Doug Engelbart arrived at SRI in 1959 and spent 18 years building his vision of an interconnected community of knowledge workers. He built up SRI's Augmentation Research Center under difficult circumstances. He had the task to sell not only the sources of funding within the US Government agencies, but also to convince SRI management to make the investment required. He did this during the difficult times of the late 1960s when SRI was separating from Stanford University. Student uprisings, arguments about classified work on campus, and other major distractions were an everyday presence. Through all this, Doug maintained focus on his vision.
Doug's task was to build a new type of organization. He drew on others about him—Charlie Rosen, for instance, who steered him through some of the Washington funding obstacles and helped him in many ways. Doug operated his center as a family, with a very high degree of camaraderie. He recruited brilliant coworkers, many of whom have made a substantial name for themselves either at SRI or later at organizations like Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple Computer. His obvious drive and dedication set the highest example for his colleagues and support staff.
What he left behind at SRI is immense. First, any ongoing program in information systems draws on Doug's concepts and visions of an interactive community sharing knowledge. Second, anyone at SRI—or in the world—who picks up a mouse, sends e-mail, shares files with his neighbor, or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to Doug Engelbart. His contributions to today's working society include the basic idea of hypertext, the "desktop" metaphor, multiple windows, file-sharing collaboration, distributed servers, and many other concepts that we take for granted today. The very idea of working with a computer interactively began in Doug Engelbart's group.
It is ironic that he is best known among lay people as the inventor of the mouse. In his 18 years at SRI, he proved that he was the consummate visionary of what we know today as the community of information workers. As Dr. David Liddell, Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center once said, "What Doug described in the '50s and '60s, we are implementing in the '80s."