Inventor Of The Computer Mouse, Douglas Engelbart Dies At 88

Douglas Engelbart, best known as the inventor of the computer mouse,
has died at age 88. During his lifetime, Engelbart made numerous
groundbreaking contributions to the computing industry, paving the way
for videoconferencing, hyperlinks,text editing, and other technologies
we use daily. TheComputer History Museum was first to report the news
via Twitter, and Stanford Research Institute has since confirmed
Engelbart's passing to The Verge.


Perhaps the pioneer's most well-known moment came on December 19th,
1968, when he demonstrated the "mouse" — an unheard of concept at the
time — before an audience at Brooks Hall in San Francisco.


That presentation, commonly referred to as "the mother of all demos,"
would serve as inspiration for countless up and coming technologists
in the earliest days of computing. "We weren't interested in
'automation' but in 'augmentation,'" Engelbart would say later. "We
were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system
forworking with knowledge."
Douglas Engelbart with the first mouse ever.


As it turned out, Engelbart wasn't a fan of his creation being dubbed
a "mouse." In arecent profile by The New York Times, his daughter
Christina revealed it was actually fellow researchers that came up
with the name. "It was just what they called it affectionately," she
said. Engelbart referred to it as the "X-Y position indicator for a
display system" but unsurprisingly, the simpler monicker proved more
popular.


President Bill Clinton honored Douglas Engelbart with the National
Medal of Technologyand Innovation in 2000 — anesteemed recognition of
all that Engelbart accomplished in his lifetime. Specifically,
themedal recognizes Engelbart "for creating the foundations of
personal computing including continuous, real-time interaction based
oncathode-ray tube displays andthe mouse, hypertext linking, text
editing, on-line journals, shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote
collaborative work."


Christina Engelbart confirmed her father's death in a message to
professor David Farber's "classic computers" email list. "His health
had been deteriorating of late, andtook turn for worse on the
weekend," she wrote.