Douglas Engelbart

thumb|right|180px|Engelbart in December 2008 Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him. Quotes The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed. Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 9/19/05 The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better. Computer History Museum - Fellow Awards By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (October 1962), Stanford Research Institute, p. 1. We need to think about how to boost our collective IQ, and how important it would be to society because all of the technologies are just going to make our world accelerate faster and faster and get more and more complex and we're not equipped to cope with that complexity. Interview quoted in Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (2000) by Thierry Bardini, p. 24. External links Great quotes by Doug Engelbart and Others - Doug Engelbart Institute Category:People from Portland Category:Engineers from the United States Category:1925 births Category:2013 deaths Category:Turing Award laureates Category:Computer scientists from the United States Category:Stanford University faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni