Douglas C. Engelbart, computer visionary responsible for helping ot create the computer mouse has died at age 88 according to ABC News. Engelbart passed away on Tuesday evening at his home in Atherton, Calif.
Engelbart served as an electronic radar technician for the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the late 1950s he began working at the Stanford Research Institute where he worked on some of the first graphic user interface computers. That's where he, and a group of others, began developing the idea of the computer mouse, a revolutionary device to allow users to interact directly with their display. In 1970 he received a patent for the mouse. Although he couldn't remember who exactly came up with the idea to call the device a "mouse" he did say, in a 1986 interview that the name likely came from the fact that the original design of the mouse had the cord coming out of the back rather than the front. Once the development team realized the device's tail was going to get in the way, they moved it.
Although the mouse wasn't popularized until Xerox PARC began experimenting with it and Apple began shipping the mouse with its "Lisa" in 1983, Englebart was no stranger to being ahead of the popular curve.
He worked on the ARPANET, a network of computers that preceded the Internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He worked on the concept of "groupware" before anyone else and, in 1968, he was one of the first to demonstrate on-screen video teleconferencing.
"I have admired him so much. Everything we have in computers can be traced to his thinking," Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told ABC News. "To me, he is a god. He gets recognized for the mouse, but he really did an awful lot of incredible stuff for computer interfaces and networking. The networking ideas were even more significant than the mouse," Wozniak said. "He did this way before the Internet. He was thinking about how computers could solve some of the main problems for mankind before many."
