Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies

Last night, at the age of 88, Douglas Engelbart died. His daughter writes that his father died peacefully in a dream in his house.

Douglas Engelbart is a talented inventor and visionary, he owns 20 patents and many awards for scientific achievements. One of the main inventions is a computer mouse manipulator.

Engelbart will forever go down in history also as the author of an incredible presentation of December 9, 1968. This presentation is known as Mother of All Demos, and in it Douglas and his colleagues show the audience the “future of computer technology”, including a graphical user interface, hypertext, a co-edited text editor, and online group conferences etc. This is at a time when computers were working on punch cards.

The illustration shows the first computer mouse that Engelbart developed at his ARC (Augmentation Research Center), created at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.

Douglas Engelbart filed an application for invention in 1967 and received a patent in 1970. The device consisted of a wooden case with two metal wheels.

Interestingly, in the 70s, some of Engelbart's colleagues left ARC and left for Xerox PARC due to technical and, in a sense, political differences. Engelbart believed that the future of technology was in the field of cloud computing, collaboration, networking and client-server technology, and his colleagues believed that the future lay in personal computers.

The world's first computer mouse demonstration, among other Douglas inventions, took place during that same legendary presentation.

Mother of all demonstrations