You've likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh.

But what you may not know about is the really early history. The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are better stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, about the events that led to personal computing as we know it.

In his wonderful new book, What the Dormouse Said..., John Markoff tells these stories.

Google search: "doug engelbart OR douglas engelbart"

The Bootstrap Institute was conceived by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting individual and organizational ability to better address problems that are complex and urgent.* It is along this chosen career path that he became prominent as a pioneer of the digital age. He garnered fame especially through his invention of the computer mouse and was the first to use the cathode-ray tube for the display of text, of graphics and of the mouse pointer (the monitor as we know it today). He is credited with pioneering online computing and email, and other inventions and innovations. More on this will be found in the Chronicle, a part of this website that conserves the past. We hope that the Chronicle will prove especially useful to those of a historical bent of mind as well as to members of the press. However, the overarching aim of these web pages is to inform decision-makers and a wider public about a strategy and tools for achieving peak performance within public institutions and commercial enterprises in the interest of mankind as a whole. 2A