Douglas Engelbart, who revolutionized computing by inventing the
mouse, died in California on Tuesday at the age of 88, the institute
bearing his name said Wednesday.
Born in Oregon, Engelbart studied
electrical engineering and computer sciences in the 1950s before
joining the Stanford Research Institute. There, he and his team
worked on a number of concepts that have entered the computer
mainstream, such as email, video conferencing, hypertext links and
ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet. But he is best remembered
for the mouse, which in its original incarnation was a wood box with two
metal wheels and was granted a patent in 1970.
He had publicly
used it two years earlier during a video conference in San Francisco
before some 1,000 people — an event that became known as “the mother of
all demos.”
Engelbart had a total of 21 patents to his name. In
2000 he was presented with the National Medal of Technology, the tech
industry’s highest honor.
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