Inventor Of Computer Mouse, Douglas Engelbart Dies At 88
News about Inventor Of Computer Mouse, Douglas Engelbart’s Death At 88
Douglas Engelbart, best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, has died at age 88. During his lifetime, Engelbart made numerous groundbreaking contributions to the computing industry, paving the way for video conferencing, hyperlinks, text editing, and other technologies we use daily. The Computer History Museum was first to report the news via Twitter, and Stanford Research Institute has since confirmed Engelbart’s passing to The Verge.
Douglas Engelbart with the first Computer Mouse
Perhaps the pioneer’s most well-known moment came on December 19th, 1968, when he demonstrated the “mouse” — an unheard of concept at the time — before an audience at Brooks Hall in San Francisco.
That presentation, commonly referred to as “the mother of all demos,” would serve as inspiration for countless up and coming technologists in the earliest days of computing. “We weren’t interested in ‘automation’ but in ‘augmentation,’” Engelbart would say later. “We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge.”
As it turned out, Engelbart wasn’t a fan of his creation being dubbed a “mouse.” In a recent profile by The New York Times, his daughter Christina revealed it was actually fellow researchers that came up with the name. “It was just what they called it affectionately,” she said. Engelbart referred to it as the “X-Y position indicator for a display system” but unsurprisingly, the simpler monicker proved more popular.
President Bill Clinton honored Douglas Engelbart with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2000 — an esteemed recognition of all that Engelbart accomplished in his lifetime. Specifically, the medal recognizes Engelbart “for creating the foundations of personal computing including continuous, real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, on-line journals, shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work.”
Christina Engelbart confirmed her father’s death in a message to professor David Farber’s “classic computers” email list. “His health had been deteriorating of late, and took turn for worse on the weekend,” she wrote.
