A Fireside Chat with Doug Engelbart


Doug Engelbart in the sixties

This list is by design neither exhaustive nor alphabetical or even prioritized; the order is more or less the order in which it was recorded. It is intended to facilitate a casual atmosphere. It is really a fireside talk by Doug Engelbart on different topics, not a lecture or a strict reference work, both figuratively and literally.

Inconsistencies (superficial or real), mistakes, etc. will therefore not be edited out. Many of these words will seem obvious. Until heard with a Doug twist.

Quick Overview: Doug Engelbart created a system called NLS (Online System - later renamed Augment when sold to Tymshare) with his research group at SRI (Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA) which featured the first incarnation of hypertext, the mouse, windows and more, much of which has yet to see widespread use. NLS was first presented to the public in the now-famous 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference Presentation in San Francisco, CA. NLS was not an isolated research project however, at it's peak, there were approximately 15 machines in operation serving a user population of several thousand people.