@Mark Ollig
On your computer screen, there are various icons, program windows, and documents.
A small pointer, or cursor, moves fluidly as you operate a mouse or swipe your finger across the surface.
This familiar visual interface owes much to Douglas Carl Engelbart, a pioneering engineer born in Portland, OR, Jan. 30, 1925.
A Minnesota connection: his paternal grandfather, Louis Brainerd Engelbart, was born June 30, 1868, in New Ulm. He died Jan. 22, 1944, in Colfax, WA.
In 1942, Douglas Engelbart began studying electrical engineering at Oregon State College, but his studies were put on hold when he served in the US Navy during World War II as a radio and radar technician in the Philippines.
Upon returning from military service, he completed his BS in electrical engineering in 1948 at Oregon State College, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, CA, to explore how computers could enhance human thinking and problem-solving.
He established the Augmentation Research Center to develop concepts for the oN-Line System (NLS) computer program.
Starting in 1959, with support from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Engelbart began a research program at SRI to improve the management of digital information.
By the early 1960s, with support from the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Engelbart and his team at SRI developed the networked, interactive oN-Line System (NLS), which some historians consider an important influence on the early internet.
The NLS was an experimental software environment running on a Scientific Data Systems (SDS) 940 time-sharing computer, providing a networked interactive system for multiple users.
NLS lets users operate networked display workstations using a typewriter-style QWERTY keyboard, mouse, hyperlinked text, and a chorded keyset (a small five-key device for entering commands by pressing key combinations).
In October 1962, Engelbart published a technical report titled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The report described using a screen to control a computer in real time, share linked documents, and collaborate with others over networked display workstations.
These ideas outlined much of what became modern personal computing, including interactive displays, shared workspaces, hypertext, on-screen windows, and online collaboration.
The report helped Engelbart secure added funding so his lab could build the hardware and software that became NLS.
NLS ran on a Scientific Data Systems (SDS) 940 time-sharing mainframe at SRI and connected to custom-built NLS display workstations over dedicated data lines and coaxial cabling that carried input from the keyboard, mouse, and chorded keyset and output to the screens.
The SDS 940 was a 24-bit time-sharing mainframe introduced in 1966 that used magnetic-core memory with up to 64,000 words.
It had its own display, keyboard, a chorded keyset with five narrow, piano-like keys for rapid commands (macros), and a small wooden pointing device that rolled on two wheels, one for horizontal and one for vertical motion.
The original mouse, officially titled “X-Y position indicator for a display system” in Engelbart’s US Patent 3,541,541 issued Nov. 17, 1970, was a small wooden block equipped with a cable and two metal wheels set at right angles.
This configuration allowed it to track horizontal and vertical movements across a flat surface.
The cord’s resemblance to a tail led users to call it a mouse, a name that stuck.
Douglas Engelbart and 17 researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute gave a public demonstration of their fully functional oN-Line System, or NLS, Dec. 9, 1968.
Running on an SDS 940 mainframe at SRI, NLS supported multiple users at separate display workstations and managed special display hardware for monitors and large screens used in the exhibition.
The demonstration took place during the three-day Fall Joint Computer Conference, hosted Dec. 9 to 11, 1968, in San Francisco, CA.
Engelbart’s session, “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect,” was on the third floor of the Civic Auditorium, with about 1,000 attendees.
The Eidophor projector, an oil-film system used commercially since the 1940s, displayed Engelbart’s terminal on a 22-foot screen.
The projector used three-phase power, and basic models only projected in black and white.
I learned that NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, TX, used Eidophor projectors to display the flight and video data during the Apollo era.
Engelbart’s ergonomic console terminal and display workstation, set up on stage in San Francisco, connected to the SDS 940 computer at SRI in Menlo Park over a 40-mile full-duplex, four-wire leased telephone circuit.
We older telecom technicians called this a “nailed-up” connection, a dedicated circuit that stayed active all the time.
The leased circuit used a pair of custom-built 1,200-baud modems to carry Engelbart’s keyboard, chorded keyset, and mouse signals between the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and the SDS 940 in Menlo Park.
The leased circuit, provided by Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, the local Bell operating company for Menlo Park in 1968, was carried over a twisted-pair copper cable.
Pacific Telephone & Telegraph’s main offices and switching infrastructure were based in San Francisco.
Two separate microwave links carried the live video between the SRI lab and the civic auditorium: one for the camera feed of Engelbart’s colleagues at SRI to appear in a window on the large screen, and the other to send the complete mixed video signal of the presentation to SRI for recording and monitoring.
Overhead video cameras on stage above Engelbart’s workstation captured close-up views of him and his workstation screen and controls.
The combined camera feed projected his real-time NLS session onto a 22-foot screen as he explained and demonstrated the system’s software and hardware features.
He demonstrated the computer mouse, hyperlinking and hypertext, real-time text editing, multiple on-screen windows, shared-screen collaboration, an early graphical user interface, and video conferencing.
I watched the demo and was impressed by how he used NLS to type, edit, and rearrange ordinary text on the screen, in what we now call word processing, and remember, this is 57 years ago.
Viewers could see him enter and revise “text words” in real time as he worked inside linked on-screen documents.
The audience saw live video feeds of Engelbart and a remote colleague collaborating and editing the same document simultaneously.
People would later refer to the demonstration as “The Mother of All Demos.”
The Dec. 9, 1968, presentation can be seen in three separate videos on the official Doug Engelbart Institute’s YouTube channel:
Reel No.1: https://bit.ly/4afpLHl.
Reel No.2: https://bit.ly/4p92onl.
Reel No.3: https://bit.ly/4oXQnB9.
Read next week’s Bits and Bytes for part two.
