American Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and developer of early incarnations of email, word processing programmes and the internet, has died at the age of 88.
His work boiled down to making computers user-friendly.
One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time, it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels, an “X-Y position indicator for a display system”.
The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the outside was way ahead of its time. The mouse was not commercially available until 1984, with Apple’s new Macintosh.
In fact, Dr Engelbart’s invention was so early that he and his colleagues did not profit much from it.
The mouse patent had a 17-year life span and in 1987 the technology fell into the public domain meaning Dr Engelbart could not collect royalties on the mouse when it was in its widest use. At least one billion have been sold since the mid-1980s.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30 1925 and grew up on a small farm near Portland, Oregon.
He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, taking two years off during the Second World War to serve as a Navy electronics and radar technician in the Philippines.
After the war, Dr Engelbart worked as an electrical engineer for Nasa’s predecessor, Naca, at its Ames Laboratory. Dreaming of computers that could change the world, he left Ames to pursue his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
Among Dr Engelbart’s other key developments in computing was the use of multiple windows. His lab also helped develop ARPANet, the government research network which led to the internet.
In 1997, he won the most lucrative award for American inventors, the $500,000- Lemelson-MIT Prize. Three years later, President Bill Clinton bestowed him with the National Medal of Technology “for creating the foundations of personal computing”.