered 47 people, was allowed. The approach to the personnel issue was quite remarkable: each new applicant was primarily tested for the ability to increase the “collective IQ”.
In the 60s, fate favored him. He allowed his laboratory to be involved in the military project ARPANet, which completely untied his hands financially. His recruitment method formed the basis for organizing the team around the first distributed computer network. Engelbart and his guys became the main developers of the core information management system, ensuring that the accumulated knowledge is not lost and becomes inaccessible due to the imperfect technology of managing formats and protocols. In particular, his team creates the working environment On-Line System or NLS.
In 1963, his work "The Basic Concepts of Research for the Expansion of Human Intellectual Capabilities" was published; it listed those aspects of human activity where powerful computers could be used. In it, he described the H-LAM / T system, the essence of which was to ensure that the user-machine pair plays the role of the main, creative component, and the computer acts as an assistant, a symbiosis of dynamic components, enhancing the user's natural intelligence.
It was then that Douglas offered the world an NLS (oNLine System) environment, including a fundamentally new operating system, a universal programming language, e-mail, split newsgroup screens, a contextual help system, and much more, the development of which was generously funded by the Air Force and the US Department of Defense. Alas, despite the obvious advantages, it has not received wide distribution.
Engelbart's laboratory mainframe was the second computer connected to the ARPANet, which began to emerge just in those years. And it was precisely as a side effect of the NLS project that the first mouse type mouse was born.
It was not specially developed, just the existing manipulators (joysticks, light pens, etc.) were categorically not suitable for the window environment. In this area, a whole study was conducted, the result of which was the mouse. And although Engelbart said in interviews more than once that he has no idea where this nickname came from, and the device, they say, immediately became a mouse, just look at the photos of those times and everything becomes clear. The indicator of positions x and y clearly got its name due to the fact that the wire was sticking out from behind, that is, it was under the user's wrist, which looks like a tail.
The first working prototype, created by Engelbart's colleague, Bill English, appeared in 1964 and was a handmade wooden box with two perpendicular metal wheels inside and a button on top.
In 1968, at the San Francisco Computer Engineering Conference, Engelbart introduced operating devices that allow a person to directly interact with a computer — a keyboard for entering text, keys for transmitting commands to a computer, and a pointing device for selecting characters on the screen — the mouse.
Over the course of the demonstration, Engelbart's face disappeared from time to time from the screen — an image of the console appeared instead. With one hand he manipulated a small introductory device resembling a part of the keyboard, and with the other he twisted and clicked the device. The device, moving on hidden rollers, had a pair of buttons on top and was connected by cable to the console.
Engelbart received a patent for a mouse a few years later (in 1970). According to the most modest estimates, today in the vicinity of large and small computers, hundreds of millions of "mice" are moving.
But the entire then $ 10,000 fee was immediately paid in as the first contribution for a modest house away from the luxurious villas, familiar to Silicon Valley.
')
The first noticeable success inflamed Engelbart's imagination, it seemed to him that the time had come to offer himself to the world. Ideas showered like a cornucopia. It would seem that after that he should have become a billionaire, but everything turned differently. The NLS was never widely used, and Douglas’s ideas were probably too innovative for the military at that time. In addition, the system was completely unfriendly and difficult to learn, it required the user to learn the mnemonic code, to know the 5-bit binary code in order to work normally with the chord keyboard and much more. Engelbart never sought to create a simple, user-friendly system. And he was always of the opinion that when it comes to a physically and mentally healthy person, it means absolutely no need to chew everything and put it in your mouth.
Engelbart's ideas became fundamental for the further development of the personal computer industry.
In addition, Engelbart created:
* first text messaging system;
* protocols for virtual terminals;
* links;
* had a hand in the appearance of the symbol @;
* multiple windows (opening a new data segment for an application program at startup);
* remote access protocol.
The failure of the NLS was the beginning of the end of his lab.
In the early 70s, Doug's team began to scatter, taking with it fragments of his ideas. In particular, the development of the mouse Bill English has already continued under the wing of the company Xerox PARC.
Douglas's inability to sell drove him into the shadows. He devoted himself to the family. I dragged mushrooms and berries with my children, picked worms for fishing, swam across the stormy Oregon Rivers.
In the end, in 1975, the ARPA stopped financing the work of Engelbart, and in 1977 the ARC was liquidated.
In the 80s, Engelbart's ideas readily picked up jobs-gates. Meanwhile, Douglas sat in a small telephone company Tymshare, being content with a modest employee salary. On top of the setbacks, his house burned down, and everything acquired over the years was lost in fire, and Douglas himself became seriously ill. He does not like to talk about this period of his life and once even called him "a reference to Siberia."
In the 84th, the company was eaten up by a large aeronautical conglomerate, to whom the indefatigable Engelbart (inherited by the new owners as a free makeweight) offered a well thought out intranet design scheme. But then no one knew the words of such an “intranet” (intranet). The management response was stunning in its logic: “This is not even the case with IBM or HP. Why the hell did we give up
It seemed to Doug that he had reached the bottom of a bottomless well, from which he could not shout to anyone. In the same year, doctors diagnose cancer. Desperate, Engelbart began the struggle for life. Perhaps he always lacked precisely this desperate frenzy. For the first time in his life, he swam against the stream. And survived. And made me remember. Things began to improve only in the late 80s - early 90s, when Douglas was suddenly remembered and decided to recognize his merits and contribution to the development of computer progress.
1987 - PC Magazine Award for Lifetime Achievement Award;
1990 - ACM Software System Award;
1991 - Award of the Congress of the American industry for the invention;
1992 - Award for pioneering work from the Electronic Frontier Foundation;
1993 - Award for pioneering work from the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award;
1994 - Prize from Price Waterhouse and Computerworld magazine “For achievements on a life path”;
1994 - Honorary Doctorate of the University of Oregon;
1994 - admission to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Quotes: “The lifetime of a person is directly proportional to the difficulties that he can afford to overcome. I allowed myself a lot "
“We need to improve not the process, but the participant in the process”
“Even the GUI still limits our capabilities. It reminds me of Chinese English. We must continue the evolution of computing "
The final recognition of the authorship of Engelbart in the invention of the mouse occurred only in 1998. This year he was awarded the 500 thousandth (in dollars) Lemelson-MIT Prize, established for awarding outstanding inventions.
Ten years ago, Douglas organized the eponymous public institute (Bootstrap Institute), entrusting the management of his beloved daughter Christine.
The stated goal of creating this scientific institution is to assist organizations and enterprises in increasing their work efficiency by increasing for these institutions the cumulative IQ (mental capacity index), which means the ability of the community of people to respond to changes in the situation in their field of activity and the effective use of aggregate knowledge and skills of all employees.
Children tend to inherit the intellectual abilities of their parents. "Without a penny for the soul, I had to share with the children: what is not hitting." In any field, Engelbart can not tolerate “dummies”, it seems to him that the idea of ​​adapting to someone else’s “want-not-want” is disgusting if it is about people who are physically and mentally healthy. He considers human laziness to be the greatest evil on the planet, therefore, in the end, the old man dreams of modernizing the human operating system.
Part of the material is taken from (c) xakep.ru
But fate decreed otherwise he was able to get a diploma only after the end of the Second World War.
During the Second World War, served as a radio technician at a base in the Philippines. Even then, he seriously thought about the prospect of using the most sophisticated military equipment in civilian life. Instead of horrible loops and curves on the radar screen, he imagined pictures of peaceful life and the great creations of mankind. After reading the Vannevar Bush article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In which the question was raised of the difference in the structure of storing information on external media in and our memory. After all, in our head everything is far from being in alphabetical order, human thinking is associative.
After the end of the war and obtaining a diploma, Engelbart was invited to work at the NACA laboratory with a degree in electrical engineering. In connection with his job, he had to move to California where the laboratory was based.
Deciding that the ideas of creating artificial intelligence require more serious preparation, in 1951 he entered Berkeley (University of California at Berkeley) with a degree in electronics.
But for a start it was required at least to get the coveted computer into its own undivided use. Doug began searching for such a place.
The place was soon found. Although at first one didn’t have to count on one-on-one meetings with a computer. The newly minted assistant to Professor D. Engelbart harnessed to the collective yoke on the design of a monstrous supercomputer within the walls of the University of Berkeley (the staff affectionately called their brainchild Neanderthal, on which it looked very much like dimensions and intelligence). For a while, Doug had to pretend to be an ordinary executive-headed technician, for expressing incomprehensible ideas about the possibility of gradually growing Man from Neanderthal could deprive him of such a “profitable” place. He fed the foolish child of the mountain of punched cards and lived the dream of the miraculous transformation of a stubborn piece of iron into a rational being. In general, over the period from 1954 to 1958, he patented 7 bistable gas-plasma digital devices and 12 magnetic devices. In particular, those that were born in preparation for a doctoral degree. He tried to sell them for more than a year, but the idea was not crowned with success.
Engelbart for the first time proposed using a cathode-ray tube to display symbols on a computer.
In 1955, having received the degree of Doctor of Science in the same field of computer technology, Douglas University, however, did not quit. Instead, he quit NACA and began a new job as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Finally, he was closer to his dream - computers. In the same 55th he was attracted to the project CALDIC, on which the work at the university had been boiling for more than a year. The development was financed by the military, and the abbreviation was decoded as California Digital Computer. It is easy to understand that in the walls of Berkeley developed a supercomputer.
Since 1957, goes to the Stanford Research Institute, where he organized the Augmentation Research Center (ARC).
At the same time, he actively assisted the engineer Hewitt Crane in working on magnetic components of computers, participated in the fundamental study of the phenomenon of digital devices and their potential miniaturization. Such a stormy activity did not go unnoticed.
Despite the plain (compared to Berkeley) location, it was breathing much easier there. In order to cajole the fathers of Silicon Valley, for a couple of years, Dr. Engelbart made up with a dozen more of any difference and asked for freedom. Freedom he was not given (who will be scattered so valuable kadramN), but allowed to conduct their own project.
Gradually, a very conspicuous company began to rally around Engelbart, wholly endorsing his insane ideas. Among the theses put forward by the company, the most amusing (and at the same time repulsive) was the thesis about the need to “increase the intelligence of a computer user for the sake of creating a generation cooperating with a computer, rather than sucking juice out of it”.
In 1959, at Stanford, the Engelbart Laboratory of the Augmentation Research Center, whose staff then numbered 47 people, was allowed. The approach to the personnel issue was quite remarkable: each new applicant was primarily tested for the ability to increase the “collective IQ”.
In the 60s, fate favored him. He allowed his laboratory to be involved in the military project ARPANet, which completely untied his hands financially. His recruitment method formed the basis for organizing the team around the first distributed computer network. Engelbart and his guys became the main developers of the core information management system, ensuring that the accumulated knowledge is not lost and becomes inaccessible due to the imperfect technology of managing formats and protocols. In particular, his team creates the working environment On-Line System or NLS.
In 1963, his work "The Basic Concepts of Research for the Expansion of Human Intellectual Capabilities" was published; it listed those aspects of human activity where powerful computers could be used. In it, he described the H-LAM / T system, the essence of which was to ensure that the user-machine pair plays the role of the main, creative component, and the computer acts as an assistant, a symbiosis of dynamic components, enhancing the user's natural intelligence.
It was then that Douglas offered the world an NLS (oNLine System) environment, including a fundamentally new operating system, a universal programming language, e-mail, split newsgroup screens, a contextual help system, and much more, the development of which was generously funded by the Air Force and the US Department of Defense. Alas, despite the obvious advantages, it has not received wide distribution.
Engelbart's laboratory mainframe was the second computer connected to the ARPANet, which began to emerge just in those years. And it was precisely as a side effect of the NLS project that the first mouse type mouse was born.
It was not specially developed, just the existing manipulators (joysticks, light pens, etc.) were categorically not suitable for the window environment. In this area, a whole study was conducted, the result of which was the mouse. And although Engelbart said in interviews more than once that he has no idea where this nickname came from, and the device, they say, immediately became a mouse, just look at the photos of those times and everything becomes clear. The indicator of positions x and y clearly got its name due to the fact that the wire was sticking out from behind, that is, it was under the user's wrist, which looks like a tail.
The first working prototype, created by Engelbart's colleague, Bill English, appeared in 1964 and was a handmade wooden box with two perpendicular metal wheels inside and a button on top.
In 1968, at the San Francisco Computer Engineering Conference, Engelbart introduced operating devices that allow a person to directly interact with a computer — a keyboard for entering text, keys for transmitting commands to a computer, and a pointing device for selecting characters on the screen — the mouse.
Over the course of the demonstration, Engelbart's face disappeared from time to time from the screen — an image of the console appeared instead. With one hand he manipulated a small introductory device resembling a part of the keyboard, and with the other he twisted and clicked the device. The device, moving on hidden rollers, had a pair of buttons on top and was connected by cable to the console.
Engelbart received a patent for a mouse a few years later (in 1970). According to the most modest estimates, today in the vicinity of large and small computers, hundreds of millions of "mice" are moving.
But the entire then $ 10,000 fee was immediately paid in as the first contribution for a modest house away from the luxurious villas, familiar to Silicon Valley.
')
The first noticeable success inflamed Engelbart's imagination, it seemed to him that the time had come to offer himself to the world. Ideas showered like a cornucopia. It would seem that after that he should have become a billionaire, but everything turned differently. The NLS was never widely used, and Douglas’s ideas were probably too innovative for the military at that time. In addition, the system was completely unfriendly and difficult to learn, it required the user to learn the mnemonic code, to know the 5-bit binary code in order to work normally with the chord keyboard and much more. Engelbart never sought to create a simple, user-friendly system. And he was always of the opinion that when it comes to a physically and mentally healthy person, it means absolutely no need to chew everything and put it in your mouth.
Engelbart's ideas became fundamental for the further development of the personal computer industry.
In addition, Engelbart created:
* first text messaging system;
* protocols for virtual terminals;
* links;
* had a hand in the appearance of the symbol @;
* multiple windows (opening a new data segment for an application program at startup);
* remote access protocol.
The failure of the NLS was the beginning of the end of his lab.
In the early 70s, Doug's team began to scatter, taking with it fragments of his ideas. In particular, the development of the mouse Bill English has already continued under the wing of the company Xerox PARC.
Douglas's inability to sell drove him into the shadows. He devoted himself to the family. I dragged mushrooms and berries with my children, picked worms for fishing, swam across the stormy Oregon Rivers.
In the end, in 1975, the ARPA stopped financing the work of Engelbart, and in 1977 the ARC was liquidated.
In the 80s, Engelbart's ideas readily picked up jobs-gates. Meanwhile, Douglas sat in a small telephone company Tymshare, being content with a modest employee salary. On top of the setbacks, his house burned down, and everything acquired over the years was lost in fire, and Douglas himself became seriously ill. He does not like to talk about this period of his life and once even called him "a reference to Siberia."
In the 84th, the company was eaten up by a large aeronautical conglomerate, to whom the indefatigable Engelbart (inherited by the new owners as a free makeweight) offered a well thought out intranet design scheme. But then no one knew the words of such an “intranet” (intranet). The management response was stunning in its logic: “This is not even the case with IBM or HP. Why the hell did we give up
It seemed to Doug that he had reached the bottom of a bottomless well, from which he could not shout to anyone. In the same year, doctors diagnose cancer. Desperate, Engelbart began the struggle for life. Perhaps he always lacked precisely this desperate frenzy. For the first time in his life, he swam against the stream. And survived. And made me remember. Things began to improve only in the late 80s - early 90s, when Douglas was suddenly remembered and decided to recognize his merits and contribution to the development of computer progress.
1987 - PC Magazine Award for Lifetime Achievement Award;
1990 - ACM Software System Award;
1991 - Award of the Congress of the American industry for the invention;
1992 - Award for pioneering work from the Electronic Frontier Foundation;
1993 - Award for pioneering work from the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award;
1994 - Prize from Price Waterhouse and Computerworld magazine “For achievements on a life path”;
1994 - Honorary Doctorate of the University of Oregon;
1994 - admission to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Quotes: “The lifetime of a person is directly proportional to the difficulties that he can afford to overcome. I allowed myself a lot "
“We need to improve not the process, but the participant in the process”
“Even the GUI still limits our capabilities. It reminds me of Chinese English. We must continue the evolution of computing "
The final recognition of the authorship of Engelbart in the invention of the mouse occurred only in 1998. This year he was awarded the 500 thousandth (in dollars) Lemelson-MIT Prize, established for awarding outstanding inventions.
Ten years ago, Douglas organized the eponymous public institute (Bootstrap Institute), entrusting the management of his beloved daughter Christine.
The stated goal of creating this scientific institution is to assist organizations and enterprises in increasing their work efficiency by increasing for these institutions the cumulative IQ (mental capacity index), which means the ability of the community of people to respond to changes in the situation in their field of activity and the effective use of aggregate knowledge and skills of all employees.
Children tend to inherit the intellectual abilities of their parents. "Without a penny for the soul, I had to share with the children: what is not hitting." In any field, Engelbart can not tolerate “dummies”, it seems to him that the idea of ​​adapting to someone else’s “want-not-want” is disgusting if it is about people who are physically and mentally healthy. He considers human laziness to be the greatest evil on the planet, therefore, in the end, the old man dreams of modernizing the human operating system.
Part of the material is taken from (c) xakep.ru
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/77584/
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