12 de enero de 2003

Visionario y pionero sobre colaboración basada en computador.

Origen: http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Inet/birth.html

Idioma: Inglés.

Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart is a visionary and a pioneer in the design of modern collaborative computer environments. As Principal Investigator at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) starting in the mid-sixties, Dr. Engelbart led his research group in the development of the On-Line System (NLS), with tools to support asynchronous use by project collaborators; the NLS is still recognized today as one of the most comprehensive systems for supporting wide-area collaboration. Dr. Engelbart's innovations, as well as his active role in the formation of the ARPAnet community, resulted in the choice of SRI as one of the first four nodes of the ARPAnet.

Other major technologies first conceived by Dr. Engelbart include the "windows" user interface, and the now ubiquitous mouse. The ARC mouse actually had three buttons which could be used for typing, so the user's hand never had to leave it. Invented and patented by Dr. Engelbart 30 years ago (among Dr. Engelbart's more than 20 patents and 25 publications), both have become standard features of the modern computer.

Today, Dr. Engelbart is the Director of the Bootstrap Institute, pursuing comprehensive strategies to optimize collaborative computing environments heading into the 21st century. His life's work, with his "big-picture" vision of organizational augmentation, and his persistent pioneering breakthroughs, continue to impact the past, present, and future of personal, interpersonal, and organizational computing.

Doug Engelbart

Doug Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute founder and Director, has an unparalleled 30-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. From his early vision of turning organizations into augmented knowledge workshops, he went on to pioneer what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking, and organizational transformation.

Well-known technological firsts include the mouse, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. Integrated prototypes were in full operation under the NLS system, as early as 1968. In the last decade of its continued evolution, thousands of users have benefited from its unique team support capabilities.

After 20 years directing his own lab at SRI, and 11 years as senior scientist, first at Tymshare, and then at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, where he is working closely with industry and government stakeholders to launch a collaborative implementation of his work. 

Engelbart has received numerous awards for outstanding lifetime achievement and ingenuity. His life's work, with his "big-picture" vision and persistent pioneering breakthroughs, has made a significant impact on the past, present, and future of personal, interpersonal, and organizational computing.

Origen: http://www.bootstrap.org/engelbart/index.jsp#nid052

Augmentation Research Center   

It was in 1963, an outcome of the proposal written for the Air Force, that he began receiving the funds for his own research laboratory, which he later dubbed the Augmentation Research Center. The evolution of his laboratory over the next fifteen years followed this strategy, and its extended record of unusually creative and coherent tools and work processes can to a considerable extent be traced to the fact that everybody worked the new way -- programmers, designers, project managers, application-support staff, and the considerable array of pro-active end-user organizations supported through the ARPANet from 1974 into the late '80s.   

The year before, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had brought to Washington a man who made a singularly important difference in the history of computers and networks. Dr. Joseph C. R. Licklinder (always called Lick) came from Harvard, via the Cambridge consulting firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman, with an unusually open charter to foster research associated with the theme on which he himself had previously published, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," and toward the technology necessary to do "time sharing" of a computer's processing power between a number of concurrently active online users.   

Because Engelbart's published framework of 1963 and the pursuits proposed therein were so much on line with his, Licklider began steering funds to him despite voiced misgivings of some of his colleagues -- something that came into the open some years later from unguarded chatter by some of them at a cocktail party. "Nothing personal, you understand," it's just that "way out there in Palo Alto, there isn't the computer and programming talent to justify investing good R&D dollars." The year before, a proposal made to a government funding agency had been turned down in almost those exact words in spite of being rated as "a very interesting proposal."   

The first two years of ARPA support were relatively unproductive -- problems in aligning actual work with bootstrapping concepts, which were deemed inappropriate by prevailing paradigms of management, engineering and computer programming. Meanwhile a fortunate bit of funding arrived from a NASA psychologist named Bob Taylor. (Later, Taylor moved to ARPA and became a significant factor in launching the ARPANet.) That started a project to experiment and evaluate various available "screen selection" devices -- pointers -- to see which would be most appropriate for use in on-line computer interaction. Engelbart proposed the research, and was listed as the Principle Investigator, but it was his friend Bill English, an extremely effective engineer and organizer, who put together the tests and analyses which yielded the effective results. Engelbart had thought of the basic idea for the computer mouse several years before and, almost incidental to this, suggested with a few simple sketches that maybe building and testing this kind of a device would help round out the experiments. So, Bill built it, and some unknown person in the small group of designer, programmer, machinist, test subjects -- no one can remember who -- started referring to it as the mouse. And it just happened to win the tests; and people on the project began building and using them throughout the following fifteen years.   

The Augmentation Research Center was developing the kind of technology that Engelbart believed would be required to augment human intellect, and to support the bootstrapping/augmentation process as well. Throughout the '60s and '70s, the lab pioneered an elaborate hypermedia-groupware system called NLS (for oN-Line System) most of whose now-common features were conceived of, fully integrated and in everyday operational use, by the early 1970s.   

ARPANet and the 1968 Demo   

In the Spring of 1967, it was announced that the thirteen ARPA-sponsored computer research labs, including the Augmentation Research Center, would be networked to promote the sharing of resources. Engelbart was thrilled. The ARC became the second host on the ARPANet, which he viewed as an excellent vehicle for extending his lab's NLS provisions into a collaboration distributed well beyond the confines of his ARC. He also perceived NLS as a natural to support an on-line directory of resources and therefore he proposed that ARPA support a Network Information Center (NIC).   

During the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference (a semi-annual joint meeting of the then major computing societies) held in San Fransisco, the ARC lab harnessed some leased video links to the conference site and borrowed an unusual, new device that could project dynamic video brightly onto a 20-foot screen needed to provide readable NLS screens in a space holding 1000-plus attendees. At a special session, Engelbart, operating NLS from the stage through a home-made modem, used NLS to outline and then concretely illustrate his ideas to the audience while members of his staff (with their faces shown on the screen) linked in from his lab at SRI. A standing ovation concluded this "mother of all demos," the first public demonstration of the computer mouse, of hypermedia, and of on-screen video teleconferencing.   

The augmentation framework requires an effective integration of psychology and organizational development with all these advances in computing technology. Engelbart strongly believes that the co-evolution of human natural capabilities and those of artifacts should be based on rigorous exploratory use in a wide variety of real-world applications. Therefore, in the mid-70s, he began building up a community of users via the ARPANet. These knowledge-work architects collaborated in pilot trials and the establishing of future requirements.   

From the beginning, Engelbart applied a bootstrapping strategy by using NLS for distributed collaborative software engineering, technology transfer, and community support. Not only did his knowledge-work architects use the NLS, but the entire R&D operation did. The system was further developed and maintained by using NLS in creating structured hypertext files with links between the source code, design documents, specifications, bug reports, change requests, thinkpieces, commentary, rationales, customer records, and so on. At its peak, Engelbart's ARC lab had grown to 47 people, inluding the Network Information Center.