Engelbart's Role in Early Internet History 0

Following is some background on the role Doug Engelbart and his lab at SRI played in the early formation of the ARPANET, precursor to the Internet.

The 2nd Server on the Internet 1

When ARPA* was ready in 1969 to go live with the first internet, called ARPANET, the first node was a mainframe at UCLA, and the second was Doug Engelbart's computer lab at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, CA.

Engelbart's research began in earnest in the early 1960s, with funding from ARPA and the US Air Force to develop his vision of interactive computing to augment the human intellect. By 1968 his lab at SRI had a fully operational collaborative hypertext system called NLS. Around that time ARPA was gearing up its ARPANET initiative to make the large computational mainframe computer resources at key university contractor sites available remotely to the ARPA research community. Engelbart was thrilled about the potential for NLS to be accessed over the net to support communities of knowledge workers, and was given the funds to set up the first ARPANET Network Information Center (NIC) to support the ARPANET community. He then set to work extending NLS provisions for community support, including integrated hyper-email and an automated library facility (the "Journal"). By 1978 there were 5-6 mainframes running NLS over the ARPANET as well as over early commercial networks to support a variety of user communities.

This map shows the entire ARPANET in 1969 with the first four nodes, including Engelbart's lab at SRI. Click the map to see full size at the source site)

See Also 2

From the Internet 2a

From Doug's Lab 2b

  • "The Mother of All Demos" (90 min Video/Film) Doug's 1968 debut of NLS (Augment's precursor) including hypermedia, the mouse, collaborative work, interactive computing, human computer interface, and overarching guiding principles. See especially Clip 32 and Clip 33 where Doug outlines the participation of ARC in the planned ARPA computer network to be established within the next year (1969). Also available on DVD in its entirety at our online Store.

  • Following are references to the passages from Engelbart's papers in the late '60s and early '70s which highlight his lab's orientation for Network Implications prior to and during the formation of the ARPANET, all directly related to today's World Wide Web as well -- Knowledge Management, Collaboration, etc.

    • The 1968 paper they published in the FJCC Conference Proceedings has been somewhat masked by the publicity given to the online presentation they gave at the Conference, but it outlined in detail the hardware, software and functionality of the NLS system:

      A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect, Douglas C. Engelbart and William K. English, AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, CA, December 1968, Vol. 33, pp. 395-410.

    • In 1970, Larry Roberts organized a small conference at University of Texas in Austin: The Interdisciplinary Conference on Multi-Access Computer Networks. Each solicited speaker was to address his relevant "Implications of Multi-Access Computer Networks." For instance, Larry's was "Economic Implications." Engelbart's was "Intellectual Implications":

      Intellectual Implications of Multi-Access Computer Networks, Douglas C. Engelbart, Stanford Research Institute, 1970 (AUGMENT,5255,). From Proceedings of The Interdisciplinary Conference on Multi-Access Computer Networks, Austin, Texas, April 1970. See particularly topical sections relevant to the shape of today's emergent web-based changes:

    • Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Douglas C. Engelbart. 1962, see especially what he envisioned for accessing the computers remotely via 'workingstations' in this 'backcast' section 7. Team Collaboration.

Footnote: 3

* ARPA = Advanced Research Projects Agency, now DARPA or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a funding agency of the US Department of Defense which was the major source of R&D funds for early computer and internet research.