Douglas C. Engelbart, the man responsible for giving the computer world, among many other gifts, the mouse has died at the age of 88 at his home in California reports The New York Times.
In 1950, Engelbart was just 25 years-old when he had an epiphany that “spoke to him of technology‘s potential to expand human intelligence” at a time when computing was in its very early stages where huge machines tabulated numeric data and personal computing was simply science fiction.
Keen to make an impact on the world, Engelbart began a series of inventions, one of which was what we know today as the mouse which he patented in 1970 described as a “X-Y position indicator for a display system”. Unaware of its true value, no royalties for the device were ever collected.
The mouse was first presented in 1968 when he demonstrated his vision for networked computers to the world’s leading computer scientists in San Francisco setting the industry alight with graphical user interfaces, hyperlinks, text editing and shared-screen video conferencing to mention a few. Developed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the design, development and presentation of the oN-Line System (NLS) came to be the basis for modern computing.
Referred to as the “the mother of all demos”, Engelbart’s technology was later refined by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was later in the 1980s that it first became commercially available through two relatively new software companies – Apple and Microsoft.
Watch Engelbart’s original presentation below:
