The computer scientist died this week and he left behind a tremendous legacy to us all.
As I write this, I am using at least two of the amazing things that Douglas Engelbart invented in his extraordinary lie. The computer scientist died this week, aged 88, and he had a huge influence on much of what we take for granted in the digital world we live in.
He is most famous for inventing the humble mouse. Engelbert unveiled the crude wooden box at a talk he gave in 1968. He gave his invention the snappy title “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” We’ve since come up with the much more user-friendly mouse name.
Engelbart and his first ‘mouse’
At the time, Engelbart worked for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and it was they who patented the invention, eventually licensing it to Apple. Engelbart never made a penny from the frankly brilliant idea he came up with.
Born in 1925, Engelbart served as a radio operator in the Phillipines for two years during World War II and when he returned to America he went and got a degree in electrical engineering and he eventually ended up with a Masters in Science from Berkley. It was 1957 before he started work for SRI and after many years of tinkering, he created the humble mouse.
But that wasn’t the only accomplishment in his life. At that same 1968 talk, Engelbart also spoke of how he envisioned the future of computing and he spoke of how text-based links could tie pages and pages of information together, essentially the design of the web today.
Incredibly, also in that same talk, now known as the ‘mother of all demos’ he also conducted the first video conference call with a colleague who was almost 50km away as well as demonstrating many, many things we now take for granted like word processing and hyper text.
Though his final years were more obscure, and he failed to find funding for many of his ideas, his work is still in everyday use, and will be for the foreseeable future.
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