The history of computing has always been marked by individuals who have been years ahead of their time. The nature of computing, its impact on society, and the acceleration of change in turn recursively accelerates change.
In 1962, Dr. Engelbart began focusing his efforts on constructing a conceptual framework that would become his seminal work, originally written in a research report prepared for the Director of Information Sciences of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In this work, Dr. Engelbart describes the groundwork for such concepts as augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and bootstrapping. The motivations for this framework were (and continue to be) the idea that both complexity and urgency are increasing exponentially and that the combination of both complexity and urgency will soon challenge our public and private organizations. Thus, organizations must actively work against the pressures of complexity and urgency to become increasingly faster and smarter at their core missions, and as such, organizations will need to become faster and smarter at how organizations continue to improve.
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Douglas Engelbart, Ph.D., Director and Founder of the Bootstrap Institute, has been a pioneer in human-computer interaction throughout his entire career. Inspired from his experiences as a Naval RADAR officer, he understood that the presentation of and interaction with visual information on a display was an important key to harnessing the power of human sensory, perceptual, and cognitive capacities.
His involvement at the Stanford Research Institute lead to a dozen patents and the production of his 1962 research report that defined both the philosophy and the agenda of his research entitled "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework." He founded the Augmentation Research Center where he and his team developed a number of innovations that were well ahead of the computer revolution. These pioneering innovations included the mouse, hypertext, multiple windows, bit-mapped screens, shared screen teleconferencing, and outline processing.
In 1989, He retired from corporate life and with
his daughter, Christina, founded the Bootstrap Institute which strives
to form strategic alliances to help improve organizations and society at
large, "bootstrapping organizations into the 21st century."
Dr.
Engelbart is the recipient of more than 20 patent awards including the
patent for the mouse. He has also received a number of prestigious
honors including the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 1997, and the
Nation Medal of Technology, the highest award for technological
achievement in the United States, presented by President Bill Clinton
on December 1, 2000.
Resources:
This presentation is one of a series from the Accelerating Change 2004 held at Stanford University, November 5-7, 2004.
For Team ITC:
This free podcast is from our Accelerating Change series.