In the early 1950s, Doug decided that instead of having a steady job he would focus on making the world a better place, especially through the use of computers to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems. wikipedia 
Two greats
Ted Nelson's eulogy for Douglas Englebart
Doug Engelbart Institute. Launching the Program for the Future. website
Alan Kay once asked “What will the Silicon Valley do when they run out of Doug’s ideas?”
When asked about the large portion of those ideas unrealized, Engelbart said:
quote
“Many years ago, I dreamed that people were talking seriously about the potential of harnessing a technological and social nervous system to improve the IQ of our various organizations. What if, suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we evolved a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms? Then I dreamed that we got strategic and began to form cooperative alliances of organizations, employing advanced networked computer tools and methods to develop and apply new collective knowledge.”
Doug Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution—Launching the Program for the Future. webpage
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Doug Engelbart was perhaps best known for inventing the computer mouse and other seminal technologies. However his driving vision was to dramatically increase humankind's collective capacity to address its most challenging problems. website
Many Oregon State University alumni who served during World War II lived through wartime experiences that had strong impacts on their lives and careers. post
This is true of Douglas C. Engelbart, '48, whose service as a Navy electronic technician became somewhat responsible for his eventually emerging as one of the most remarkable computer science engineers of the 20th century.
Two days after the war had ended, Engelbart, a native of Portland and a graduate of Franklin High, was relaxing at a Red Cross library in the Philippines when suddenly he came upon an article in Atlantic Monthly magazine by Vanneva Bush titled, "As We May Think."