Douglas Engelbart, a visionary who invented the computer mouse and
laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those
ideas to the mass market, died earlier this week. He was 88.
Engelbart is survived by his wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart; his four children, Diana, Christina, Norman and Greda; and nine grandchildren.
According to Diana, Engelbart's death of acute kidney failure occurred at his home on Tuesday night in Atherton, California, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
On a winter afternoon in 1968, speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was the mouse's public debut.
The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the outside was way ahead of its time when Engelbart began working on it.
The mouse didn't become commercially available until 1984, with the release of Apple's then-revolutionary Macintosh.
At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a counter-cultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success.
For instance, he never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.
At least 1 billion units have been sold since the mid-1980s.
Engelbart
was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers could be used
to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described with zeal
and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly productive
workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating
information on shared computers.
"The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills," he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.
His work, he argued with typical conviction, "competes in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer."
A proud visionary, Engelbart found himself intellectually isolated at various points in his life. But over time he was proved correct more often than not.
By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award.
Born on January 30, 1925 in Portland to a radio repairman father and a homemaker mother, Engelbart resolved to change the world as a computer scientist
Among Engelbart's other key developments in computing, along with his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute and his own lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was the use of multiple windows. Engelbart's lab also helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the Internet.
In the final decades of his career, Engelbart struggled to secure funding for his work, much less return to the same heights of influence.
[Source : businesstoday.intoday.in]
Engelbart is survived by his wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart; his four children, Diana, Christina, Norman and Greda; and nine grandchildren.
According to Diana, Engelbart's death of acute kidney failure occurred at his home on Tuesday night in Atherton, California, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
On a winter afternoon in 1968, speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was the mouse's public debut.
The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the outside was way ahead of its time when Engelbart began working on it.
The mouse didn't become commercially available until 1984, with the release of Apple's then-revolutionary Macintosh.
At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a counter-cultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success.
For instance, he never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.
At least 1 billion units have been sold since the mid-1980s.
An April 9, 1997, file photo of Douglas Engelbart with the computer mouse he designed, in New York. PHOTO: AP
"The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills," he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.
His work, he argued with typical conviction, "competes in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer."
A proud visionary, Engelbart found himself intellectually isolated at various points in his life. But over time he was proved correct more often than not.
By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award.
Born on January 30, 1925 in Portland to a radio repairman father and a homemaker mother, Engelbart resolved to change the world as a computer scientist
Among Engelbart's other key developments in computing, along with his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute and his own lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was the use of multiple windows. Engelbart's lab also helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the Internet.
In the final decades of his career, Engelbart struggled to secure funding for his work, much less return to the same heights of influence.
[Source : businesstoday.intoday.in]
0 comments:
Post a Comment