Douglas Engelbart
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The computer mouse, "The Mother of All Demos"
- Awards
- Turing Award 1997
Demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and real-time collaborative editing in 1968 — all in one sitting, nine years before the personal computer.
Engelbart ran the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute on the premise that computers should amplify human thinking rather than replace it. On 9 December 1968 he demonstrated the NLS system to around a thousand people in San Francisco. The audience saw a mouse-driven cursor, clickable links between documents, split screens, and a colleague joining by video from 400 kilometres away.
The event has been known ever since as "The Mother of All Demos". Almost everything shown took decades to reach the market, and it was Xerox PARC and later Apple that commercialised the ideas. Engelbart's patent on the mouse expired before it became commonplace, and he earned essentially nothing from it.