Douglas Engelbart, inventor of a computer mouse, died.

Douglas Engelbart died last night at the age of 88. His daughter writes that his father died peacefully in a dream, in his home.

Douglas Engelbart is a talented inventor and visionary, he owns 20 patents and many awards for scientific achievements. One of the main inventions is a computer mouse.

Engelbart will go down in history forever as the author of the incredible presentation of December 9, 1968 . This presentation is known as the Mother of All Demos, and in it Douglas and his colleagues show the audience the “future of computer technology”, including a graphical user interface, hypertext, text editor with collaborative editing, group online conferences etc. This is when computers were working on punch cards.

The illustration shows the first computer mouse that Engelbart developed at his ARC (Augmentation Research Center), created at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.
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Douglas Engelbart filed an application for invention in 1967 and received a patent in 1970. The device consisted of a wooden case with two metal wheels.

Interestingly, in the 70s, some Engelbart colleagues left the ARC and left for Xerox PARC due to technical and, in a sense, political differences. Engelbart believed that the future of technology lies in the field of cloud computing, collaboration, networks and client-server technologies, and his colleagues believed that the future is personal computers.

The world's first demonstration of a computer mouse, among other inventions of Douglas, took place during that legendary presentation.

Mother of all demonstrations