THE CLOSEST THING in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth was when Steve Jobs visited Engelbart’s protege Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1979. He saw a demo of the Alto — a descendant of Engelbart’s earlier oN-Line System — and, the legend goes, left with the idea for the MacintoshD. Just like that, fire was placed into the hands of common man.
The problem with fire, of course, is that it doesn’t ask what you want it to burn.
Engelbart spent the rest of his life watching the world run with it in directions he never intended. After PARC, his research group at SRI slowly dissolved. His best people left for Xerox, then Apple, then the blooming industry around them. The funding dried up. The vision that had animated his work — augmenting collective intelligence, bootstrapping humanity’s ability to solve systematic challenges — got quietly swapped out for something more legible to the market: personal productivity. A word processor. A spreadsheet. Things that sold.
He kept working, kept giving talksE, kept trying to articulate the gap between what the computer had become and what he believed it could still be. The later the talks you watch, the more depressed he sounds — a rant about how the world could be so different, a sigh, then a dash through his meticulously prepared slides as if he already knew the audience wouldn’t follow.
By the time he died in 2013, he estimated that only “about 2.8%” of his vision had ever been realized.F
Two percent.