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New York Times
Douglas Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose epiphany in 1950 about technology's potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions — among them the computer mouse — that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88.
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The cause was kidney failure, his wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, said.
Beginning in the 1950s, when computing was in its infancy, Engelbart set out to show that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power.
He called the approach 'bootstrapping' and believed it would raise what he called their 'collective IQ.'
At the time, however, computers were room-size calculating machines that were not interactive and could be used by only a single person at a time.
In December 1950 he had what might be called a complete vision of the information age.
He saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols, a vision most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II.
The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.
In December 1968, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world's leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
At the time, the only way those and other scientists interacted with computers, the mainframe machines of their day, was by submitting stacks of punch cards to them and waiting hours for a printout of answers.
But Engelbart had been developing a variety of revolutionary interactive computer technologies, and he had chosen the conference as the place in which to reveal them.
For the event he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on a 22-foot-high video screen behind him.
In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.
At least at first, it was the mouse that made the biggest impression on the computer industry.
The idea of a pointing device that rolled on the desk occurred to Engelbart in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference.
He was musing about how to move a cursor — initially referred to as a 'bug' — on a computer display.
When he returned to work he gave a copy of a sketch to William English, a collaborator and mechanical engineer at SRI, who with the aid of a draftsman fashioned a pine case to hold the mechanical contents.