SAN FRANCISCO: Douglas C Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died on Tuesday night. He was 88.
Engelbart had suffered from poor health and died peacefully in his sleep, his daughter, Christina, told friends in an email.
Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the “mother of all demos.”
Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” It was the mouse’s public debut. Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 30 miles away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the Web’s architecture.
At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success. He never received any royalties for the mouse, for instance, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple Computer.
In his later years he founded a management seminar programme called the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina.
He is survived by Karen O’Leary Engelbart, his second wife, and four children: Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman. His wife Ballard died in 1997.
REUTERS
