Doug Engelbart, the grandson of early pioneers of the West, grew up in the Great Depression on a small farmstead near Portland, Oregon. He graduated from Oregon State University with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1948 and earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1955.
Dr. Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, although his most significant work to date is leadership of the team that developed NLS, the first collaborative hypertext systems back in the 1960s. His ongoing work is inspired by his belief that society needs better ways to solve problems that are increasingly more urgent and more complex.
Today, Dr. Engelbart directs the California-based Bootstrap Institute to engage thought leaders and practitioners in a cooperative exploration of improvement strategies and the organizational/technology infrastructures that will be required. Prior to the Bootstrap Institute, Dr. Engelbart worked as a Senior Scientist at McDonnell Douglas and Tymshare Corporation; and served as Director, Augmentation Research Center, SRI International.
Dr. Engelbart’s many honors include the National Medal of Technology awards by President Clinton in 2000, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the ACM Turing Award, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the IEEE von Neumann Medal among others.
Dr. Engelbart’s ideas have always been leading edge. So much so, in fact, that their adoption has often met with resistance by the conventional thinks of the time. The correctness of his ideas in human knowledge acquisition, collaboration and use have however proven themselves to be correct. Dr. Engelbart holds more than 25 patents and has authored numerous publications and presentations available in the open literature.
