Douglas Engelbart, Inventor of Computer Mouse, Has Died [View all]

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Source: CBS News

Inventor of computer mouse dies at age of 88
July 03, 2013

Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and developer of early incarnations of email, word processing programs and the Internet, has died at the age of 88.

The Computer History Museum, where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005, says he died early Wednesday. The museum in Mountain View, Calif., was notified of the death in an email from his daughter, Christina. The cause of death wasn't immediately known.

Engelbart's biggest breakthrough was the computer mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time, it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels.

The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the outside was ahead of its time. The mouse wasn't commercially available until 1984, with Apple's new Macintosh.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57592224/inventor-of-computer-mouse-dies-at-age-of-88

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Englebart significant for many other innovations, bisions, advances in digital revolution, not just mouse.

Wikipedia: "Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 - July 2, 2013[3][4]) was an American inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human/computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse,[5] and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.

Engelbart was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.[6] Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab."

Englebart demonstrates the mouse, from the famous 1968 "Mother of all Demos:"