# Douglas Engelbart Doug's digital footprint is rather large and spans 50 years. You can begin by reading his [papers](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/164/126/), from his original proposals from the 1960s to summaries from the 2000s. You can watch [videos](https://archive.org/details/dougengelbartarchives?&sort=-downloads&page=2) of his talks from the ["mother of all demos"](http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1968-demo.html) in 1968 to a [2008 tribute at Stanford](https://archive.org/details/StanfordNews2008TributeEngelbart). ## Big Ideas In this section, I'll try to summarize the big ideas gleaned from Engelbart. ### C Activities  - **A Activities** are the core activities of the business. - **B Activities** are activities that improve the ability of the company to perform A Activities. - **C Activities** are activities that improve our capabilities for improvement. When I engage in "meta-work", it's often "C Activity" work. Also, building a framework like [RedwoodJS](https://redwoodjs.com) or [Croquet](https://croquet.io) is very much "C Activity". ## References ### Papers Of all of his papers, the two that have been most recommended to me are: - The most famous report is a longer [Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework](http://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart%20-%20Augmenting%20Human%20Intellect.pdf) from October 1962. - A useful reference while reading this paper may be [Field Guide to Doug's 1962 Framework Report](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/380). - A summary of his framework, 40 years later, called [Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future](http://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart%20-%20Improving%20Our%20Ability%20to%20Improve.pdf) from September 2003. ### Video - Improving How We Improve - Doug Engelbart at Groupware '92 <iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sQzznHqFrYg?autoplay=1&origin=https://jessmart.in" frameborder="0"></iframe> Talk: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQzznHqFrYg) Lots of interesting ideas in this talk. May need to watch it a few more times in order to really get it. Need to document more. Other References: - Broad Overview: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/248/260/ - Summary: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/115/000/ ## Writings about Doug Engelbart - [Bret Victor on Engelbart](http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart) #publish #work/notes