Douglas Engelbart
Personal Details
Douglas Carl Engelbart1 was an american engineer and inventor, best known for inventing the computer mouse. He was born in Portland, Oregon on January 30, 1925. His ancestors were of German, Swedish and Norwegian descent. He got his bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State College and then went on to do Ph.D from UC Berkley. (University of California, Berkley).
Professional Accomplishments
He worked on the challenges of human-computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research center Lab in SRI (Stanford research Institute) International that resulted in the invention of the computer mouse in the first place and the networked computers, precursors to GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) and the development of hypertext. He also discovered a law about the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential. This law, Engelbart's Law, was named after him. His inventions were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos2 in 1968.
He was greatly influenced by Vannevar bush. It was only after reading Bush's article As we may think that Engelbart decided to explore the field of electrical engineering. By 1962, he had joined SRI International and proposed a report about his vision and proposed research agenda entitled "Augmenting Human Intellect: A conceptual Framework"
Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab (ARC -Augmentation Research Centre, which he founded at SRI) and termed them "bootstrapping strategy". These principles were designed to boost the rate of innovation of his lab. It was ARC that became the major force behind the design and development of the oN-Line System (NLS) where he and his team developed computer interface elements such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, the hypertext, collaborative tools and precursors to the GUI. In 1967, he applied for a patent, which he recieved in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels(Computer Mouse). He had developed it a few years earlier with his lead engineer, Bill English. Engelbart nicknamed it the "mouse" because the tail came out at the end. Unfortunately, he never recieved any royalties for the invention of mouse.
.In 1988, after Engelbart had been dethroned from his position at ARC (Which came under the control of Tymshare), he teamed up with his daughter christina and founded the bootstrap Institute to coalesce his ideas into a series of three day management seminars offered at Stanford between 1989 and 2000. Later its name was changed to Doug Engelbart Institute.
Engelbart recieved several awards during his lifetime, the most noteworthy of which were Turing award(1997) Lovelace medal(2005) National medal of technology(2000) and Lamelson-MIT Prize. He died on July 2, 2013 at the age of 88, and is buried in Atherton, California.