#29: I gave Douglas Engelbart a mouse and a book

November 14, 2005 By

Tonight I peered into the eyes of the creator.

And heard his frustration.

It all started earlier this afternoon when Buzz Bruggeman asked me in an email “want to have dinner with Douglas Engelbart?”

First of all, if you don’t know who Douglas Engelbart is you better do some reading. He invented the mouse and many of the concepts that you are now using to read my words. And he did that 40 years ago. Yes, he was that far ahead.

Oh, Buzz, do you have to ask?

Anyway, turned out he had been talking with Bill Daul, one of Doug’s friends and they quickly arranged a dinner. Six people in total. Andy Ruff, program manager on Microsoft’s Entourage team. Buzz. Doug’s friend Bill. I had a previously arranged dinner with Joseph Jaffe, so I invited him along.

What an incredible dinner. The five of us hung on every word Doug spoke. The conversation was interesting and diverse.

I filmed part of it but the restaurant was so noisy that that probably won’t be very useful.

Some key things stuck with me.

1) Doug is a frustrated inventor. He was frustrated over and over again during his career by people who just didn’t get his ideas.
2) He says he has many ideas that he hasn’t shared yet. We talked about the way the system could change from how it sees what you’re paying attention to, for instance.
3) He repeated for us the creation of the mouse. Said they still don’t know who came up with the name “mouse.” That was the part of the dinner I filmed.
4) He challenged the business people at the table (specifically looking at Andy and me) to come up with a way to increase the speed that innovations get used. He didn’t say it, but his eyes told me that taking 25 years for the world to get the mouse was too long and his career would have been a lot more interesting if people could have gotten his ideas quicker. I told him that ideas move around the world a lot faster now due to blogs and video (imagine trying to explain what Halo 2 was going to look like if all you had to describe it was ASCII text).

It was an incredible evening. One that I just can’t do justice to by writing on my blog. I got to say thank you to a real visionary who plowed forward even after everyone had told him he was nuts.

I handed him a pre-release copy of our book, wrote in the front “thank you for inventing the world that made all of this possible” and gave him the mouse that I used. Hey, he gave all of us mice, seemed to be the least I could do.

Joseph Jaffe just posted about the night. Thanks Joseph for the kind words, your ideas on the new world of marketing are inspiring.

But peering into the eyes of the creator I realized something. He’s also the best evangelist I’ve ever met. He can draw pictures and inspire in a way that few people can. And, this 80-year-old can run intellectual circles around most 25-year-olds I’ve met (and certainly runs circles around me). He’s an amazing person and certainly an American treasure.

http://www.gadgetguy.de/ Frank Koehntopp

Sorry to be picky, but wouldn’t it be “Engelbart”…?
http://www.gadgetguy.de Frank Koehntopp

Sorry to be picky, but wouldn’t it be “Engelbart”…?
http://crueltobekind.org/ Nicole Simon

Robert, you are a lucky guy. You probably would have killed Buzz if he let you out on this.

If I have to pick one flabbergasting moment of this year, it was seeing the video at reboot and thinking (like most of the people in the room): what the hell have they done the last 27 years? They had everything already there.

It leaves me with the question: What did they also invent we have not seen yet, and why have we not seen it?
http://crueltobekind.org Nicole Simon

Robert, you are a lucky guy. You probably would have killed Buzz if he let you out on this.

If I have to pick one flabbergasting moment of this year, it was seeing the video at reboot and thinking (like most of the people in the room): what the hell have they done the last 27 years? They had everything already there.

It leaves me with the question: What did they also invent we have not seen yet, and why have we not seen it?
http://ronvdb.com/ Ron van den Boogaard

Thanks for pointing me in his direction. Right now I am reading his 1962 AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. It is a terrific piece. And when you think this was written back then; it’s amazing!
http://ronvdb.com Ron van den Boogaard

Thanks for pointing me in his direction. Right now I am reading his 1962 AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. It is a terrific piece. And when you think this was written back then; it’s amazing!
Christopher Coulter

The “invention” part, is only but one factor, you also have to factor in a need and a market, the problem with geeks and techie utopians, is that they only ever recall the hits. Whole lotta vapor and whole lot of wasted money chasing ratholed dreams.

That being said, per Xerox PARC taken decades for things to impact. Even yet now, not much closer to Kay’s “Dynabook”, the Tablet being a poor substitute. Still legend’s like Butler W. Lampson and Chuck Thacker are some of MFST’s best employees. Just a darned shame MFST can’t milk it.
Christopher Coulter

The “invention” part, is only but one factor, you also have to factor in a need and a market, the problem with geeks and techie utopians, is that they only ever recall the hits. Whole lotta vapor and whole lot of wasted money chasing ratholed dreams.

That being said, per Xerox PARC taken decades for things to impact. Even yet now, not much closer to Kay’s “Dynabook”, the Tablet being a poor substitute. Still legend’s like Butler W. Lampson and Chuck Thacker are some of MFST’s best employees. Just a darned shame MFST can’t milk it.
http://lazycoder.com/ Scott

“He invented the mouse and many of the concepts that you are now using to read my words. ”

Doug Englebart invented the English language?

As far as not being able to describe things without pictures. I imagine Shakespeare and Robert Frost would disagree with you.
http://lazycoder.com Scott

“He invented the mouse and many of the concepts that you are now using to read my words. ”

Doug Englebart invented the English language?

As far as not being able to describe things without pictures. I imagine Shakespeare and Robert Frost would disagree with you.
Dougle

I’m jealous that a turd of a man like Scoble gets to meet interesting people like this fellow.
Dougle

I’m jealous that a turd of a man like Scoble gets to meet interesting people like this fellow.
http://jveisdal.fatalt.org/ Jorgen Veisdal

This guy is on NerdTV in a couple of weeks i think.
http://jveisdal.fatalt.org Jorgen Veisdal

This guy is on NerdTV in a couple of weeks i think.
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http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=17 Andyed

I had a similar energizing experience with Englebart, linked below.
http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=17 Andyed

I had a similar energizing experience with Englebart, linked below.
Eric Pobirs

Some people are missing the point in comparing ASCII to the current state of the Web. Yes, you can describe anything in ASCII but you inevitably get a ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’ effect. Everybody has a different image in their head when playing Zork. Which is fine if the originating medium is text.

But movies, comics, and video games are far more than text. The creator or creators are presenting not just a ‘super soldier in green armor’ but rather a very specific representation of what that guy looks like, how he sounds, how he moves, etc. A skillful writer may decribes these attributes well but it is not remotely the same experience.

Some things are better left to the reader’s imagination. I recall a long running SF series about a far future military officer in which different artists were used for most of the covers. (Some of the artwork was possibly created for other material and repurposed for these books.) Some of these had an interpretation of the character that was jarringly in disagreement with my own imagined version of the character. Some seemed pretty spot on. But all were valid based on the text and the clash with my aesthetics was as much my fault as theirs. I’d be interested to know which covers the author most favors.

Halo 2 is not just ideas on a page but also how they’re embodied by the running game. The quality of those visuals and other elements of the presentation are critical selling points of the product. Promoting that product on a text-only medium would be painful.

A great idea is only step one of innovation. It took decades for the set of ideas Engelbart presented in the 60′s to catch on because these were things to make computers usable by a far wider range of people. That didn’t avoid the issue of what the computers cost. It took many years before computers were even a common retail item and more before the machines possessed the level of power needed to bring Engelbart’s concept to a wide audience.

It isn’t just a matter of reaching consumers. It also means making the cost of entry low enough so developing around new ideas isn’t restricted to a small elite. The number of people creating video games exploded when there were affordable personal computers that allowed nearly anyone to learn how to program and have access to a platform where they could publish software without being in the business of manufacturing the platform. There is a huge difference between producing an arcade machine and a game that runs on a home computer. In 1979 all of the people in the world who had created a video game could hold a meeting in any big hotel ballroom. Just a few years later that number had increased by orders of magnitude. The difference? Millions of relatively cheap home computers.
Eric Pobirs

Some people are missing the point in comparing ASCII to the current state of the Web. Yes, you can describe anything in ASCII but you inevitably get a ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’ effect. Everybody has a different image in their head when playing Zork. Which is fine if the originating medium is text.

But movies, comics, and video games are far more than text. The creator or creators are presenting not just a ‘super soldier in green armor’ but rather a very specific representation of what that guy looks like, how he sounds, how he moves, etc. A skillful writer may decribes these attributes well but it is not remotely the same experience.

Some things are better left to the reader’s imagination. I recall a long running SF series about a far future military officer in which different artists were used for most of the covers. (Some of the artwork was possibly created for other material and repurposed for these books.) Some of these had an interpretation of the character that was jarringly in disagreement with my own imagined version of the character. Some seemed pretty spot on. But all were valid based on the text and the clash with my aesthetics was as much my fault as theirs. I’d be interested to know which covers the author most favors.

Halo 2 is not just ideas on a page but also how they’re embodied by the running game. The quality of those visuals and other elements of the presentation are critical selling points of the product. Promoting that product on a text-only medium would be painful.

A great idea is only step one of innovation. It took decades for the set of ideas Engelbart presented in the 60′s to catch on because these were things to make computers usable by a far wider range of people. That didn’t avoid the issue of what the computers cost. It took many years before computers were even a common retail item and more before the machines possessed the level of power needed to bring Engelbart’s concept to a wide audience.

It isn’t just a matter of reaching consumers. It also means making the cost of entry low enough so developing around new ideas isn’t restricted to a small elite. The number of people creating video games exploded when there were affordable personal computers that allowed nearly anyone to learn how to program and have access to a platform where they could publish software without being in the business of manufacturing the platform. There is a huge difference between producing an arcade machine and a game that runs on a home computer. In 1979 all of the people in the world who had created a video game could hold a meeting in any big hotel ballroom. Just a few years later that number had increased by orders of magnitude. The difference? Millions of relatively cheap home computers.
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#29: I gave Douglas Engelbart a mouse and a book

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