Douglas Carl Engelbart: developing the underlying concepts for contemporary computing

Abstract

Currently, the World Wide Web is the hottest topic in contemporary and popular culture. The Web's meteoric rise is difficult to escape notice. Web stories are plastered in the popular press, and advertisements now include cryptic strings of letters starting with http://, but what is missing from the current commercial descriptions of the Web is a discussion about the 30-year history of research and development that created the underlying technologies on which the Web is based. Much of this foundation was laid in the 1960s by Douglas Carl Engelbart. In 1968, at the ACM/IEEE-CS Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart demonstrated his concept of interactive computing to a group of computer scientists, and this is now considered a seminal event in the history of computing. The technologies Engelbart originally presented included: windowed screen design, the user interface, hypertextual linking of documents, the mouse, collaborative and multimedia. His pioneering work in the 1960s influenced future generations of computer designers and developers. Almost 30 years after Engelbart's initial demonstration, many of his pioneering visions are now commonly found in personal computers and the developing World Wide Web.