Escalante
Image: Douglas Engelbart in a still from The Mother of all Demos.
The second important reader is Douglas Engelbart, who read the article in a Red Cross Library library tent in the Philippines, as a reprint in the magazine Life. He was a radar technician at the time, and I remember hearing – though I don’t have a source for this right now, it might have been in one of his talks – I remember hearing that he read the article and he went, “Hey, we could do that with radar screens.”
So in 1962 he wrote his paper Augmenting Human Intellect in which he laid down the idea of computers being used as tools by people for creative, intellectual work, and not just as big calculators to figure out the trajectory of ballistics.
His subsequent research programme culminates in 1968 with what’s been called the “Mother of all Demos.” In a single one and a half hour demo, Engelbart showed collaborative co-working, video conferencing, hypertext and how to make links, outliners and word processing; the separation of the screen terminal from the keyboard, he literally invented new office furniture; and the computer mouse, which was an almost incidental thing they just added, made out of wood, to control the system.
Doug Engelbart is the embodiment of the lazy programmer. You know, he invented a whole new world just to get on with creative all this stuff so he can just sit in his chair being creative. That’s good laziness.