Douglas Engelbart apart from the First Computer Mouse invention, is credited with many other inventions
Mention the name ‘Engelbart’ in any circle — preferrably a tech group — and you will have people saying, “Isn’t that the guy who created the mouse?” This would indeed be right but Engelbart, who turns 85 on Saturday, was also responsible for a lot of other creations.
In fact, he and his team showed so many new technologies on Dec 9, 1968 in San Francisco that this is usually hailed as ‘The Mother of All Demos’. Some of the things demonstrated at this convention — apart from the ubiquitous mouse — include email and hypertext, something that all of us use. Things that not everybody uses, but are still popular, were videoconferencing and a collaborative real-time editor, which were also shown at the demo.
But this said, Engelbart remains firmly entrenched in our minds as inventor of the mouse, probably because this is a solid, physical object that we use to interact with computers on a daily basis.
As dougengelbart.org puts it, “Doug Engelbart is best known for inventing the mouse and other seminal computing tools; however, his greatest innovations have been in the visionary strategy he devised for bootstrapping the innovation process, creating a very fast sort of turbo-charged learning curve in his lab, out of which emerged unprecedented levels of breakthrough innovation.”
Much of his innovation was driven by the fact that he had at one time been a radar technician and, therefore, understood how information could be shown on a screen. He felt that one day, everybody would be sitting in front of such screens, communicating and collaborating with each other. Nobody could have described today’s world of the Web better.
Of course, in his time, not many could have understood the concept of what the Web could offer - in fact, even in the mid-90s, when the Web was operational, many people had difficulty in understanding what its true potential was. The greatness of Engelbart lies in the fact that he could envisage a future before anybody saw it,
and more importantly, contribute towards making it happen.
No doubt, people in his time would have ridiculed him for some of his ideas, which may have seemed like sci-fi then, but as he put it so succinctly, “The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the amount of embarrassment he can tolerate.”
NICE TO KNOW
• The pointer device was called a mouse because the wire connecting it to a computer looks like the tail of a mouse
• The pointer that the mouse moves on the screen was originally called a bug
• Engelbart never received any royalties for his mouse invention
Mention the name ‘Engelbart’ in any circle — preferrably a tech group — and you will have people saying, “Isn’t that the guy who created the mouse?” This would indeed be right but Engelbart, who turns 85 on Saturday, was also responsible for a lot of other creations.
In fact, he and his team showed so many new technologies on Dec 9, 1968 in San Francisco that this is usually hailed as ‘The Mother of All Demos’. Some of the things demonstrated at this convention — apart from the ubiquitous mouse — include email and hypertext, something that all of us use. Things that not everybody uses, but are still popular, were videoconferencing and a collaborative real-time editor, which were also shown at the demo.
But this said, Engelbart remains firmly entrenched in our minds as inventor of the mouse, probably because this is a solid, physical object that we use to interact with computers on a daily basis.
As dougengelbart.org puts it, “Doug Engelbart is best known for inventing the mouse and other seminal computing tools; however, his greatest innovations have been in the visionary strategy he devised for bootstrapping the innovation process, creating a very fast sort of turbo-charged learning curve in his lab, out of which emerged unprecedented levels of breakthrough innovation.”
Much of his innovation was driven by the fact that he had at one time been a radar technician and, therefore, understood how information could be shown on a screen. He felt that one day, everybody would be sitting in front of such screens, communicating and collaborating with each other. Nobody could have described today’s world of the Web better.
Of course, in his time, not many could have understood the concept of what the Web could offer - in fact, even in the mid-90s, when the Web was operational, many people had difficulty in understanding what its true potential was. The greatness of Engelbart lies in the fact that he could envisage a future before anybody saw it,
and more importantly, contribute towards making it happen.
No doubt, people in his time would have ridiculed him for some of his ideas, which may have seemed like sci-fi then, but as he put it so succinctly, “The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the amount of embarrassment he can tolerate.”
NICE TO KNOW
• The pointer device was called a mouse because the wire connecting it to a computer looks like the tail of a mouse
• The pointer that the mouse moves on the screen was originally called a bug
• Engelbart never received any royalties for his mouse invention
