On Tuesday the computer science pioneer, best known for the invention of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart (photo ©Alex Handy) passed away.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in Portland, Oregon. He started studying at Oregon State College but had to interrupt his studies during World War II to go to fight in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a radar technician in the Philippines. He returned to the university and in 1948 he earned a bachelor in electrical engineering. Later, he went to University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Master’s degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1955.
After a brief period in which he was the teacher, Douglas Engelbart realized that at Berkeley he couldn’t fulfill his dreams. Initially, he opened a company called Digital Techniques to sell some products of its research but in 1957 he decided to go to work at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International. There he started working on computers, which at the time were huge machines programmed using punch cards.
Along with other researchers, Douglas Engelbart worked on concepts that are now part of our everyday use of computers but at the time were absolutely revolutionary. On December 9, 1968 Engelbart held what was then called the “Mother of All Demos” in which he showed for the first time the use of the mouse as well as other technologies such as a graphical user interface, hypertext and video conferencing.
Some of those technologies were subsequently developed by Xerox but only in the ’80s Steve Jobs realized their importance and started really applying them to computer sold to the public, obviously his Apple computers.
At the end of the ’60s, one of Douglas Engelbart’s research was funded by DARPA so he was also involved in the development of ARPANET, the computer network that, after years of development, became the Internet.
Douglas Engelbart wanted to go on with other research but by the end of the ’70s he struggled to find financing. In 1988 he founded together with his daughter Christina the Bootstrap Alliance, which later became the Doug Engelbart Institute, which aims to enhance the human ability to solve complex and urgent problems.
Douglas Engelbart’s contributions weren’t forgotten and over the past twenty years he has received many awards including the Turing Award and the National Medal of Technology, the most importnate American award in the field of technology.
In the course of his life, Douglas Engelbart has been married twice and had four children with his first wife. In 2007 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and died last Tuesday at his home in Atherton, California, as a result of kidney failure.
Douglas Engelbart really believed in teamwork but certainly without his contribution to computer science today the world of computers and the Internet would be different and poorer.
