Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution 道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特：不只是鼠标之父.docVIP

Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution 道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特：不只是鼠标之父 　　Douglas Engelbart knew that his obituaries1） would laud him as “Inventor of the Mouse.” I can see him smiling wistfully2）， ironically， at the thought. The mouse was such a small part of what Engelbart invented. 　　We now live in a world where people edit text on screens， command computers by clicking， communicate via audio-video and screen-sharing and use hyperlinks to navigate through knowledge—all ideas that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute invented in the 1960s. But Engelbart never got support for the larger part of what he wanted to build， even decades later when he finally got recognition for his achievements. When Stanford honored Engelbart with a two-day symposium3） in 2008， they called it “The Unfinished Revolution.” 　　To Engelbart， computers， interfaces and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created. He listed the end results of boosting what he called “collective IQ4）” in a 1962 paper， “Augmenting5） Human Intellect.” They included “more-rapid comprehension … better solutions， and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.” If you want to understand where today’s information technologies came from， and where they might go， the paper still makes good reading. 　　Engelbart’s vision for more capable humans， enabled by electronic computers， came to him in 1945， after reading inventor and wartime research director Vannevar Bush6）’s Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think.” Bush wrote： “The summation7） of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious8） rate， and the means we use for threading through9） the consequent maze10） to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged11） ships.” 　　That inspired Engelbart， a young electrical engineer， to come up with the idea of people using screens and computers to