Douglas Engelbart, computer visionary and inventor of the mouse, dies at 88 - The Washington Post Douglas Engelbart, computer visionary and inventor of the mouse, dies at 88 The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! Got it By Olga Khazan By Olga Khazan July 3, 2013 Douglas C. Engelbart, a computer science visionary who was credited with inventing the mouse, the now-ubiquitous device that first allowed consumers to navigate virtual desktops with clicks and taps, died July 2 at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where Dr. Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005, confirmed the death. The cause was kidney failure, his wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, told the New York Times. At a time when computers were the size of Buicks and ran on punch cards, Dr.

Engelbart led a team of researchers who conceived seminal ideas that helped build the modern computer industry and allowed the machines to become a staple of work and home life. “With his help, the computer has become a friendly servant rather than a stern taskmaster,” the noted economist Lester Thurow told the Associated Press in 1997. In addition to the mouse, Dr. Engelbart and his colleagues developed the concept of the digital workspaces now called windows, hypertext to conjoin digital files, and shared-screen teleconferencing. Douglas C. Engelbart, a computer science visionary who was credited with inventing the mouse, the now-ubiquitous device that first allowed consumers to navigate virtual desktops with clicks and taps, died July 2 at his home in Atherton, Calif. (Courtesy of SRI International) Dr. Engelbart carried out much of his work in Menlo Park, Calif., working from 1957 to 1977 at the Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International).

He was regarded as an eminence in his profession who inspired generations of computer scientists, but he did not have the household name recognition of other early personal-technology innovators, such as Steve Jobs , whose company made the mouse a commercial success. In 2000, Dr. Engelbart received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest award in that field. “More than any other person,” the citation read, “he created the personal computing component of the computer revolution.” A window to the future Perhaps no better illustration can be found of Dr. Engelbart’s egalitarian and utilitarian vision for the computer than his landmark 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” In the paper, he described an architect drafting on a computer screen: “He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side; this is his working surface, and is controlled by a computer (his ‘clerk’) with which he can communicate by means of a small keyboard and various other devices.” At the time, the workplace description was a postcard from the future.

While the paper intrigued the Defense Department, which provided him funding, his peers sometimes brushed off his talk of interactive computing, and his “think pieces” occasionally left colleagues baffled. “That,” Dr. Engelbart later told the Christian Science Monitor, “was my first real awareness of what I’ve come to see as the biggest single problem” — the absence of a way to express futuristic concepts in modern-day terms. Dr. Engelbart began work on another then-futuristic concept, the mouse, in 1964, after he built an $80,000 monitor and figured he needed a device to interact with the screen. He had served in the Navy during World War II as a radar operator and recalled using a light pen — a type of stylus fitted with a photocell — to control a cathode-ray tube, the technology that powered radar systems and early televisions. He theorized that a similar setup would work for the computer monitor. With fellow SRI engineer William English, Dr. Engelbart tested all of the pointing gadgets available at the time and decided a contraption that would roll around on a desktop was fastest and most accurate.

Working with English, he developed a thick wooden block that rolled on metal wheels and connected to the computer via a cord. Officially, the device was called the “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System,” but Dr. Engelbart’s lab dubbed it the “mouse” for its taillike cord. “We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name,” Dr. Engelbart said later. “But it didn’t.” Douglas Carl Engelbart was born Jan. 30, 1925, in Portland, Ore. He became interested in technology as a high school student during World War II when he heard about radar — an invention then so new and secretive that instruction manuals about it were kept in vaults, he said in a 1986 interview with Stanford University. While stationed in the Philippines in 1945, he wandered into a hutlike Red Cross library and read an article in the Atlantic Monthly by the noted engineer and presidential science adviser Vannevar Bush that urged scientists to make humankind’s store of knowledge more accessible. The piece inspired Dr. Engelbart’s move into the nascent field of computing. Dr.

Engelbart received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1948. In 1955, he received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Stanford Research Institute in 1957 as a researcher. Within SRI, he founded the Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Defense Department. Simple plans All computing projects Dr. Engelbart oversaw were propelled by his desire for simplicity. Bill Duvall, an engineer who worked in Dr. Engelbart’s lab, told Computer Reseller News that when Dr. Engelbart interviewed job candidates, he would hand them a pencil with a brick attached to it with masking tape and ask them to write their name. If our writing tools were that unwieldy, he would demonstrate, people would never have learned to write. Besides the mouse — for which he received a patent in 1970 — his research team’s innovations included the oN-Line System, or NLS, a project that allowed multiple users to share content through a central archive.

Building on the work of computer scientist Ted Nelson, Dr. Engelbart’s team also developed hypertext, the underlying structure behind the World Wide Web. In the early 1970s, Dr. Engelbart’s laboratory was one of the four initial sites to host ARPAnet, the Internet precursor, and was the first to host the Network Information Center, which would eventually become responsible for allocating Internet domain names. Dr. Engelbart first showcased many of his innovations before more than 2,000 people at a 1968 conference in San Francisco. The event would one day be called “the mother of all demos.” Few in attendance had ever seen the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, clickable desktop windows and other such technology. “People were amazed,” English, the researcher who worked with Dr. Engelbart, told the New York Times in 1996. “In one hour, he defined the era of modern computing.” But as Dr. Engelbart ventured into collaborative computing, in which several computers are joined together to complete tasks, his lab slowly unraveled. After the 1968 demo, he began to focus on team-building through staff seminars rather than pursuing new breakthroughs.

Some of his staff members complained about the trajectory of the lab, and some said they preferred to devote their time to tech projects rather than to personal development. Cuts in funding from DARPA and the rise of other research centers such as Xerox ’s Palo Alto Research Center sped the exodus of most of Dr. Engelbart’s employees. As his staff left for PARC, they took the concept of the mouse with them. The Xerox team outfitted Dr. Engelbart’s contraption with a track ball and packaged it — at the cost of several hundred dollars — with the Alto personal computer. Then in 1983, Apple more widely commercialized the device with the Lisa computer. By the next year, the company was responsible for nearly half of the more than 500,000 mice sold. Dr. Engelbart was not impressed with Apple’s adjustments to his invention, which originally had three buttons. “Apple people so smugly said one [button] is what you need,” he later told the Toronto Star. “That’s like saying I’m going to chop off three fingers on my hand because they are superfluous.” The mouse’s eventual universality did not make Dr. Engelbart rich.

Though his name is on the patent, the royalties belong to SRI, which at one point paid him a $10,000 lump sum for the invention. DARPA ceased its funding of Dr. Engelbart’s oN-Line System in 1974, and SRI sold the project in 1977 to Tymshare, a computer services and network company. In the early 1980s the system was sold again to the defense contractor McDonnell Douglas, where Dr. Engelbart then worked as a scientist for several years. His first wife, the former Ballard Fish, died in 1997 after 46 years of marriage. In 2008, he married Karen O’Leary. Besides his wife, survivors include four children from his first marriage; and nine grandchildren. In 1989, Dr. Engelbart created the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina Engelbart out of a small office in Fremont, Calif. To Dr. Engelbart, the term “bootstrapping” meant building a tool, testing it and then refining it.

The organization gave management seminars in that field and in the mid-1990s received DARPA funding to perform technical work for the military. He retired in 2008; today the Bootstrap Institute is known as the Doug Engelbart Institute . In 1997, Dr. Engelbart received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for excellence in innovation. Dr. Engelbart often tried to play down the role of the mouse in his legacy, arguing that his greatest invention was not a piece of hardware but rather making possible the once-“crazy” concept of making computers an integral part of workaday problem solving. “Boy, I was hooked then,” he told Computer Reseller News, “and never got unhooked.” business Doug Engelbart did more than just invent computer mouse – Tech2 0 By Staff / 05 Jul 2013 , 12:20 Douglas Engelbart might not be a familiar name to those who aren’t well-versed with the history of computers.

Engelbart, who passed away yesterday at the age of 88, is the man responsible for inventing the computer mouse, a device without which many of us can’t imagine using our PC’s and Desktops even though we have moved into the age of touch-screens. But apart from the mouse, Engelbart also contributed independently to the early versions of the Internet. He was a man whose ideas and inventions were ahead of their time. Here are few things you need to know about Engelbart: How it all began: In 1950 Engelbart had a vision where he saw a world where people could interact with computers which would have television-like screens, and use them to share information and solve problems. According to this New York Timespiece , when Engelbart had this vision, computers were the size of a huge room, and were not about personal use. The NYT story also talks about how Engelbart was inspired by an article by Vannevar Bush, titled “As We May Think”.

Bush was a physicist and inventor and in the article he described a universal information retrieval system called Memex in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, “mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” Dr Engelbart was inspired by this idea. Douglas Engelbart in this file photo. AP Invention of the Mouse: Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1963 when he was working at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) along with his lead engineer Bill English. The first mouse didn’t look anything like the ones we have today; it was a was a wooden shell with two metal wheels, perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. According to this piece while the earlier versions only had three buttons, Engelbart wanted 10 buttons. Sadly Engelbart did not hold the patent for the mouse, which was held by SRI and the patent ran out in 1987, before the mouse became popular. Mother of all Demos In December 1968, Engelbart gave what is referred to in the computer world as the ‘mother of all demos’ at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Not only did he display the use of a mouse to the audience but he also showed off networked and interactive computing systems, video conferencing, ideas of improved hypertexting which would be the founding stone for the web. In short Engelbart was way ahead of his time. Contribution to the Internet:Engelbart also invented the NLS system or the”oN-Line System.” This was revolutionary because it used used hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, screen windowing, and other modern computing concepts. However the system was deemed as too difficult to learn. NLS was gradually faded out and replaced by the ARPAnet computer network which is the foundation stone for the modern Internet. Lack of success: You’d think being ahead of the times would have ensured a lot of financial success for Engelbart. But that didn’t happen. According to this ZDNET article, Silicon valley remained impervious to the man’s genius and Engelbart himself felt that he was a failure. “I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure.

I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue.” Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has died | Computerworld Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has died The computer scientist demonstrated many of the concepts of modern personal computing in 1968 Senior U.S. Correspondent, IDG News Service | Jul 3, 2013 7:36 PM PT Email a friend Use commas to separate multiple email addresses From Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page. More like this Windows 10 Quick Tips: Getting the most from Cortana Douglas Engelbart, a Silicon Valley engineer who invented the computer mouse and is credited with many of the concepts that underpin modern computing and the Internet, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88. Born in 1925, Engelbart was coming of age as World War II raged in Europe. He joined the U.S. Navy as an electronic and radar technician, and after the war studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He went on to complete a master's degree and Ph.D.

at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was also an assistant professor. The man credited with inventing the computer mouse, Douglas Engelbart, died Tuesday at age 88. (Image: SRI International) About a year later, in 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute (today called SRI International), which was just over a decade old. From 1959 until 1977 he led the organization's Augmentation Research Center, and in 1963 came up with the concept of the computer mouse . The mouse would go on to revolutionize personal computing, but the public didn't get their first look at it until several years later. In a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968, he introduced the concepts of hypertext linking, real-time text editing, the use of multiple windows, and teleconferencing. He also showed a set of three devices that worked together to control a computer. "We have a pointing device called a mouse, a standard keyboard and a special key set," he told the audience. The demonstration can be seen in archive footage on YouTube .

In a world of mainframe computers controlled by keyboards, the mouse was a new idea. "I don't know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it," he said, explaining the name to his audience. A year later, the Augmentation Research Center underscored its importance in computing by becoming the second node of the ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet. "Doug was a giant who made the world a much better place and who deeply touched those of us who knew him," Curtis Carlson, president and CEO of SRI, said in a statement. "SRI was very privileged and honored to have him as one of our 'family.' He brought tremendous value to society. 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." Engelbart received numerous awards for this work through the latter years of his life. They included the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 1997 and the Turing Award, also in 1997.

Mouse - Doug Engelbart Institute [courtesy SRI International and Stanford University MouseSite] "Father of the Mouse" 0 Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the early 1960s in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). The first prototype was built in 1964, the patent application for this "X-Y position indicator for a display system" was filed in 1967, and US Patent 3,541,541 was awarded in 1970. Although many impressive innovations for interacting with computers have followed in the last 50 years since its invention, the mouse remains to this day the most efficient hands on pointing device available for speed and accuracy. 1 The First Mouse 2 The basic idea for the mouse first came to him in 1961 while sitting in a conference session on computer graphics, his mind mulling over the challenge of making interactive computing more efficient. It occurred to him that, using a pair of small wheels traversing a tabletop, one wheel turning horizontally, one turning vertically, the computer could track their combined rotations and move the cursor on the display accordingly.

The wheels could function something like the wheels on a planimeter – a tool used by engineers and geographers to measure areas on a map, blueprint, drawing, etc. – but in this case, rolling the wheels around on the tabletop would plot the x,y coordinates for a cursor on a computer screen. He recorded the idea in his notebook for future reference. A little over a year later, Engelbart received a long-awaited grant at SRI to launch his dream research initiative titled "Augmenting Human Intellect," for which he envisioned intellectual workers sitting at high-performance interactive display workstations, accessing a vast online information space in which to collaborate on important problems. He hired a small research team, and set up a basic lab with computer and teletypes, and finally, a display terminal. By now there were several off-the-shelf solutions for moving a cursor and selecting something on a display screen, but no good data about which would be most efficient to meet Engelbart's "high-performance" requirement. He applied for and was awarded a small grant from NASA to explore that question.

Engelbart and his research staff rounded up then best-of-breed pointing devices to compare, and rigged up some in-house prototypes to add to the mix, such as a foot pedal and a knee-operated device (see Mouse Alternatives below). Engelbart also reviewed his earlier notes with his lead engineer Bill English , who built a prototype of the hand-held device with perpendicular wheels mounted in a carved out wooden block, with a button on top, to test with the others. This was the first mouse (pictured above and below). The Mouse Wins 3 In 1965 Engelbart's team published the final report of their study evaluating the efficiency of the various screen-selection techniques. They had pitted the mouse against a handful of other devices, some off the shelf, some of their own making (see Mouse Alternatives below). The mouse won hands down, and was thus included as standard equipment in their research moving forward (see Screen-Selection Experiments below for links to key reports and papers detailing these experiments). In 1967, SRI filed for the patent on the mouse , under the more formal name of "x,y position indicator for a display system," and the patent was awarded in 1970.

The first mouse plugged into it's display workstation - circa 1964 Enter, the Keyset: In the meantime, to further increase efficiency, Engelbart's team thought to offer a companion to the mouse – a device for the left hand to enter commands or text while the right hand was busy pointing and clicking (shown above). After trying out several variations, they settled on a telegraph-style " keyset " with five piano-like keys. This keyset also became standard equipment in the lab (pictured below). Both devices were introduced to the public in Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, now known as the " Mother of All Demos " (see Check It Out below for links to selected video footage of the debut, historic photos, and more). 3b (click to enlarge photo) In Doug's Words: 3c "The mouse we built for the [1968] show was an early prototype that had three buttons. We turned it around so the tail came out the top. We started with it going the other direction, but the cord got tangled when you moved your arm. I first started making notes for the mouse in '61.

At the time, the popular device for pointing on the screen was a light pen, which had come out of the radar program during the war. It was the standard way to navigate, but I didn't think it was quite right. Two or three years later, we tested all the pointing gadgets available to see which was the best. Aside from the light pen there was the tracking ball and a slider on a pivot. I also wanted to try this mouse idea, so Bill English went off and built it. We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before. It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I'm surprised the name stuck. We also did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons the mouse should have. We tried as many as five. We settled on three. That's all we could fit. Now the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac." â Source: The Click Heard Round The World , by Ken Jordan, WIRED 2004.

3a1 Check It Out 4 Check out the online Exhibit on the Mouse and Keyset at the Computer History Museum , as well as press coverage of their 2001 event " Early Computer Mouse Encounters ". Debunking the "Xerox PARC created the mouse" Myth 5 The mouse later migrated from Doug's lab at SRI to Xerox PARC, and then to Apple and others. One of the most common myths about the mouse is the mistaken belief that it was invented at Xerox PARC. Note that the patent for the mouse was filed in 1967, by which time production models were in operational use throughout Doug's lab, three years before Xerox PARC was established in 1970. 5a Mouse Alternatives 6 Engelbart and his team tested a half dozen pointing devices for speed and accuracy. These included the mouse, and a knee apparatus (pictured below, right), both created in-house, along with several off the shelf devices such as DEC's Grafacon (pictured below, center, modified for testing purposes), a joy stick, and a light pen. See Screen-Selection Experiments below for links to more details and photos.

They also experimented with a foot pedal device as well as a head mounted device, neither of which made it into the final tests. 6a From Doug Engelbart's experiments with pointing devices in the mid 1960s Joy stick and mouse (click to enlarge) A small piece of a large vision 7 In the 1950s, Doug Engelbart set his sights on a lofty goal -- to develop dramatically better ways to support intellectual workers around the globe in the daunting task of finding solutions to larger and larger problems with greater speed and effectiveness than ever before imagined. His goal was to revolutionize the way we work together on such tasks. He saw computers, at the time used primarily for number crunching, as a new medium for advancing the state of the art in collaborative knowledge work. Building on technology available at the time, his research agenda required that his team push the envelope on all fronts: they had to expand the boundaries of display technology and interactive computing and human-computer interface , help launch network computing , and invent hypermedia , groupware , knowledge management, digital libraries, computer supported software engineering, client-server architecture, the mouse, etc.

on the technical front, as well as pushing the frontiers in process reengineering and continuous improvement, including inventing entirely new organizational concepts and methodologies on the human front. Engelbart even invented his own innovation strategy for accelerating the rate and scale of innovation in his lab which, by the way, proved very effective. His seminal work garnered many awards , and sparked a revolution that blossomed into the Information Age and the Internet. But as yet we have only scratched the surface of the true potential Engelbart envisioned for dramatically boosting our collective IQ in the service of humankind's greatest challenges. 7a See Also 8 On the Web 8a MouseSite - the definitive website on the Mouse hosted by Stanford University, especially their Photos of the First Mouse page. They also curate video of the 1968 demo and other significant archives from Doug Engelbart's work. Visit Logitech's Billionth Mouse site - see the genesis of the mouse. Planimeter: Planimeters are often used by surveyors, foresters, geologists, geographers, engineers, and architects to measure areas on maps of any kind and scale, as well as plans, blueprints, or any scale drawing or plan. (source: Ben Meadows ).

See How Planimeters Are Used for some great visuals (thanks to Dr. Robert Foote at Wabash College), and this photo of geographers using planimeter for the 1940 census (thanks to the National Archives). See also Wikipedia's more complete Planimeter article with links to other resources. From Doug's Lab 8b Screen-Selection Experiments: Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation , William K. English, Douglas C. Engelbart and Melvyn L. Berman, March 1967. This paper describes an experimental study into the relative merits of different CRT display-selection devices as used within a real-time, computer-display, text-manipulation system in use at Stanford Research Institute. The mouse was tested against other devices and found to be the most accurate and efficient. See also the 1965 Report and the 1966 Quarterly Report detailing their screen-selection experiments. Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse - The New York Times The New York Times Technology |Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse Search Technology | Douglas C. Engelbart, 1925-2013 Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse Continue reading the main story Douglas C.

Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world. He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that might last, even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age. The epiphany spoke to him of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer. In later years, one of those inventions was given a warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse. Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure. Photo Douglas C. Engelbart with an early computer mouse in 1968, the year it was unveiled.

Credit SRI International Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind. In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image 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. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was his great insight 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 I.Q.” A decade later, during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International).

The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department. Even so, in the main, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic outsider. In December 1968, however, 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, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them. For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto 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 invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

Photo A prototype of the first computer mouse, which was invented in 1964 by Dr. Engelbart and constructed by two of his associates. Credit Apic, via Getty Images In contrast to the mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library. The conference attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern life. Years later, people in Silicon Valley still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all demos.” It took until the late 1980s for the mouse to become the standard way to control a desktop computer. Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 30, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart.

He spent his formative years on a farm in suburban Portland, graduated from high school in 1942 and attended Oregon State College. Toward the end of World War II, he was drafted. He spent two years in the Navy, one of them in the Philippines, as a radar technician. Advertisement Continue reading the main story One day he was in a reading library on a small island when an article titled “As We May Think” caught his eye. The article, by Vannevar Bush, a physicist and inventor who oversaw the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, described a universal information retrieval system called Memex. The idea stuck with Dr. Engelbart, and he made it his life’s work. After returning to Oregon State and graduating, he was hired to work at Ames Research Center, a government aerospace laboratory in California run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, NASA’s forerunner. While there, working as an electronics technician, he saw how aerospace engineers started with small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size airplanes. Photo Patent design from Dr. Engelbart for the first computer mouse. Credit U.S. Patent Office The idea of scaling remained with him.

After getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and starting work at SRI, he wrote a seminal paper on the importance of scaling in microelectronics. He presented it in 1960, a year after the invention of the planar transistor, which had improved the electrical output of transistors and made them cheaper to manufacture and available to a mass market. Dr. Engelbart grew convinced that computers would quickly become more powerful and that there would be enough processing power to design the Memex-like Augment system that he envisioned. He was proved right. The idea for the mouse — a pointing device that would roll on a desk — occurred to Dr. Engelbart in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was musing about how to move a cursor 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. Early versions of the mouse had three buttons, because that was all the case could accommodate, even though Dr.

Engelbart felt that as many as 10 buttons would be more useful. Two decades later, when Steve Jobs added the mouse to his Macintosh computer, he decided that a single button was appropriate. The Macintosh designers believed in radical simplicity, and Mr. Jobs argued that with a single button it was impossible to push the wrong one. (When and under what circumstances the term “the mouse” arose is hard to pin down, but one hardware designer, Roger Bates, has contended that it happened under Mr. English’s watch. Mr. Bates was a college sophomore and Mr. English was his mentor at the time. Mr. Bates said the name was a logical extension of the term then used for the cursor on a screen: CAT. Mr. Bates did not remember what CAT stood for, but it seemed to all that the cursor was chasing their tailed desktop device.) Photo By the late 1980s, the modern mouse became the standard way to control a PC. Credit Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press The importance of Dr.

Engelbart’s networking ideas was underscored in 1969, when his Augment NLS system became the application for which the forerunner of today’s Internet was created. The system was called the ARPAnet computer network, and SRI became the home of its operation center and one of its first two nodes, or connection points. (The other node was at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two others followed, at the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara.). Advertisement Continue reading the main story Dr. Engelbart saw his ARC group grow rapidly after 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War, it swelled to more than 50 researchers — a significant number of them young men who had taken to computing in part to avoid the military draft. The group disbanded in the 1970s, and SRI sold the NLS system in 1977 to a company called Tymshare. Dr. Engelbart worked there in relative obscurity for more than a decade until his contributions became more widely recognized by the computer industry. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize and the Turing Award.

His first wife, the former Ballard Fish, died in 1997. Besides his wife, his survivors include his daughters, Gerda and Christina Engelbart and Diana Mangan; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren. Dr. Engelbart was one of the first to realize the accelerating power of computers and the impact they would have on society. In a presentation at a conference in Philadelphia in February 1960, he described the industrial process of continually shrinking the size of computer circuits that would later be referred to as “Moore’s Law,” after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Speaking of the future, he said, “Boy, are there going to be some surprises over there.” Correction: July 8, 2013 Because of an editing error, an obituary on Thursday about Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist who invented the computer mouse, described incorrectly in some copies his reference to “the bug.” It was the cursor on a computer screen, not the mouse. (The cursor was also called the CAT.) Correction: August 7, 2013 An obituary on July 4 about Douglas C.

Engelbart, a visionary scientist who invented the computer mouse, misstated his date of birth. It was Jan. 30, 1925 — not Jan. 25. A reader recently pointed out the error in an e-mail. A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe PC Polymath - What device did Douglas Engelbart invent? | HowStuffWorks What device did Douglas Engelbart invent? Tom Munnecke/ Getty Images Although he was best known for the mouse, Engelbart pioneered a slew of personal computing and Internet technologies. More than that, he articulated a vision of an information society that we are only beginning to realize today [source: Markoff ]. While the politicians of his childhood might have touted a chicken in every pot, Engelbart envisioned a computer terminal in every office, connected to a central computer through which workers could share data, files and ideas.

This augury of the office network came to him in 1950, in an era of room-sized computers, vacuum tubes and punched-tape programming [sources: DEI ; Markoff ; MIT ]. Up Next Test Your Knowledge: Neil deGrasse Tyson Quiz His stint as a radar technician in World War II had convinced him of the potential uses of screen displays, but how to get from massive corporate mainframes to a network of desktop terminals remained unclear -- until the integrated circuit debuted in 1959 [sources: CHM ; Markoff ; MIT ]. Engelbart saw great potential in integrated circuits. He believed that the same principles of scaling that he had witnessed while working in aerospace research could be applied, in reverse, to scale down integrated circuits. He laid out his arguments in a 1959 paper, "Microelectronics and the Art of Similitude." Some argue that Gordon E. Moore was influenced by Engelbart's work in formulating his famous law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years [source: Brock ; Markoff ].

But it was Engelbart's belief that computers could improve our daily experience, add value to our work and boost our brainpower -- a phenomenon he called "bootstrapping" -- that truly set this electrical-engineer-turned-computer-scientist apart [sources: Flynn ; Markoff ]. The extent of Engelbart's vision and accomplishments became clear in his Dec. 9, 1968, demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held in San Francisco -- the famous "mother of all demos" in which he unveiled the computer mouse. The demo was possible because Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (aka DARPA ), was the second node on ARPANet, the packet-switching papa of the Internet [source: DEI ; UC Berkeley ]. As he walked the audience through the work he and 17 researchers at SRI's Augmented Human Intellect Research Center had accomplished, he also lifted the curtain on early examples of videoconferencing, word processing, hypertext and networking -- the building blocks of his vision for boosting intelligence and productivity through computers [sources: DEI ; Markoff ; Stanford ; UC Berkeley ].

The Mouse That Roared Today, it's hard to imagine that the mouse's future was ever uncertain. We sometimes forget that it once competed for dominance with the light pen, the trackball and stranger gadgets, such as knee-guides, foot pedals or helmet-mounted devices. While light pens, trackballs and styluses persist and have resurged on tablets and smartphones , the mouse has multiplied and evolved. Optical and laser mice removed the troublesome ball, wireless mice untangled us and gyroscopic mice unchained us from our desks. Now, we stand on the cusp of a new generation of input devices that work off gestures, voice and, perhaps one day soon, thoughts. Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has died | PCWorld Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has died Senior U.S. Correspondent, IDG News Service | Jul 3, 2013 10:36 PM PT Email a friend Use commas to separate multiple email addresses From Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page.

More like this Prototype lets blind 'feel' smartphone display Douglas Engelbart, a Silicon Valley engineer who invented the computer mouse and is credited with many of the concepts that underpin modern computing and the Internet, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88. Born in 1925, Engelbart was coming of age as World War II raged in Europe. He joined the U.S. Navy as an electronic and radar technician, and after the war studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He went on to complete a master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was also an assistant professor. About a year later, in 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute (today called SRI International), which was just over a decade old. From 1959 until 1977 he led the organization’s Augmentation Research Center, and in 1963 came up with the concept of the computer mouse . File photo, SRI International Douglas Engelbart and the computer mouse he invented The mouse would go on to revolutionize personal computing, but the public didn’t get their first look at it until several years later.

In a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968, he introduced the concepts of hypertext linking, real-time text editing, the use of multiple windows, and teleconferencing. He also showed a set of three devices that worked together to control a computer. “We have a pointing device called a mouse, a standard keyboard and a special key set,” he told the audience. The demonstration can be seen in archive footage on YouTube . In a world of mainframe computers controlled by keyboards, the mouse was a new idea. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it,” he said, explaining the name to his audience. A year later, the Augmentation Research Center underscored its importance in computing by becoming the second node of the ARPANET, the predecessor to today’s Internet. “Doug was a giant who made the world a much better place and who deeply touched those of us who knew him,” Curtis Carlson, president and CEO of SRI, said in a statement. “SRI was very privileged and honored to have him as one of our ‘family.’ He brought tremendous value to society.

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.” Engelbart received numerous awards for this work through the latter years of his life. They included the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 1997 and the Turing Award, also in 1997. To comment on this article and other PCWorld content, visit our Facebook page or our Twitter feed. Related: Inventor Douglas Engelbart Inventor: Douglas Carl Engelbart Criteria: First to invent. First to patent. First practical. Birth: January 30, 1925 in Portland , Oregon Nationality: American Years before personal computers and desktop information processing became commonplace or even practicable, Douglas Engelbart had invented a number of interactive, user-friendly information access systems that we take for granted today: the computer mouse, windows, shared-screen teleconferencing, hypermedia, GroupWare, and more.

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968, Engelbart astonished his colleagues by demonstrating the aforementioned systems---using an utterly primitive 192 kilobyte mainframe computer located 25 miles away! Engelbart has earned nearly two dozen patents, the most memorable being perhaps for his "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System": the prototype of the computer "mouse" whose convenience has revolutionized personal computing. Mouse (computer), a common pointing device, popularized by its inclusion as standard equipment with the Apple Macintosh. With the rise in popularity of graphical user interfaces (Graphical User Interface) in MS-DOS; UNIX, and OS/2, use of mice is growing throughout the personal computer and workstation worlds. The basic features of a mouse are a casing with a flat bottom, designed to be gripped by one hand; one or more buttons on the top; a multidirectional detection device (usually a ball) on the bottom; and a cable connecting the mouse to the computer. By moving the mouse on a surface (such as a desk), the user typically controls an on-screen cursor.

A mouse is a relative pointing device because there are no defined limits to the mouse's movement and because its placement on a surface does not map directly to a specific screen location. To select items or choose commands on the screen, the user presses one of the mouse's buttons, producing a "mouse click." Engelbart's inventions were ahead of their time, but have been integrated into mainstream computing as industry capabilities have increased. It was not until 1984 that the Apple Macintosh popularized the mouse; but today it is difficult to imagine a personal computer without one. And the huge success of Microsoft's Windows95 proves that Engelbart's original windows concept has also become a virtual necessity. In a talk delivered at MIT (June 1996), Bill Gates himself praised Engelbart for his pioneering work. Byte magazine, in an article honoring the 20 persons who have had the greatest impact on personal computing (September 1995), went so far as to say of Engelbart: "Comparisons with Thomas Edison do not seem farfetched. Engelbart now works out of the Bootstrap Institute, which he founded, where he is an inventor and a consultant in multiple-user business computing.

His current focus is on a type of GroupWare called a "open hyperdocument system," which may one day replace paper recordkeeping entirely. TO LEARN MORE Invention | Computer Mouse Computer Mouse Bibliography Invention Prior to the invention of the computer mouse Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute had to use preexisting devices in order to interact with the computer. Antecedents to the mouse included the light pen and the trackball. The first trackball was invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff in 1952. The device was created for the Royal Canadian Navy and consisted of a Canadian bowling ball that was supported by air bearings. 1 The First Trackball The first light pen was invented by Ben Gurley in 1959. 2 A Light Pen ~Brown University 1969 The basic idea for the computer mouse came to Douglas Engelbart in 1961, while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was unsatisfied with the other pointing devices available at this time. He came up with the design of a device that would use small wheels to move. He originally referred to the device as a “bug”. 3 One of the wheels would turn horizontally and the other would turn vertically.

Each wheel would transmit its coordinates for analysis to the computer. 4 Douglas Engelbart, working with his lead engineer, Bill English in 1963 built the first prototype of the computer mouse . The first mouse was encased in a carved out wooden box, it had perpendicular wheels underneath, and one button. 5 The device was called a “mouse” because the cord and the motion made when using the device was reminiscent of a mouse scurrying across a table. 6 The first Mouse During the years 1964 and 1965, Doug Engelbart and his team experimented with these different devices to determine the best approach. The tests were computerized and measured the speed and accuracy of these devices under several conditions. In conclusion, the mouse was determined to have the fastest transfer time. The transfer time is the amount of time that it takes the user to switch from his mode of screen selection (using the mouse, the trackball, the light pen), to typing on the keyboard. 7 Vardalas, John. “FP-6000 — From DATAR to the FP-6000”, 1994. .

↩ Bill Buxton, design, mouse, trackball, track-ball, joystick, touchscreen, touch-screen, touch screen, touch tablet, touch pad, multi-touch, lightpen, light-pen, light pen, lightgun, light-gun, light gun, tablet, graphics tablet, stylus, pen”, n.d, 2011. . ↩ Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford University Press, 2000.p 95. ↩ Levine, Alan. “Doug Engelbart on the Invention of the Mouse | NMC,” January 4, 2010. . ↩ Jordan, Ken. “Wired 12.01: The Click Heard Round The World.” The Click Heard Round The World. . ↩ Brown, David. Inventing Modern America: from the Microwave to the Mouse. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. p162. ↩ Engelbart, Doug.

“Design Considerations for Knowledge Workshop Terminals – 1973 (AUGMENT, 14851,) – Doug Engelbart Institute,” March 14, 1973. . ↩ History in Pix - Doug Engelbart Institute Additional photo collections can be found on Facebook in the Doug Engelbart Institute Albums and the ARC Bootstrapper Albums , in the MouseSite Photo Gallery at Stanford University, in several of the Online Exhibits at the Computer History Museum, SRI's Engelbart Storykit page, and amongst Engelbart's published papers . 1b Mouse and workstation 2 For more on this topic, including story, links to archive footage, etc., see our portal page on The Mouse . For deeper background on early display technology, see " Workstation History and The Augmented Knowledge Workshop " (Engelbart, 1986); and for details on early experiments with pointing devices, see " Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation " (Engelbart et.al. 1967). 2a The Grafacon, an experimental pointing device .

- In search of a best way to select screen objects for interactive display workstations in late 1963 or early 1964; Engelbart launched experiments managed by Bill English. They selected a variety of available pointing devices -- light pen, track ball, joysticks, the "Graficon" pictured here, and the mouse. The devices were compared for speed and accuracy with the mouse coming out on top. Still other experimental variations were later built and tested, including foot-pedal operated, knee-operated, even head-operated ("nose pointing") devices. 2a Knee brace instead of a mouse . - A contender cooked up by Engelbart's lab for moving the cursor on the display screen. 2b First mouse . - Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1963, built by his lead engineer Bill English as part of an experiment to find better ways to point-and-click on a display screen. Made in a shop at SRI, the casing was carved out of wood. It had only one button, which was all there was room for. Subsequent models featured three buttons.

Engelbart would have gone for even more buttons, but there was only room for three of the needed micro-switches available in those days. 2c First mouse again . - Two wheels, perpendicularly mounted to one another in the mouse's innards track the X-Y position that is communicated to the screen. The mouse was patented in 1970 as an "X-Y Position Indicator." Xerox Park is often credited, erroneously so, with the invention of the mouse, but they do have to their credit the trackball that has replaced the perpendicular wheels. 2d Workstation with mouse .- The mouse was invented for use with display workstations that were pioneered in Engelbart's laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center. This model, of circa 1964-1966, was custom-built for roughly $80,000. A second device with buttons, on the left, is the forerunner of the keyset designed for the rapid input of command codes for manipulation of blocks of text. The keyset is, for that purpose, more efficient than the common keyboard. 2e First production keyset . - Engelbart invented a document generation and editing system with which a number of people can work together.

It was known as the NLS (oN-Line System). It called for streamlining the commands for operating the computer and manipulating documents. Engelbart looked for single-character inputs, such as a d for delete. He then came up with the keyset for chording the command keys with the left hand while the mouse was worked with the right hand. 2f A cue card for the keyset, or "chord ". - The keyset's five keys permit 31 combination of pressed keys. That covers more than the alphabet. Letters, beginning with a, are shown on this cue-card chart. Uppercase characters are obtained by simultaneously pressing the middle mouse button. With the left mouse button pressed, the keyset is used for entering digits and punctuation marks. Tests done in the early '60s showed that temporarily secretarial helpers (known as the "Kelly Girls") mastered the keyset in less than two hours no-matter what method of training was used. They also demonstrated that the regular keyboard is more efficient for straightforward typing, but that for editing and maneuvering text, the mouse-keyset combination is the more efficient. 2g Production mouse .

- This model was used by the Augmentation Research Center group and the customers served over the ARPAnet. It is also the mouse used in the 1968 FJCC demo. 2h Production workstation and mouse . - The first production model of the mouse was made in 1967. It had a plastic casing on a metal base plate. Although the casing was originally designed for the cord to be attached to the wrist side of the device, it is seen here with the cord coming out from the other end. 2i Ergonomic keyboard console . - This console was custom-made by Herman Miller furniture company of Zeeland, Michigan, and used during the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference at which Doug Engelbart gave his historical demonstration of on-line computing. The setup included a tilt-swivel office chair. 2j Doug Engelbart and mice . - Engelbart, in his office at Tymshare, shows the original mouse next to the then latest, 1984 model. Upon acquiring the NLS co-operative text-editing system from SRI, Tymshare renamed the system Augment.

2k ARC lab environment 3 For background on the experimental environment in the Augmentation Resources Center lab see " Workstation History and The Augmented Knowledge Workshop " (Engelbart, 1986). 3a Experimental workplace and closeup of a knowledge worker . - Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI experimented with various office and seating arrangements, and with several keyboard-display configurations, even beyond the bounds of existing conventions. 3a Engelbart in his ARC office . - Doug Engelbart at his first personal display workstation, - This station was installed in his own office in 1974. Until then, all the ARC's display workstations were situated in an open arena shared by all his engineers. 3b Pictures, ( top and bottom ) show Doug and staff using NLS to support 1967 meeting with sponsors -- probably the first computer-supported conference. The facility was rigged for a meeting with representatives of the ARC's research sponsors NASA, Air Force, and ARPA. A U-shaped table accommodated setup CRT displays positioned at the right height and angle. Each participant had a mouse for pointing.

Engelbart could display his hypermedia agenda and briefing materials, as well as the documents in his laboratory's knowledge base. See also Father of Groupware and Working Together . 3c Bill English at the ARC office . Bill English, Engelbart's lead engineer, working at the ARC office using the ergonomic workstation. 3d NIC archives (1971) . - The host mainframe at ARC was the second such unit linked into the ARPANet, which was the precursor of the Internet. Engelbart's lab had been assigned by ARPA to run the Network Information Center (NIC), which has since grown into the InterNIC . This photo shows the NIC archives vault with its library of NIC publications and backup tapes (magnetic 7- or 9-track tapes). 3e Engelbart conducting a workshop ( standing and seated ). - Circa 1967-68. 3e Tree of evolution . - Chart shows progression of ideas from Engelbart's Augmentation Research Lab at SRI (SRI-ARC) migrating to Xerox, the Apple Computer Co., and beyond.

(Slide by Charles Irby who migrated from Engelbart's lab to Xerox PARC, Metaphor, and is now at SGI.) 3f FJCC 1968 "Mother of All Demos" 4 See our 1968 Demo page for a bit of background and links to the demo and other related resources. 4a San Francisco's Brooks Hall all set for the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference . - It is here that Doug Engelbart received a standing ovation for his demonstration of interactive computing. His console in this hall, which held about 1000 people, was connected by telephone line to his partners in the demo located in the ARC lab in Menlo Park. 4a Client server architecture . 5b Images to illustrate concepts 6 Tricycle vs bicycle . - Engelbart used these images to illustrate the difference between ease of use and high-performance. The tricycle may be easier to learn and use, but it is hard work to travel even a short distance. Riding a bicycle calls for considerably more skill, with bumps and bruises expected as one learns, but the effort-to-performance ratio is dramatically higher.

The high-performance knowledge workers of the future, as perceived by Engelbart, are expected to be very skillful. 6a Downhill skiing vs skiing on birch slats provides a similar analogy for comparing a high-performance worker flying through information space as compared to plodding with a one-button mouse and menus without the prospect of ever graduating to anything faster. 6b Example of "de-augmention". - Illustrating how our writing abilities would be "de-augmented" if we used a pencil encumbered with a brick , thereby significantly slowing down the writing and/or enducing the writer to produce larger script . Illustrations from D.C. Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework , 1962 6c Potter's wheel . - An example of how any trade or profession has evolved tools and methods in which the tradespeople become extremely proficient in their use. The knowledge work profession is relatively young and less evolved, and professionals are not expected to become proficient soon except in the most rudimentary skills. 6d Helicopter pilot . - For those who are not highly trained or certified, the services of a pilot are the answer. Passengers are not expected to fly a helicopter; the pilot does that.

Similarly, we should expect executives and average knowledge workers wishing to fly through complex or unfamiliar information space to employ cyber pilots. Those can take them were they need to go, help find what is needed, give guided tours, etc. This assistance could quite easily be done remotely, for example, by video teleconferencing as shown above . 6e Hangglider . - Engelbart often concluded his presentations with this inspirational parable of soaring elegantly up above the horizon. 6f Behind the scenes at ARC 7

Question: What device did US computer engineer Douglas Englebart invent in 1969?
Answer: The COMPUTER MOUSE