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| Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse |
Engelbart died on Tuesday
night, according to an email sent from his daughter, Christiana, to The
Computer History Museum in California, where Engelbart had been a fellow since
2005.
Ms Engelbart did not
state the cause of death but said her father had been in poor health recently
and died peacefully in his sleep at home.
The inventor first
developed a computer mouse in the 1960s and patented his creation the 1970s,
though the notion of operating a computer with an outside tool was ahead of its
time and the mouse wasn't commercially available until 1984, with Apple's new
Macintosh.
When Engelbart first
created the computer mouse it was simply a wooden shell covering two metal
wheels, and his invention was so early he hardly profited from it.
Engelbart's mouse patent
had a 17-year life span and so the technology entered the public domain in
1987, meaning that he couldn't collect royalties on the mouse when it was most
in use. At least one billion computer mice have been sold since the mid-1980s.
Engelbart, who was born
in January 30 1925 and grew up on a small farm near Portland, Oregon, said his
work was all about "augmenting human intellect".
In 1968, Engelbart
dazzled the industry at a San Francisco computer conference with the first
public demonstration of the mouse and networked computing. His presentation
prompted a standing ovation and became known as the "mother of all
demos", as he demonstrated hypertext, shared screen collaboration and
video teleconferencing
At the presentation,
Engelbart apologised for the choice of name for his most famous invention. He
said: "I don't know why we call it a mouse – sometimes I apologise for it.
It started that way and we never did change it."
Among Engelbart's other
key developments in computing, together with his colleagues at Stanford
Research Institute (SRI) and his own lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was
managing multiple windows through one application.
Engelbart's lab also
helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the
internet.
But the mild-mannered
Engelbart gave played down the importance of his inventions, stressing instead
his vision of using a collaborative approach to solve the world's problems.
In a biography written by
his daughter, Engelbart said: "Many of those firsts came right out of the
staff's innovations - even had to be explained to me before I could understand
them. They deserve more recognition."
In 1990, Engelbart
started the Bootstrap Institute, which researches ways to advance collaboration
on complex problems.
Engelbart studied
electrical engineering at Oregon State University, but took two years off
during World War II to serve as a Navy electronics and radar technician in the
Philippines.
During his Navy service,
Engelbart read Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think' in a Red Cross library and was
inspired by Bush's idea of a machine that would aid human cognition.
After the war, Engelbart
worked as an electrical engineer for NASA's predecessor, NACA, at its Ames
Laboratory. Restless, and dreaming of computers that could change the world,
Engelbart left Ames to pursue his PhD at University of California, Berkeley.
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