Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse and helped develop many of the basic computing technologies we now take for granted, has died. He was 88.
The news appears to have first been announced via a tweet from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. SRI International, where Engelbart did much of his work and which represents the Douglas Engelbart Institute, confirmed Engelbart's death to Mashable.
It was just announced that Computer History Museum 2005 Fellow, Doug Engelbart passed away early this morning.... http://t.co/OqRWSXUuOR— Computer History (@ComputerHistory) July 3, 2013
Engelbart gave the first demonstration of a computer mouse on December 9, 1968, which has since been dubbed the "Mother of All Demos." In addition to the mouse, Engelbart showed many technologies now common in computing, including video conferencing, word processing, hypertext and collaborative editing (watch a video of the demo below). His research also pioneered the way for graphical user interfaces.
More than a year before the demo, Engelbart applied for a patent on the mouse, which he received in 1970. It was a simple wooden shell with two metal wheels, which the application describes as an "X-Y position indicator control for movement of the hand to move a cursor over the display on a cathode-ray tube."
Engelbart was involved in developing the precursor to the Internet, ARPANET. With funding from DARPA (then ARPA), Engelbart's team was on the receiving end of the first message transmitted over the network, the letters "lo" (it was supposed to be "login" but the system crashed). Engelbart's research lab, called ARC, eventually managed the ARPANET node connections.
Engelbart received many awards for his research, including the National Medal of Technology, which he accepted from President Bill Clinton in 2000. He also received a Computer Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and even had his home state of Oregon declare January 24, 2002 "Douglas C. Engelbart Day."
Engelbart is survived by his wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, four children and nine grandchildren, according to Wikipedia.
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