STORIES
Contents
Federation through Stories
Knowledge Federation
Douglas Engelbart's unfinished revolution
Text
The 21st century printing press
Of course it's the Web – but...
Having decided, as a novice engineer in December of 1950, to direct his career so as to maximize its benefits to the mankind, Douglas Engelbart thought intensely about the best way to do that. After three months he had an epiphany.
On a convention of computer professionals in 1968 Engelbart and his SRI-based lab demonstrated the computer technology we are using today – computers linked together into a network, people interacting with computers via video terminals and a mouse and the windows, and through them with one another.
In the late 1990s the Silicon Valley found out that it was not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who invented the technology, or even the XEROS Palo Alto Research Center from which they took it. Engelbart became a celebrity. He received all the imaginable honors that an inventor can get. And yet he made it obvious, and everyone around him knew, that he felt celebrated for a wrong reason; and that the gist of his vision had not yet been understood, or put to use.
Douglas Engelbart's unfinished revolution
In 2007, with his career coming to an end, Engelbart was honored one more time with a panel at Google, to give his last message to the world. Doug gave his slides the title "A Call to Action!". His his first slide – equipped with his photo to suggest that this was really his message to the world – read "Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking." But during the panel the title slide and the three slides that followed – which explained the substance of his vision, and the deeper reason for the technology he invented – were not even shown!
Engelbart passed away in 2013, celebrated as the man whose ideas created "the revolution in the Valley", yet feeling that he had failed.