Doug Engelbart with his his first prototype mouse, in San Francisco, 2004. Photograph: Zuma/Rex
Posted on 07/04/2013 6:26:01 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Doug Engelbart, who has died aged 88, will be remembered as the man who in 1963 invented the computer mouse, but that was incidental to his vision of computers augmenting the human intellect and increasing our "collective IQ". While he became a much-loved and oft-lauded Silicon Valley celebrity, his most visionary ideas were neglected and went unfunded.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Doug Engelbart with his his first prototype mouse, in San Francisco, 2004. Photograph: Zuma/Rex
Has anyone written a book about this guy? I’d be a customer.
I don’t know, but I wish I’d known him. We did live in the same town at the same time. But, he’s older and our paths never crossed.
He was indeed a grand man and a genius too boot. We have all benefitted from his work
Ahead of his time. I can easily see why nobody, outside of specialty applications, cared about mice until the computer became economical enough to leave the confines of the machine room, and also until the practical resolutions of economical screens got past that of the common 80x24 dumb terminal. Even those character oriented terminals could well have done windowing graphics, in hindsight, had they supported some kind of dynamic bit mapped “character” creation. That’s moot now since our full graphics windows and the memory and graphics computation resources behind them are so commonplace. Moore’s Law to the rescue....
Alan Turing => Doug Engalbart => Alan Kay => Xerox PARC/Smalltalk => Steve Jobs/Apple. And the rest we all know.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.