Doug Engelbart, the man behind the mouse, dies at 88

I want you to take a moment to appreciate your mouse today. Think about how different your relationship with your computer would be without it and give thanks for Doug Engelbart who has passed away aged 88.

But Engelbart, who developed the mouse while working at SRI International (the same research institute that would eventually build Siri) wasn’t just responsible for the device that allows you to point and click on objects on your screen. He also worked on the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.

The American inventor joined SRI International (then called Stanford Research Institute) in 1957, having attained PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1955.

At SRI, Engelbart gradually obtained over a dozen patents and his work led to the creation of Augmentation Research Center, which became the driving force behind the design and development of the oN-Line System (NLS). ARC would later become involved with ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.

Engelbart applied for his mouse patent in 1967 and received it in 1970. The patent application describes the wooden shell with two metal wheels as X-Y position indicator for a display system”. It was nicknamed the mouse owing to the “tail” which stuck out the back.

How far we’ve come (Image:SRI International, via Wikimedia Commons)

Engelbart never profited from his invention. In an interview, he said: “SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple Computer for something like US$40 000.”

Given the goals Engelbart set out for his career however, it seems unlikely that it would have mattered much to him.

According to an extract from author and early web pioneer Howard Rheingold’s 1985 book Tools For Thought:

“Doug is neither rich nor famous nor powerful — not that these were ever his goals. All he seems to hunger for is all he ever hungered for — a world that is prepared for the kind of help he wants to give. Ironically, his office at Tymshare in Cupertino, California, is merely blocks away from the headquarters of Apple Corporation, where icons and mice and windows and bit-mapped screens and other Engelbart-originated ideas are now part of a billion-dollar enterprise.”

So whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, take a moment today to reflect on the mouse. Whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, think about how far we’ve come from that simple bit of wooden casing with two wheels and appreciate what Doug Engelbart did for computing.

Image: vonguard (via Flickr).