We had a fete to commemorate Doug Engelbart's life at the Computer History Museum on Monday evening, the 45th anniversary of "The Mother of All Demos" It was a packed house, with luminaries speaking (albeit a bit long), and much ado about one of the quirkiest iconoclasts I've ever known.
Ted Nelson, the Xanadu futurist and scourge of many a computer industry manager, gave the most eloquent talk, which you can see at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/an-homage-to-douglas-engelbart-and-a-critique-of-the-state-of-tech/?_r=1&
Ted caught the spirit of Doug, I felt (and so did most of the audience, based on the applause) when he said: "This is weird. Doug was dumped by ARPA, dumped by SRI, shunned by XeroxPARC, and spent his last thirty years wandering in exile. And here we are, grasping at shreds of his robe, to say 'we're carrying on his vision'."
I first met Doug in 1966, when a young product marketing kid, Paul Schmidt, at HP took me (at a ripe old age of 25) over to meet Doug at SRI (then still on campus in a smallish lab). Doug had me operate the chordic keyboard, the foot treadle and the knee lever. It was like you could be an impresario if you were truly multidextrous.
Doug bought an HP 1300A from me, as did Alan Kay up at University of Utah and a few others ahead of their time. As the first commercially available computer graphics display, it was a pretty strange box to behold, and at $2,000, hardly an insignificant purchase. This was the box that later earned me Dave Packard's gratuitous "Medal of Defiance" since he had ordered it to be cancelled.
We crossed paths again circa 1982 when I organized HP's first Coporate Engineering function, and we were trying to figure out how to get disparate parts of HP to talk together. Through my wife at the time, I met Patty Burbank, a first cousin of Doug's wife -- yes, in a hot tub, as befits the Silicon Valley aura of the day-- and she said she'd help reconnect us.
A couple of years later, Bert Raphael and his team (notably Walt Underwood and Mark Laubach with Dave Farber as advisor) bought the first commercially sold router from a fledgling company named cisco systems (small letters, no caps). A.nd built virtually the first multi-mediated communications rail for any company on the globe, 2nd largest email network of the day acc. to one pundit. And HP was like the 60th largest Fortune 500 company, so this wasn't exactly "standard procedure' yet
Bert and I hired Doug then to try to implement his Augmented Knowledge ideas, which we did via a group of HP Productivity Engineers (longish story here, to be told later).... That encounter started a deeper association for me with Doug that lasted the rest of his life. Consequently, I co-hosted the 40th anniversary of "the Mother of all Demos" at Stanford with Media X in 2008, meeting many of the giants in this sub-culture.
Thinking about all of this on Monday night, I just had to marvel at the folk who turned out--and reflect on how all of these ideas, the contention, the arguments, the insane competitive wars, and the camaraderie all combined to change the world--maybe even for the better?
I was proud to know him, and thrilled to have had the privilege. May he rest in peace.
