My wife and I met Doug Engelbart at a dinner in 1996. I asked his daughter if he might autograph a mouse for me. She said that she never heard of him autographing a mouse before. She brought me to his table. He said, "... I have never autographed a mouse before." He took my Sharpie and signed away with a laugh and a smile.

A mythical event that is about to become 50 years old; time flies when you're having fun they say ;-)

I met Doug Engelbart when we both worked for a company called
Tymshare in the early 1980’s. At one of his demos of the Augment system, he
predicted that people sitting around a conference table would communicate with
each other primarily via terminals instead of talking. I couldn’t imagine why
people in the same room viewing a common slide presentation needed to do anything
other than talk to each other. In the intervening decades, I smile to myself
every time I see a group of people sitting around a conference table with their
noses buried in notebook computers and cell phones, and texting each other.

Many large portions of this article are just plain wrong -- in too many ways to detail here.

For example, it fails to mention that the personal computers we created at Parc were networked from the beginning (we invented the Ethernet to hook everything together, and quite a few Parc people were on the committee that invented the Internet). I was just one of a number of "research ringleaders" at Parc, and was friends with all the NLS people from 1967 on. Multiple windows appeared in Sketchpad III at Lincoln Labs, and display text editing at MIT, both before NLS. And so on.

Doug and his group can't be too highly praised, but they would be the first to not wish to be wrongly praised. The best way to praise all of this stuff is to praise the ARPA-Parc research community, and especially the funders that supported this work.

Since there exist carefully researched and vetted histories of the ARPA-IPTO research community (and Parc was a member of this, but funded by Xerox) such as "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop, and several histories commissioned by the Association for Computing Machinery, and that the Smithsonian Institution is supposed to be deeply involved in history, it is astounding to me that an article this full of errors was allowed to be published (I'm guessing with no attempts to fact check).

Sincerely,

Alan Kay

Just lost faith in the Smithsonian. Thanks, Mr. Kay.

Do you think it has been simply dumbed-down for the majority (or some) of the readers Alan?
BTW, you are awesome!

I don't think that "dumbing down for the majority" is the problem. As I said, Doug and his researchers can't be too highly praised for both what they did do, and what they thought needed to be done. An article about them by anyone should focus most especially on what has still been missed today that is vitally important. The errors are quite careless, but have the problem of being misleading and confusing, especially when displayed under the sign of the Smithsonian.