SAN FRANCISCO -- Doug Engelbart, a visionary who invented
the computer mouse and developed other technology that has transformed
the way people work, play and communicate, died late Tuesday. He was 88.
His death of acute kidney failure occurred at his home in Atherton,
Calif., after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, according to one
of his daughters, Diana Engelbart Mangan.
Back in the 1950s and `60s, when mainframes took up entire
rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart already was
envisioning a day when computers would empower people to share ideas and
solve problems in ways that seemed unfathomable at the time.
Engelbart considered his work to be all about "augmenting human
intellect" – a mission that boiled down to making computers more
intuitive to use. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he
developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time, it was a
wooden shell covering two metal wheels: an "X-Y position indicator for a
display system."
Engelbart "brought tremendous value to society," said Curtis R.
Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, where Engelbart worked when it
was still known as the Stanford Research Institute. "We will miss his
genius, warmth and charm. Doug's legacy is immense. Anyone in the world
who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal
computer is indebted to him."
The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the
outside was way ahead of its time when Engelbart began working on it.
The mouse didn't become commercially available until 1984, with the
released of Apple's then-revolutionary Macintosh, a prelude to future
breakthroughs such as the iPhone and iPad.
All of those devices were conceived by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs,
who died in October 2011. Although Jobs' contributions to personal
technology are far better known, Engelbart left an indelible mark, too.
"There are only a handful of people who were as influential," said
Marc Weber, founder and curator of the Internet history program at the
Computer History Museum, where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005.
"He had a complete vision of what computers could become at a very early
stage. He was thinking about these things when computers were used just
for calculations and number crunching. They weren't interactive at all,
so it was pretty radical at the time."
Engelbart conceived the computer mouse so early in the evolution of
computers that he and his colleagues didn't profit much from it. The
mouse patent had a 17-year life span, allowing the technology to pass
into the public domain in 1987. That prevented Engelbart from collecting
royalties on the mouse when it was in its widest use. At least 1
billion have been sold since the mid-1980s.
