The inventor of the computer mouse,
Doug
Engelbart, has died aged 88.
Engelbart developed the tool in the 1960s as a wooden shell covering two
metal wheels, patenting it long before the mouse's
widespread use. He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing
and video teleconferences at a California research institute.
The state's Computer History Museum was notified of his death by his
daughter, Christina, in an email.
Her father had been in poor health and died peacefully on Tuesday night in
his sleep, she said.
Doug
Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to a radio
repairman father and a housewife mother.
'Mother of all demos'
He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and served as a
radar technician during World War II.
He then worked at Nasa's predecessor, Naca, as an electrical engineer, but
soon left to pursue a doctorate at University of California, Berkeley.
His interest in how computers could be used to aid human cognition
eventually led him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then his own
laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center.
His laboratory helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that
led to the internet.
Engelbart's ideas were way ahead of their time in an era when computers took
up entire rooms and data was fed into the hulking machines on punch cards.
At a now legendary presentation that became known as the "mother of all
demos" in San Francisco in 1968, he made the first public demonstration of
the mouse.
At the same event, he held the first video teleconference and explained his
theory of text-based links, which would form the architecture of the internet.
He did not make much money from the mouse
because its patent ran out in 1987, before the device became widely used.
SRI licensed the technology in 1983 for $40,000 (£26,000) to Apple.
At least one billion computer mice have been sold.
Engelbart had considered other designs for his most famous invention, including
a device that could be fixed underneath a table and operated by the knee.
He was said to have been driven by the belief that computers could be used
to augment human intellect.
Engelbart was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and the National
Medal of Technology for "creating the foundations of personal
computing" in 2000.
Since 2005, he had been a fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, California.
He is survived by his second wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, and four children.
-BBC, standardmedia.com
