Late Great Engineers: Douglas Engelbart - personalising the computer

If ever there was an engineer with a vision it was Douglas Engelbart. Back in the early 1950s, he saw a direction for early number-crunching computers that went beyond punched-card programming. As if he’d returned from the future, while still in his mid-twenties, Engelbart envisioned a world in which people sat at cathode-ray tubes ‘flying around’ in an information space, using networked computers and collective human intelligence to solve global problems. His daughter and business partner Christina, who co-founded what’s now called the Doug Engelbart Institute, wrote that he “had read about computers, and considered how they might be used to support mankind’s efforts to solve these problems.”

Sometimes described as one of the great Internet pioneers, Engelbart is mainly remembered today for his role in the invention of the computer mouse, the development of the graphic user interface (GUI), hypertext and networked computing. Throughout his long career, Engelbart nurtured a complex personal philosophy that informed everything he did, paving the way for the modern application of co-evolved technology and philosophy. But as Engelbart’s obituary in the Guardian states: “While he became a much-loved and oft-lauded Silicon Valley celebrity, his most visionary ideas were neglected and went unfunded.”