Dr. Doug Engelbart, father of the computer mouse and many other PC and internet technologies, dies age 88 in his Atherton, California house of kidney failure.
Born in in Portland, Oregon on 25 January 1925, Engelbart started working on computers in the 1950s when he had an "epiphany" involving a computer screen full of different symbols-- a vision, probably inspired by Navy radar consoles The New York Times suggests, of what we can recognise as a computer workstation desktop.
In the 1960s Engelbart established the experimental Augmentation Research Centre (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI, later SRI International), where he developed a number of revolutionary technologies first shown off at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, California.
During what Silicon Valley calls "the mother of all demos" Engelbart demonstrated not only his 1964 invention, the mouse (a collaboration with mechanical engineer William English), but also text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing within a remarkable creation called oNLine System (NLS).
NLS was refined at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory before Apple and Microsoft "borrowed" its ideas on GUI design in the 1980s.
Previous to that that, in 1960 (a year before the invention of the planar transistor), Engelbart wrote a paper on scaling in microelectronics and predicted a future with enough processing power for what he called "Augment" (aka ARPAnet), the granddaddy of today's internet.
For his many contributions Engelbart received a number of awards-- including the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the Turing Award. But he will remain best remembered for that not-so-furry rodent companion to our PCs, which Engelbart described as "one of the potentially promising means for delivering and receiving information.”
Go Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse (The New York Times)
