Computing Legend Douglas Engelbart Dies Aged 88

Douglas Engelbart, an American inventor credited with designing the very first computer mouse, died in his sleep on Tuesday at the age of 88.

Engelbart was a visionary responsible for many ideas that shaped the modern digital world. He believed in collaboration between man and machine, worked on the early principles on the web and was among the first to successfully demonstrate videoconferencing.

During his lifetime, Engelbart won countless awards, including the Turing Award for contributions to the computing community, Lemelson-MIT prize and the National Medal of Technology. However, he never received royalties for his most famous invention.

Visionary

Engelbart was born in 1925 in Portland, Oregon: his father was a radio repairman and his mother was a housewife. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, but his degree was interrupted when he was sent to serve as a radar technician during World War II. It was during the war Engelbart first saw computing as an answer to humanity’s problems.

Upon returning, he completed his degree and started working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – a precursor to NASA. Later, he was teaching at the University of California in Berkley, where he got his electrical engineering doctorate in 1955.

The inventor joined government-sponsored Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1957, where he opened his own laboratory – the Augmentation Research Centre – dedicated to computing tools. Engelbart created first sketches of a graphics manipulator device in 1961, and had his colleague Bill English build one out of wood.

In 1968, Engelbart gave a presentation to the technology community in San Francisco, in which he demonstrated the device that featured two disks along with a single red button, that could move a digital object on the display. He called it an “X-Y position indicator for a display system”, but we know it better as a computer mouse.

No one now remembers which member of Englebart’s team first coined the term “mouse”.

The device was later patented by SRI, and licensed to Apple for $40,000. It appeared on the market in 1983, as a companion to Apple’s Lisa personal computer. Unfortunately, the patent ran out in 1987, before mice gained popularity.

Besides creating the mouse, Engelbart also conducted one of the first videoconferences, worked on email and word processors, and is credited with ideas that would later form the basis of the Web. His “mother of all demos” videoconference is justly famous and has been preserved on YouTube by SRI. It is embedded below.

Despite his achievements, as the industry moved away from pure scientific research, Engelbart found it increasingly hard to obtain funding for his work. He never became rich or obtained celebrity status like many of the Silicon Valley pioneers that followed in his footsteps.

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