The computer mouse and hypertext both debuted at a single 1968 demonstration
In 1968 Douglas Engelbart showed an audience a pointing device called a mouse, linked text, word processing and bitmapped screens, when most people could only reach a computer through intermediaries. The show became known as the Mother of All Demos. His inspiration had come from an essay read in a stilt hut in the Philippines.
Born on January 30, 1925, in Portland, Oregon, Engelbart was the middle of three children; his father died when he was nine. Partway through an engineering degree at Oregon State, he spent two years as a Navy radio and radar technician. On the island of Leyte he read Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, a call to make knowledge widely accessible. After graduating in 1948 he maintained wind tunnels at the Ames Research Center, where he met Ballard Fish, whom he married in 1951, then took a master's and a doctorate at Berkeley.
In December 1950, newly engaged, he realised his only goals were a steady job and a happy marriage. He resolved instead to make the world better by boosting humanity's collective intelligence, with computers as the tool, at a time when most saw them as number crunchers. Radar had shown him that information could appear on a screen, and he pictured knowledge workers at display stations navigating information together.
Berkeley did not suit that vision, nor did a short-lived startup, so in 1957 he joined the Stanford Research Institute. His 1962 report, Augmenting Human Intellect, won Air Force and then ARPA funding for his Augmentation Research Center, run on a bootstrapping strategy meant to speed up innovation. The lab's oN-Line System, or NLS, brought together the mouse, bitmapped displays, word processing and hypertext, all unveiled at the 1968 demonstration.
Later years were frustrating. The lab passed to Tymshare and then McDonnell Douglas, neither of which cared much for his ideas, and he retired in 1986. With his daughter Christina he founded the Bootstrap Institute in 1988 to spread his thinking. Recognition eventually came: the 1997 Turing Award and, in December 2000, the National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton. Engelbart's law, holding that human performance improves exponentially, bears his name. He died on July 2, 2013.
Source: Douglas Engelbart
