Theodor Holm Nelson's eulogy for Douglas Englebart

[FarCenter]

You don’t need me to tell you that Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time. We gather today, in pretense of unanimity and concord, to croon over Doug’s ashes and grab for scraps of his robe.

Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.

Some are no doubt here to cheer and march behind the mouse, as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of yore. Let them be happy in that celebration.

But the real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration.

Don’t get me wrong, the people who gave us all those fonts were idealists too, in their way — they just didn’t necessarily hold a very high view of human potential.

I used to have a high view of human potential. But no one ever had such a soaring view of human potential as Douglas Carl Engelbart — and he gave us wings to soar with him, though his mind flew on ahead, where few could see.

Like Icarus, he tried to fly too far too fast, and the wings melted off.The melt-off began after the Great Demo of 1968. His team dispersed to seek fortunes elsewhere; and he was subordinated to an artificial intelligence department, where his real intelligence was stifled.

All too soon the Augmentation Research Center was gone, fobbed off on an aircraft company.

He was cast out for the next 30 years into the endless spiral of what they call in Hollywood “Development Hell” — trying to find backing.

Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA, Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further.

But for Doug that great demo was only the beginning.

That great demo which defined the corners of our world was only Square One of his endless new checkerboard– the great playing field, the great workplace of sharing, cooperation and understanding he sought to create, and (alas) that only he could imagine.

Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.

Perhaps the Dynamic Knowledge Repository he imagined — the D.K.R. — would not be feasible in a real-world corporation.

Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil.

Of course he was naïve!

Gandhi and Martin Luther King pretended to be naïve, but Doug was the real thing– a luminous innocent, able to do in all innocence what sophisticates could not, would not, dare.

But that naiveté accomplished a dazzling amount in those few years of his Augmentation Research Center, even as the knives were being sharpened for him.

Did he actually have any more great inventions under that halo?

We’ll never know, will we?

Doug hoped eventually to take on all the urgent and complex problems of humanity, dealing with them in parallel he saw as the true and final challenge.

Could he have done it somehow: given us exalted, radical tools for optimization and agreement, in this urgent complex world of hurt and hatred?We’ll never know, will we.

But who better should have had the chance to try? To quote Joan of Arc, from Shaw’s play about her:

“When will the world be ready to receive its saints? I think we know the answer — when they are dead, pasteurized and homogenized and simplified into stereotypes, and the true depth and integrity of their ideas and initiatives are forgotten. But the urgent and complex problems of mankind have only grown more urgent and more complex.”

It sure looks like humanity is circling the drain. To quote the great poet Walt Kelly:

“The gentle journey jolts to stop. The drifting dream is done. The long-gone goblins loom ahead– The deadly, that we thought were dead, Are waiting, every one.”

And here we twiddle in a world of computer glitz, as the winds rise, and the seas rise, and the debts rise, and the terrorists rise, and the nukes tick.

So I don’t just feel like I’ve lost my best friend.

I feel like I’ve lost my best planet.

I’ll give the last word to Shakespeare’s Marc Antony.

He speaks to the body of Julius Caesar while he is confronting the gang who murdered him:

“O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. Thou art the ruins of the noblest man that ever lived, in the tide of times.”

Thank you.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/an-homage-to-douglas-engelbart-and-a-critique-of-the-state-of-tech

Douglas Englebart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse.

Ted Nelson is best known for coining the term "hypertext" and as the author of "Computer Lib/Dream Machines".