Douglas Engelbart (1925 - 2013) was an American engineer, inventor, and computer scientist best known for inventing the computer mouse and for pioneering many of the concepts that define modern interactive computing. [1] Working at the Stanford Research Institute, he led a laboratory devoted to using computers to "augment human intellect," developing hypertext, graphical interfaces, and collaborative tools decades before they became commonplace. [2] For these contributions he received the 1997 Turing Award. [3]
Early life and education
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 near Portland, Oregon. [1] He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, and his education was interrupted by service as a radar technician in the United States Navy in the Philippines during the Second World War. [1] That wartime experience with radar screens shaped his conviction that information could be displayed and manipulated visually on a screen. He later earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. [2]
Augmenting human intellect
In 1957 Engelbart joined the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), where he founded the Augmentation Research Center. [1] His guiding vision, set out in a 1962 report, was that computers could be used to enhance human problem-solving and collective intelligence rather than merely to automate calculation. [2] To pursue this goal his team built the oN-Line System (NLS), an integrated environment that introduced or refined many now-familiar ideas, including hypertext links, on-screen windows, and real-time collaborative editing. [3]
The Mother of All Demos
On 9 December 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart gave a live presentation of NLS that later became known as "The Mother of All Demos." [1] Before an audience of about a thousand people, he demonstrated the computer mouse, video conferencing, hypertext, and interactive text editing in a single session, previewing much of the personal-computing experience that would emerge over the following decades. [2] The wooden prototype mouse, which he had co-developed with the engineer Bill English, proved to be his most widely recognized invention. [3]
Later years and legacy
Many members of Engelbart's laboratory went on to Xerox PARC, where several of his ideas were refined into the graphical interfaces that reached the mass market. [2] Engelbart continued to promote his vision of collective intelligence, later founding the Bootstrap Institute to advance it. [3] He received numerous honors, among them the Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Lemelson-MIT Prize. [1] Douglas Engelbart died on 2 July 2013 in Atherton, California, remembered as a foundational figure in interactive and networked computing. [1]
