Doug Engelbart was unable to find funding for his work

Doug was our Einstein, but he largely punched out in the mid-70's, right as the PC and the commercial software industry took off. Later, I met him in 1998 and by that point he had no interest in talking about anything. He had any number of opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc. beyond what he did. That he didn't was a choice on his part, unfortunate for our industry, and not everyone else's fault like Tom seems to think.

This sad story demonstrates the importance of owning your ideas and directly benefiting from them (financially, public recognition, etc.), instead of giving them away to people who will like you one minute and forget you the next.

&quot;Today&#x27;s computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.&quot;<p>Well I guess we can&#x27;t expect journalists to know much about computers, but anyone who writes something like this ought to never write a word on computers again, nor should they be publishing attention-seeking articles like this one.

It surprises me, in retrospect, that Sun Microsystems didn&#x27;t give Englebart an office, some equipment, and a couple of assistants, at least. This doesn&#x27;t seem like a huge expense for a company the size that Sun got to be, and I was under the impression they had a few groups doing exploratory stuff, of various kinds, already.<p>But I know no specifics, such as whether he approached them or what they might have said.

Couldn&#x27;t get funding for what? I didn&#x27;t see any mention of what he was trying to fund.