From Mice To Windows

It's hard, but try to imagine-or re member -a world without the

Internet, without e-mail, without Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system,

without pull-down menus in computer programs, and even without the computer

mouse. Then, in one fell swoop, one person unveils the underpinnings of them

all.

That's what happened in 1968, when Douglas C. Engelbart took the stage at

the mid-December Fall Joint Computing Conference in San Francisco. He was

nervous, fretting the audience might dismiss his concepts for augmenting human

intelligence as too far-out. But he needn't have worried. Over the next 90

minutes he demonstrated how he could edit a  document interactively with

researchers in a distant location-his laboratory at Stanford Research

Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, Calif.-pointing and clicking

a boxy mouse to switch among windows on a computer screen. The audience

surprised him with a standing ovation. The event is now considered a watershed

in the history of computing.

Yet Engelbart says his inventions have been slow to deliver the impact he

wanted. Drawing on his experience watching radar images as a technician in the

Navy during World War II, he had envisioned window graphics that would make

computers easy to use. Then individuals, companies, and governments could tackle

major issues collectively. Gradually this would enhance the way people think and

learn. Today we have online teamwork and so-called learning organizations. But

society has yet to exploit computers to boost human intelligence on the scale

that Engelbart has been dreaming about since the 1950s.

With all his inventions now in daily use by millions of people, Engelbart

must be a billionaire, right? Hardly. He has picked up some sizable cash awards,

including $500,000 in 1997 when he was honored as an outstanding inventor by

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the only bonus he earned from SRI for

his 1963 invention of the mouse was $10,000, years after he left SRI to start

the Bootstrap Institute in Fremont, Calif. As was customary in the 1960s,

Engelbart assigned all his patent rights to his employer.

Never mind. At 79, as in his youth, Engelbart is driven more by the desire to

make humanity smarter, not himself richer. And on this score, he believes there

is a long way to go. Engelbart saw his 1968 prototype browser-a combination of

what was called groupware and hypertext (the "HT" in HTML, or

hypertext mark-up language)-as a two-way tool for sharing knowledge remotely,

spanning distances, language barriers, and other social and cultural divides.

His ideas helped spawn a huge marketplace for information technology. Still, he

finds the rewards to society disappointing.

In Engelbart's view, the marketplace may excel at improving products and

making them cheaper. But when it comes to coping with critical, global problems

such as environmental degradation and access to fresh water, the market doesn't

provide the necessary mechanisms and incentives, he says. It's not going to

help us "discover the combination of technology and organizational changes

that will produce effective solutions." For that, a higher order of shared

intelligence is essential. When computing brings us closer to that plane, Doug

Engelbart will be the first to cheer.

By Otis Port in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2004 by The

McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc