Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88
Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology’s potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions — among them the computer mouse — that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88.
Beginning in the 1950s, when computing was in its infancy, Dr. Engelbart set out to show 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.”
At the time, however, computers were room-size calculating machines that were not interactive and could be used by only a single person at a time.
Dr. Engelbart’s insight came just two days after he was engaged to be married in December 1950. He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, and he was pondering what he might do of value with the rest of his life.
Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be called a complete vision of the information age. He saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols, a vision 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.
A decade later, during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI International) with financing from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force, and NASA. At the time, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart largely 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. At the time, the only way those and other scientists interacted with computers, the mainframe machines of their day, was by submitting stacks of punch cards to them and waiting hours for a printout of answers.
But Dr. Engelbart had been developing a variety of revolutionary interactive computer technologies at his Augmentation Research Center, and he had chosen the conference as the place in which to reveal them.
For the event he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on 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 had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.
In contrast to the mainframes then in use, Dr. Engelbart had created a computerized system he called the “oNLine System” or NLS, which allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.
The event had a lasting impact, and years later people in Silicon Valley still referred to it as “the mother of all demos.” Eventually the technology Dr. Engelbart demonstrated would be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then be transformed for commercial use by Apple and Microsoft in the 1980s.
At least at first, it was the mouse that made the biggest impression on the computer industry.
The idea of a pointing device that rolled on the desk first occurred to Dr. Engelbart in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was musing about how to move a cursor — initially referred to as a “bug” — 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 S.R.I., who with the aid of a draftsman fashioned a pine case to hold the mechanical contents.
The first 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 Steve Jobs, when adding the mouse to the Macintosh computer, 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.)
The importance of Dr. Engelbart’s networking ideas would be underscored when, in 1969, his Augment NLS system became the application for which the ARPAnet computer network — the forerunner of the modern Internet — was created.
S.R.I. became one of the first two nodes for the ARPAnet experiment and the host of its Network Operation Center. (The other node was at U.C.L.A. Two others followed, at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.)
Having been the first to demonstrate the power and potential of the computer in the information age, Dr. Engelbart saw his ARC group grow rapidly after 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War, his group swelled to more than 50 — a significant number of them young men who had taken to computing in part to avoid the military draft.
The group disintegrated in the 1970s, and in 1977 S.R.I. sold the NLS system 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.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 25, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart. He spent his formative years on a farm in suburban Portland and, after graduating from high school in 1942, attended Oregon State College. Toward the end of World War II he was drafted and spent two years in the Philippines as a radar technician.
It was in a reading library on a small island that he discovered an article titled “As We May Think” by the physicist Vannevar Bush, which described a universal information retrieval system called Memex. The idea stuck with Dr. Engelbart, and he made it his life’s work.
After the war, he returned to Oregon State and was then 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 observed how aerospace engineers started with small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size airplanes.
The idea of scaling remained with him, and after getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and starting work at S.R.I., he presented a seminal paper on the importance of scaling in microelectronics in 1960, just a year after the invention of the planar transistor, which improved the electrical output of transistors and made them cheaper to manufacture and available to a mass market. He had grown 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. Dr. Engelbart was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the Turing Award, among others honors.
His first wife, Ballard, died in 1997. Besides his wife, he is survived by his daughters Gerda, Diana and Christina; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/techno...d=all&_r=0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
