Jeff came to SRI in 1966 to work on some newly won projects being undertaken by Doug Engelbart and soon came to lead the software development for a new and dramatically different computing capability. This new capability involved the integration of an emerging class of hardware called timesharing and some evolving software unique to SRI. In response to Engelbart’s vision, Jeff and others created a highly responsive, computer-mediated, collaborative work environment. This new continuously-responsive computer environment would define, for the first time anywhere, much of what we think of as computing today.
The remarkable capability of the collaborative system was demonstrated at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco live before hundreds of people. To assure that it would work in such a prestigious and public forum, and over the protestations of his feature-hatching boss, he froze the software one month before the event. To assure success, Jeff and a colleague also built a very early dynamic recovery process so that any system failure would not likely be noticed. This recovery feature rescued them at least once that day. The historic event went successfully and the world saw for the first time an uninterrupted real-time display of a host of software-enabled features that included: on- line file creation and editing, window formation, hypertext linking, the mouse, remote online collaboration aided by audio and video conferencing, and much more. That demonstration was a watershed moment in the history of computing and Jeff, Bill English, and Doug Engelbart, were honored with a special ACM award in 1990 for these contributions
For his part in this historic change to the nature of computing, for his role in the formative days of the world’s first computer network, the ARPANET, and for writing one of the first machine-independent computer languages, we are proud to honor him