Software Productivity Consortium salutes Dr. Douglas Engelbart on National Technology Medal win.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

HERNDON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2000

The Software Productivity Consortium today offered its congratulations to Dr. Douglas Engelbart on his receipt of the National Medal of Technology in recognition of his many contributions to networked computing.

President Clinton will present this prestigious award to Dr. Engelbart and other medal winners at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on December 1st.

The National Medal of Technology is the nation's highest science and technology honor, recognizing technological innovators who have made lasting contributions to enhancing America's competitiveness and standard of living and whose solid science results in commercially successful products and services.

Dr. Engelbart was cited for this award for his role in creating the foundations of personal computing, including continuous real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, online journals, shared screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work.

Dr. Engelbart and his team developed these innovations in the 1960s at SRI International (then called Stanford Research Institute), sponsored by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA). Reflecting Dr. Engelbart's instrumental role in the early computer networking community, his lab was selected to be the second host on the ARPANET community (forerunner of the Internet).

"We are both honored and delighted to have the opportunity to offer our personal thanks to Dr. Engelbart on behalf of our member companies in the telecom, financial services, aerospace, defense, and electronics industries," says Werner Schaer, President and CEO of the Consortium.

"His work has had an immeasurable impact on our use of information technologies, and his vision of an increasingly interconnected and productive world continues to serve as a driving force behind the online, collaborative computing framework we all seek to achieve."

Schaer and other members of the Consortium's Board of Directors will honor Dr. Engelbart at an invitation-only reception in northern Virginia on December 5th.

Douglas Engelbart

Dr. Douglas Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer "mouse" although his most significant work to date is leadership of the team that developed NLS, the first hypertext system, and collaborative computing. His ongoing work is inspired by his deep-felt belief that society needs better ways to solve problems that are increasingly more urgent and complex.

Today, in collaboration with various government agencies, corporations, universities and research institutions, Engelbart directs the California-based Bootstrap Institute (www.bootstrap.org), helping organizations harness their collective IQ, to better anticipate and manage global challenges of unprecedented scale and urgency.

With the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS), currently in development, Engelbart and his team are building a toolset that will help organizations leverage their collective knowledge more quickly and effectively.

The Software Productivity Consortium

The Software Productivity Consortium (www.software.org ) consists of leading companies in the telecommunications, aerospace, IT, financial and electronic industries that pool their resources to create a community of interest dedicated to advancing the state of systems and software engineering.

By leveraging the use of Consortium technologies and processes in their development programs, Consortium members dramatically improve their productivity, profitability, and time-to-market competitiveness.