Editing Douglas Engelbart (section)

=== Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas ===

Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity by the mid-1970s. As early as 1970, several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for [[Xerox PARC]], in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing.<ref name="ACMTuring1997"/> Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, [[timesharing|timeshare]] (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of [[personal computer]]s. The conflict was both technical and ideological: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon.<ref name="ACMTuring1997"/><ref name=OBrien1999/>

Beginning in 1972, several key ARC personnel were involved in [[Erhard Seminars Training]] (EST), with Engelbart ultimately serving on the corporation's board of directors for many years. Although EST had been recommended by other researchers, the controversial nature of EST and other social experiments reduced the morale and social cohesion of the ARC community.<ref name="bard"/> The 1969 [[Mike Mansfield#Mansfield Amendments|Mansfield Amendment]], which ended military funding of non-military research, the end of the [[Vietnam War]], and the end of the [[Apollo program]] gradually reduced ARC's funding from ARPA and [[NASA]] throughout the early 1970s.

SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of [[artificial intelligence]] researcher [[Bertram Raphael]], who negotiated the transfer of the laboratory to Tymshare in 1976. Engelbart's house in [[Atherton, California]] burned down during this period, causing him and his family further problems. Tymshare took over NLS and the lab that Engelbart had founded, hired most of the lab's staff (including its creator as a Senior Scientist), renamed the software ''Augment'', and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division. Tymshare was already somewhat familiar with NLS; when ARC was still operational, it had experimented with its own local copy of the NLS software on a minicomputer called OFFICE-1, as part of a joint project with ARC.<ref name=OBrien1999/>

At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself further marginalized. Operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to conduct ongoing research. Various executives, first at Tymshare and later at McDonnell Douglas, which acquired Tymshare in 1984, expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them. His interest inside of McDonnell Douglas was focused on the enormous knowledge management and IT requirements involved in the life cycle of an aerospace program, which served to strengthen Engelbart's resolve to motivate the information technology arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dougengelbart.org/about/ohs.html|title=About An Open Hyperdocument System (OHS)|publisher=The Doug Engelbart Institute|access-date=June 17, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120712033937/http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/ohs.html|archive-date=July 12, 2012|url-status=live}}</ref> Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, determined to pursue his work free from commercial pressure.<ref name="ACMTuring1997"/><ref name=OBrien1999/>