Early Life and Education
Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon on January 30, 1925, to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He is of German, Swedish and Norwegian descent.
He was the middle of three children, with a sister Dorianne (3 years older), and a brother David (14 months younger). They lived in Portland in his early years, and moved to the countryside to Johnson Creek when he was 9 or 10, after the death of his father. He graduated from Portland's Franklin High School in 1942.
Midway through his college studies at Oregon State University (then called Oregon State College), near the end of World War II, he was drafted into the US Navy, serving two years as a radar technician in the Philippines. On a small island, in a tiny hut on stilts, he first read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which greatly inspired him. He returned to Oregon State and completed his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948. While at Oregon State, he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon social fraternity.
He was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Ames Research Center, where he worked through 1951.
Read more about this topic: Douglas Engelbart
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“Jupiter, not wanting man’s life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason—you could reckon the ration as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.”
—William Congreve (1670–1729)