Doug was our Einstein, but he largely punched out in the mid-70's, right as the PC and the commercial software industry took off. Later, I met him in 1998 and by that point he had no interest in talking about anything. He had any number of opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc. beyond what he did. That he didn't was a choice on his part, unfortunate for our industry, and not everyone else's fault like Tom seems to think.
It's hard to fully trust anyone's impressions of anyone, particularly if they're confident about it. (I don't particularly trust even my own. :)
Perhaps he sat down with you and said, "I have no interest in talking about anything. I have many opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc; but I simply choose not to, because... it bores me and that's how I roll now." Ok, then your reasoning is impeccable. (Or maybe you offered him carte blanche and he turned you down?) But from this one post, it's unclear you got into his head, or that he felt comfortable engaging with you.
I think there's an undercurrent that might be too difficult for Doug to have expressed openly. The thing that must be understood is the idea that "The Demo" was the culmination, the pinnacle, of years of hard work. Visionary work. Work that was not just hard on its own (imagine writing that software without the modern languages and tooling we have today, let alone trying to get it to run on such primitive devices) but which was also likely a very aggravating trial in terms of interactions with others and with the bureaucracies he had to face.
Unfortunately for Doug instead of "The Demo" being the end of such struggles and the opening of a door to the payoff for his work it was the beginning of an even larger struggle. Indeed, if anything it was even the preparation prior to that beginning. And the industry was not in the mood to listen at the time, generally speaking.
Sure he could have found other work, but most folks only have so much fruitless struggle in them, and he might have been at the end of his capacity, and sought instead a more comfortable and easy life, letting his legacy bear fruit on its own as it would or not.
It did bear fruit, of course, though it's telling that even when a major Fortune 500 company, Xerox, attempted to build something revolutionary with a lot of inspiration from his work, the Alto, it still missed the mark, partly because the company was clueless and not very committed to the idea. And that was a mere 5 years later. It took several additional false starts and a decade of additional work for many of those ideas to actually become practical and commercially viable (in, for example, the Apple Macintosh).
It also required the inception and maturation of an entire new industry, not just the microcomputer industry but "startup culture" and the silicon valley way of doing business, to create the sort of environment where revolutionary ideas such as Doug's could find willing listeners and folks willing to take such ideas to heart in the making of new types of computing systems.
In a not insignificant way Doug was responsible for the blooming of silicon valley and of startup culture itself even though his contributions came too early for him to receive an easy payoff. The irony, of course, is that today a "demo" similar to Doug's in today's world is often a quick route to substantial funding or even acquisition. There are lots of tech startups out there today who have far less substance, both in terms of functionality and man-hours, behind their business than went into "The Demo" and are swimming in tens of millions of dollars of VC funding.
This sad story demonstrates the importance of owning your
ideas and directly benefiting from them (financially, public
recognition, etc.), instead of giving them away to people
who will like you one minute and forget you the next.
I suppose you can make some effort to get credit for them, but in a lot of areas trying to own and monetize everything can significantly distract from actually making progress. You end up spending all your time worrying about trade secrets and licensing and patents, and less of it worrying about science or engineering. It's actually a common failure case ("failure" from the scientific POV, at least) for inventors who come up with genuinely good stuff and then end up sidetracked for years with all their energy focused on ownership and licensing disputes.
"Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps."
Well I guess we can't expect journalists to know much about computers, but anyone who writes something like this ought to never write a word on computers again, nor should they be publishing attention-seeking articles like this one.
Feel free to point out the errors exactly. We went from a collaborative environment to near-zero connectivity as the norm. You could even see the fact that people still swap out .ptt and .doc files via e-mail as direct result of that.
We have far advanced the time-sharing era systems in terms of connectivity, but the comparison is not such a hyperbole as one might think. A lot of research today is a revitalisation of work developed for time-shared machines.
You mean because they were dumb terminals not actual workstations? That's a pretty niggling detail to rip your hair out over since it doesn't really change the essential truth of how the mode of computation has come full circle.
It surprises me, in retrospect, that Sun Microsystems didn't give Englebart an office, some equipment, and a couple of assistants, at least. This doesn't seem like a huge expense for a company the size that Sun got to be, and I was under the impression they had a few groups doing exploratory stuff, of various kinds, already.
But I know no specifics, such as whether he approached them or what they might have said.
Did you ever try finding funding for an ambitious project? Companies generally laugh at you, unless you can achieve something within 3 months (which is a typical time scale) or already work there and do other jobs. Speaking from experience here, despite the fact that my stuff is nowhere near as interesting as Engelbart's.
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calibraxis|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps he sat down with you and said, "I have no interest in talking about anything. I have many opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc; but I simply choose not to, because... it bores me and that's how I roll now." Ok, then your reasoning is impeccable. (Or maybe you offered him carte blanche and he turned you down?) But from this one post, it's unclear you got into his head, or that he felt comfortable engaging with you.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately for Doug instead of "The Demo" being the end of such struggles and the opening of a door to the payoff for his work it was the beginning of an even larger struggle. Indeed, if anything it was even the preparation prior to that beginning. And the industry was not in the mood to listen at the time, generally speaking.
Sure he could have found other work, but most folks only have so much fruitless struggle in them, and he might have been at the end of his capacity, and sought instead a more comfortable and easy life, letting his legacy bear fruit on its own as it would or not.
It did bear fruit, of course, though it's telling that even when a major Fortune 500 company, Xerox, attempted to build something revolutionary with a lot of inspiration from his work, the Alto, it still missed the mark, partly because the company was clueless and not very committed to the idea. And that was a mere 5 years later. It took several additional false starts and a decade of additional work for many of those ideas to actually become practical and commercially viable (in, for example, the Apple Macintosh).
It also required the inception and maturation of an entire new industry, not just the microcomputer industry but "startup culture" and the silicon valley way of doing business, to create the sort of environment where revolutionary ideas such as Doug's could find willing listeners and folks willing to take such ideas to heart in the making of new types of computing systems.
In a not insignificant way Doug was responsible for the blooming of silicon valley and of startup culture itself even though his contributions came too early for him to receive an easy payoff. The irony, of course, is that today a "demo" similar to Doug's in today's world is often a quick route to substantial funding or even acquisition. There are lots of tech startups out there today who have far less substance, both in terms of functionality and man-hours, behind their business than went into "The Demo" and are swimming in tens of millions of dollars of VC funding.
[+] [-] psadri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] roel_v|12 years ago|reply
Well I guess we can't expect journalists to know much about computers, but anyone who writes something like this ought to never write a word on computers again, nor should they be publishing attention-seeking articles like this one.
[+] [-] yvdriess|12 years ago|reply
We have far advanced the time-sharing era systems in terms of connectivity, but the comparison is not such a hyperbole as one might think. A lot of research today is a revitalisation of work developed for time-shared machines.
[+] [-] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|12 years ago|reply
But I know no specifics, such as whether he approached them or what they might have said.
[+] [-] fijal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flomo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snorkel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seferphier|12 years ago|reply
Regardless, he is a proven genius that deserves to be funded - given that college dropouts can raise angel easily. I find this to be sad.
[+] [-] KKJHKJHKJ|12 years ago|reply
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