7 Douglas Engelbart 7various devices—such as the computer mouse, the multiple
window display, and hypermedia (the linking of texts,
images, video, and sound files within a single document)—
for inputting, manipulating, and displaying data. Together
with a colleague at SRI, William English, he eventually
perfected a variety of input devices—including joysticks,
light pens, and track balls—that are now common. Prior
to Engelbart’s inventions, laborious and error-prone key-
punch cards or manually set electronic switches were
necessary to control computers, and data had to be printed
before it could be viewed. His work made it possible for
ordinary people to use computers.
Early in 1967 Engelbart’s laboratory became the second
site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET), the primary precursor to the Internet. On
Dec. 9, 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco,
Engelbart demonstrated a working real-time collaborative
computer system known as NLS (oNLine System). Using
NLS, he and English (back at Stanford) worked on a shared
document in one window (using keyboard and mouse
input devices) while at the same time conducting the
world’s first public computer video conference in another
window. Engelbart continued his research, building
increasingly sophisticated input and display devices and
improving the graphical user interface, but because of
budget cuts at SRI most of his research staff migrated to
other institutions such as Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto
Research Center in Palo Alto, California.
In 1977 SRI sold Engelbart’s NLS groupware system
to Tymshare, Inc., a telephone networking company that
renamed it Augment and sought to make it into a com-
mercially viable office automation system. As the last
remaining member of his research laboratory, and with
SRI showing no further interest in his work, Engelbart
joined Tymshare. In 1984 Tymshare was acquired by the