Textbook of AI

1925–2013, Engineer, inventor; pioneer of human–computer interaction

Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer at SRI International who, on 9 December 1968, gave a 90-minute live demonstration in San Francisco, now called The Mother of All Demos, that showcased almost every paradigm of modern interactive computing for the first time in a single sitting: the mouse, the bitmap display, hypertext, video conferencing, real-time collaborative editing, version control, dynamic file linking, and the windowed interface.

Engelbart's vision, set out in his 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, was that the computer should be a tool for amplifying human cognition rather than replacing it. The vision is in many ways orthogonal to the AI programme of automating intelligence , Engelbart and McCarthy disagreed politely about which research direction would prove more important, but it shaped the development of personal computing and, through it, the platforms on which modern AI now runs.

Engelbart received the Turing Award in 1997. His SRI lab was a direct ancestor of Xerox PARC; many of his collaborators (including Bill Paxton and Bill English) moved there and brought the mouse, windows and bitmap display with them.