Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science.

NLS, the "oN-Line System", developed by the Augmentation Research Center under Engelbart's guidance with funding primarily from ARPA (as DARPA was then known), demonstrated numerous technologies, most of which are now in widespread use; it included the computer mouse, bitmapped screens, word processing, and hypertext; all of which were displayed at "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968.

The lab was transferred from SRI to Tymshare in the late 1970s, which was acquired by McDonnell Douglas in 1984, and NLS was renamed Augment (now the Doug Engelbart Institute).

[10][11] He was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Ames Research Center, where he worked in wind tunnel maintenance.

[15] Over several months he reasoned that: In 1945, Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think",[18] a call to action for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge.

He had also read something about the recent phenomenon of computers, and from his experience as a radar technician, he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen.

[20] After completing his doctorate, Engelbart stayed on at Berkeley as an assistant professor for a year before departing when it became clear that he could not pursue his vision there.

[22] At SRI, Engelbart soon obtained a dozen patents,[20] and by 1962 produced a report about his vision and proposed research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

[23] Among other highlights, this paper introduced "Building Information Modelling", which architectural and engineering practice eventually adopted (first as "parametric design") in the 1990s and after.

The conflict was both technical and ideological: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon.

[1][15] Beginning in 1972, several key ARC personnel were involved in Erhard Seminars Training (EST), with Engelbart ultimately serving on the corporation's board of directors for many years.

SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of artificial intelligence researcher Bertram Raphael, who negotiated the transfer of the laboratory to Tymshare in 1976.

His interest inside of McDonnell Douglas was focused on the enormous knowledge management and IT requirements involved in the life cycle of an aerospace program, which served to strengthen Engelbart's resolve to motivate the information technology arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system.

[1][15] Teaming with his daughter, Christina Engelbart, he founded the Bootstrap Institute in 1988 to coalesce his ideas into a series of three-day and half-day management seminars offered at Stanford University from 1989 to 2000.

[15] By the early 1990s there was sufficient interest among his seminar graduates to launch a collaborative implementation of his work, and the Bootstrap Alliance was formed as a non-profit home base for this effort.

Although the invasion of Iraq and subsequent recession spawned a rash of belt-tightening reorganizations which drastically redirected the efforts of their alliance partners, they continued with the management seminars, consulting, and small-scale collaborations.

In the mid-1990s they were awarded some DARPA funding to develop a modern user interface to Augment, called Visual AugTerm (VAT),[38] while participating in a larger program addressing the IT requirements of the Joint Task Force.

The Institute promotes Engelbart's philosophy for boosting Collective IQ—the concept of dramatically improving how we can solve important problems together—using a strategic bootstrapping approach for accelerating our progress toward that goal.

[40] The Hyperscope team built a browser component using Ajax and Dynamic HTML designed to replicate Augment's multiple viewing and jumping capabilities (linking within and across various documents).

[41] Engelbart attended the Program for the Future 2010 Conference where hundreds of people convened at The Tech Museum in San Jose and online to engage in dialog about how to pursue his vision to augment collective intelligence.

[44] Two comprehensive histories of Engelbart's laboratory and work are in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff and A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century by Donald Neilson.

[52][53] A close friend and fellow computer scientist, Ted Nelson, gave a speech paying tribute to Engelbart.

[36] Bardini points out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf.

He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work.