[amsilprotag]

Just yesterday I watched an hour-long interview [0] from 2002 with Doug Engelbart.

On finding a wife. Engelbart moves to a university town, ditches a male-focused hobby, and finds a more gender neutral hobby in folk dancing. Echoes of Noyce and choir.

He turns down an offer from HP after asking whether he would be able to work on computers and being told "no".

He claims during his 12 or so years working at SRI before the '68 demo that most of the support for his ideas came from outside of the institution. He says that later he learned about paradigms (but claims not from Kuhn), which allowed him to understand the resistance he kept facing.

He gives credit to people with tangential skills that made the presentation possible: The machinist mouse-maker who was also a wood carver, the colleague's wife who was also a theater director.

He laments the fact that the easiest-to-learn tools out-competed tools that gave the greatest return on learning.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM