OUR COVERAGE: Part 1: A virtual unknown Part 2: Against all odds Part 3: Debunking the legend of the mouse Part 4: The crusade Part 5: It's networking Part 6: A pioneers' reunion Tech pioneers

The crusade

You could say that love inspired Doug Engelbart's computer crusade. Or some brew of love, mixed with a disturbing vision of his future life as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory, which later would become NASA.

In December 1950, the day after he proposed to his future wife, 25-year-old Engelbart was driving to work in Mountain View. "I realized that I didn't have any more goals than a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after," he recalls. And so he started mulling over more compelling goals, eventually asking himself, "How can my career maximize my contribution to mankind?"

"If we don't improve our ability to deal collectively with complex things, as the problems grow more urgent, we're in trouble." Douglas Engelbart

At the library, "I started researching crusades," Engelbart says nonchalantly, as though everybody flips through periodicals in search of a life mission. One Saturday morning, as he sat in his rented room in Los Altos, the kid who grew up on a farm near Portland, Ore., during the Great Depression suddenly knew how he could help save humanity: "I thought, 'Damn, I never realized the world is so complicated. If we don't improve our ability to deal collectively with complex things, as the problems grow more urgent, we're in trouble.' "

Engelbart had read about the development of the computer, and it started to gel with an article he'd read years earlier by Vannevar Bush, the renowned MIT scientist. Bush predicted that one day there would be machines that could reduce the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the size of a machine box, "a sort of mechanized private file and library."

Engelbart now envisioned this machine. During World War II, he'd worked as a radar technician. It struck him that the same engineering principles could allow people to interact with computers by visually displaying information on computer screens.

This was 1951, however; computers were room-sized Neanderthals that crunched numerical data fed into them from punch cards.

But Engelbart saw "people sitting in front of displays, 'flying around' in an information space" as they organized and traded ideas with incredible speed and flexibility.

He called his fiancée and broke the news that he was quitting his job and going back to school. At UC-Berkeley, Engelbart helped build an experimental programmable computer, earned his Ph.D. and was hired as an acting assistant professor. He told anyone who would listen about his vision of personal computers networked together. The reaction, as recorded in his official bio: "He was tipped off by a colleague that if he kept talking about his 'wild ideas' he'd be an acting assistant professor forever."

Engelbart landed a research job at SRI. The Defense Department was handing out grant money to explore new ways of harnessing the computer's power. One project was ARPA, forerunner of the Internet, which would hook together government and research organizations over a timeshare network. By 1967, Engelbart was overseeing his own research lab where his assistants - mostly kids in their 20s - were inventing the personal computing tools needed to fly through cyberspace.

Engelbart and his engineers rigged a special facility for this 1967 meeting of his research sponsors. Each participant had a mouse for pointing, and Engelbart could call up documents from his lab.

On Dec. 9, 1968, Engelbart and his research team unveiled the future according to Engelbart. For an hour-and-a-half, an amazed crowd of 2,300 at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco watched what's still called "the mother of all demos." Engelbart demonstrated a new way to work: personal computer workstations that could talk to each other, allowing collaboration from anywhere in the country.

This was more than a vision; they showed off hardware and software, built by his team from scratch, equipped with some element of virtually every system we use today: the computer mouse, the graphical user interface (visual display of text and graphics), windows, networking, a Web-style browser to fish up information out of cyberspace, e-mail, even video conferencing. "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life," recalls fellow pioneer Alan Kay. "Engelbart was like Moses opening the Red Sea."

"If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive, how much value could you derive from that?" Douglas Engelbart

Diehards can repeat Engelbart's opening line from memory:

"If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive, how much value could you derive from that?"

Then, on a gigantic movie screen, he brought this new world alive. TV cameras switched from shots of Engelbart's hands working new contraptions called a mouse and a chord keyset, in conjunction with a standard keyboard, to shots of the computer screen where Engelbart was effortlessly adding, deleting and reorganizing a grocery shopping list. Like magic, the cursor moved words and thoughts.

The world premiere of video conferencing was a show-stopper: Talking into a director's-style headset, Engelbart punched up his colleague at SRI, 30 miles away. "Hi, Bill," said Engelbart as Bill's head filled the left corner of the screen, surrounded by text. "Now we're connected . . . let's do some collaborating." The two proceeded to work jointly on a piece of text, passing the cursor and computer controls back and forth. Engelbart and his team had invented what's now called "groupware"; 30 years later it's hard to find software that allows you to do what they did in the demo - share control of a computer screen for sophisticated collaboration.

Van Dam, a 20-year-old faculty member of Brown University at the time, couldn't believe what he was seeing. "I found it staggering. It just blew me away." For days after the demo, van Dam hung around the SRI lab, trying to comprehend the incredible world Engelbart had uncorked.

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