Computer Mouse Creator, Dies at 88

Douglas C. Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, has died. He was 88.

Engelbart had suffered from poor health and died peacefully in his sleep Tuesday night, his daughter, Christina, told friends in an email.

Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the “mother of all demos.”

Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.”

It was the mouse’s public debut. Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 48 kilometres away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the Web’s architecture.

“I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” Engelbart told his audience that day. “Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it.”

The rationale for the name, he said in other interviews, was quite simple: the device resembled the rodent, with its cord as a tail. He said nobody on his team could remember who used the term first.

At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success. He never received any royalties for the mouse, for instance, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple Computer.

He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described with zeal and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly productive workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating information on shared computers.

“The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills,” he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.

His work, he argued with typical conviction, “competes in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer.”

At the same time, he wrestled with his fade into obscurity even as technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates built fortunes off of the personal computer and became celebrity billionaires by realizing some of his early ideas.

In 2005, he told Tom Foremski, a technology journalist, that he felt the last two decades of his life had been a “failure” because he could not receive funding for his research or “engage anybody in a dialogue.”

Engelbart earned no royalties from his invention. He did win, in 1997, the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventors, and in 2000, he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from U.S. President Bill Clinton.

“More than any other person,” said the award citation, “he created the personal computing component of the computer revolution.”

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on Jan. 30, 1925, in Portland, Ore., the middle child of three, to a radio repairman father and a homemaker mother.

He enrolled at Oregon State University, but was drafted into the U.S. Navy and shipped to the Pacific before he could graduate. He resolved to change the world as a computer scientist after coming across a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research, while scouring a Red Cross library in a native hut in the Philippines, he told an interviewer years later.

After returning to the United States to complete his degree, Engelbart took a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, after Stanford declined to hire him because his research seemed too removed from practical applications.

He took a job at SRI in 1957, and by the early-1960s Engelbart led a team that had begun to seriously investigate tools for interactive computing.

After coming back from a computer graphics conference in 1961, Engelbart sketched a design and tasked Bill English, an engineering colleague, to carve a prototype out of wood. Engelbart’s team considered other designs, including a device that would be affixed to the underside of a table and controlled by the knee, but the desktop mouse won out. SRI would later license the technology for $40,000 to Apple, which released the first commercial mouse with its Lisa computer in 1983.

In his later years he founded a management seminar program called the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter, Christina.