In 1961, thirty-five-year-old Douglas Engelbart sat in a computer graphics conference and daydreamed. Like he often did, he focused his thoughts on making the computers of the future more interac- tive and easier to operate; two things that the computers he used were not. Computers of the 1960s were huge and hard to find. They took up entire rooms and were owned by large corporations, univer- sities, and government agencies. Douglas knew if you were lucky enough to have access to one, you also had to reserve a time to use it, and you had to know how to use punch cards. These were stiff cards with holes punched in them in precise locations to repre- sent information. To create applications for a computer, batches of these cards were prepared beforehand and fed into the computer. Hours or days later, the user received the results of the application. Douglas knew there had to be an easier way. It was something he had been thinking about for a long time.
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