How did the computer mouse get here? Who invented it? It’s an item so commonly used that most of us take for granted. The founder and inventor of the computer mouse passed away earlier this week.
His name was Dr. Douglas Engelbart. He died of kidney failure Tuesday at the age of 88. Dr. Douglas Englebart grew up in greater Portland, Oregon and served in World War II, spending some time in the Philippines. After the war, he graduated from Oregon State and worked for the Ames Research Center as an electronics technician. There, it came to him. In the early 1950s, at a time when computers literally took up a whole room, he pictured himself sitting at a desk sitting in front of a screen of a machine that organized all communication and input (sound familiar? it should.).
As the years went on, he wrote papers to convince others the computer will one day be more powerful, but a small device would be needed to run them. In 1964, he officially came up with the idea of a cursor rolling on a desk to control a computer. He drew the sketch and sent it to his superiors at SRI. In 1968, he shocked and awed computer scientists with this device at a conference in San Francisco. But it would take many years to catch on. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when Steve Jobs added the mouse to his Macintosh, is when Dr. Engelbart finally got the respect and recognition he deserved. In 2000, he won the National Medal of Technology,?jusr one of his?accolades.
I had no idea who Dr. Douglas Engelbart was until I started reading about him, which wasn’t until his death . At least he did live to see some recognition of his work. But it’s amazing how many people don’t get their proper respect until they’re no longer with us. The mouse literally changed the way we compute, and we compute daily. So Dr. Engelbart literally changed the world! Why didn’t we hear more about him when he was alive? It makes me wonder: What other technological heroes don’t we know about?