The Inventor

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart earned his Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1948, from Oregon State University. Afterward, he began working as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory in San Francisco, this laboratory served as the precursor to NASA. During his work there Engelbert became interested in the development of the computer. He attended the graduate program at the University of California Berkeley and earned his P.H.D in 1955. After serving as an assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley for a few years Engelbart eventually settled on a position at the Stanford Research Institute.

In 1963, Engelbart received enough funding to start his own research lab, which he called the Augmentation Research Center. During the 1960s and 1970s Engelbert’s lab worked on a hypermedia-groupware system that they called NLS, which stood for “oNLine system”.  ¹