Douglas Engelbart,inventor of computer mouse,dies

Obituary: Engelbarts 1968 demo of interactive computing astounded scientists,technology was later refined for Apple,Microsoft

Douglas C Engelbart was 25,just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world.

He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California,but he wanted to do something more with his life,something of value that might last,even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.

The epiphany spoke to him of technologys potential to expand human intelligence,and from it he spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer. Among them was something he called the bug.

In later years,it was given a more warmhearted name,evoking a small,furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.

Engelbart died Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton,Calif. His wife,Karen OLeary Engelbart,said the cause was kidney failure.

Computing was in its infancy when Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Interactive computing was a thing of the future,or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Engelbarts restless mind. In his epiphany,he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen,he thought,would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.

It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers,working in small groups,shared computing power. He called the approach bootstrapping and believed it would raise what he called their collective IQ.

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In December 1968,however,he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the worlds leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco,one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s.

Years later,people in Silicon Valley referred to the presentation as the mother of all demos. And it was the mouse,at least at first,that made the biggest impression.

The idea for the mouse a pointing device that would roll on a desk occurred to Engelbart in 1964.