Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology’s potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions — among them the computer mouse — that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
He envisioned the modern workplace way before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The 1968 video below, known as “The Mother of All Demos”, demonstrates radical new thinking that was the foundation of modern computing including screen output, the mouse, text editing, hypertext, and the internet. His work was later refined at the famous Palo Alto Research Center which was later commercialized by Apple and Microsoft.
