(2018-01-21) Landau How Douglas Engelbart Invented The Future

Valerie Landau: How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future

When he demonstrated this revolutionary idea in 1968, why didn’t he get the response he’d been hoping for? I got some insight into this when I interviewed some of the engineers who’d attended his demo. They told me they’d been awestruck, but that nothing he’d described had any relation to their jobs.

The ARPANET’s funders couldn’t see why real people needed to support users. They saw his hires as a sign of failure—his systems weren’t easy enough to use on their own. What Engelbart failed to communicate was that these women weren’t just teaching people which keys to press. He wanted them to bring together thinkers who could, collectively, change the way the networks collected and analyzed information. Before long, the government reduced his funding, foreshadowing the end of his Augmentation Research Center.

Later in the 1970s, Engelbart lost his key engineers to Xerox PARC lab, a lavish and well-funded research center a few miles away. At the head was Alan Kay, 15 years Engelbart’s junior—an upbeat, brilliant guy who knew how to inspire people. The laboratory chief was Engelbart’s former funder from ARPA, Bob Taylor.

Engelbart’s refusal to compromise was one of the main reasons he had a hard time gathering momentum. He often ended discussions by declaring, “You just don’t get it.” That catchphrase cost Engelbart dearly. His detractors snidely remarked that the great proponent of collaboration was, ironically, unable to collaborate.

Because his system was designed to present the same information from different angles, it was more than a rudimentary version of the software we use today. I believe it was better equipped than Apple’s or Microsoft’s programs to solving problems like peace, income inequality, sustainable development and climate change. He designed it for sophisticated knowledge workers—writers, designers, data analysts, economists. Even Google’s collaborative apps are less ideally suited to do serious work that integrates libraries of data, documents, graphics, text and information maps.