Douglas Engelbart

One of the more interesting people from the early history (1960's) of computer technology is Douglas Engelbart. He is credited with the invention of the mouse, email, teleconferencing, etc., etc.

Some good sources for information about him and the wider implications of his "Augmentation of Human Intellect project" (Bardini, 1) are:

Bootstrapping : Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini. Stanford University Press, 2000

"Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing" by Susan B. Barnes, in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v. 19, no. 3, 1997 - p. 16 to 26

The Augmentation System Framework. Douglas C. Engelbart and Kristina Hooper, a chapter in "Interactive Multimedia," Sueann Ambron and Kristina Hooper [Ed.], Microsoft Press, 1988, pp. 14-31

and of course, chapter 9, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", of Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality, and the information about Engelbart on the book's website at http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Engelbart/Engelbart.html

Other articles by Engelbart are listed at http://www.bootstrap.org/institute/bibliography.html - many are in full text.

There is a set of webpages at http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/ - " Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution : A Symposium at Stanford University, December 9, 1998", which lists more of his accomplishments and shows some excellent videos from the symposium. The first three videos have some clips from the original 1968 presentation.

[April 11, 2006] The last link isn't working but the Stanford Mousesite has papers, videos, and much more. Some of their links weren't available but, thanks to Google Search, I found videos from the 1968 demo. This is one of the great seminal events of web interactivity so it's worth looking at.