Douglas Engelbart, (born January 30, 1925, Portland, Oregon, U.S.—died July 2, 2013, Atherton, California), American inventor whose work starting within the Nineteen Fifties led to his patent for the laptop mouse, the event of the fundamental graphical person interface (GUI), and groupware. Engelbart received the 1997 A.M. Turing Award, the best honour in laptop science, for his “inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.”
Engelbart grew up on a farm close to Portland. Following two years of enlisted service as a radar technician for the U.S. Navy in World War II, he accomplished a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering at Oregon State University in 1948. He quickly turned dissatisfied together with his electrical engineering job on the Ames Research Center, positioned at Moffett Field, California, and in December 1950 had the inspiration that may drive the remainder of his skilled life.
Engelbart’s dream was to make use of computer systems to attach people in a community that may enable them to share and replace info in “real time.” He mixed this concept of collaborative software program, or groupware, together with his expertise decoding radar shows and with concepts he gleaned from an Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” to envision networked computer systems using a graphical person interface. After receiving a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, he stayed on as an performing assistant professor for a yr earlier than accepting a place with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI; now SRI International) in Menlo Park, California.
In 1963 SRI partially funded Engelbart’s personal analysis laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center, the place he labored on inventing and perfecting varied units for inputting, manipulating, and displaying knowledge—equivalent to the pc mouse, the multiple-window show, and hypermedia (the linking of texts, photographs, video, and sound information inside a single doc). Together with a colleague at SRI, William English, he ultimately perfected a wide range of enter units that turned widespread—together with joysticks, mild pens, and observe balls. Prior to Engelbart’s innovations, laborious and error-prone keypunch playing cards or manually set digital switches had been crucial to regulate computer systems, and knowledge needed to be printed earlier than it might be considered. His work made it attainable for odd folks to make use of computer systems.
Early in 1967 Engelbart’s laboratory turned the second web site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first precursor to the Internet. At a pc convention in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, Engelbart demonstrated a working real-time collaborative laptop system generally known as NLS (oN-Line System). Using NLS, he and a colleague (again in Menlo Park) labored on a shared doc in a single window (utilizing keyboard and mouse enter units) whereas on the identical time conducting the world’s first public laptop video convention in one other window. Engelbart continued his analysis, constructing more and more refined enter and show units and bettering the graphical person interface, however due to funds cuts at SRI most of his analysis workers migrated to different establishments equivalent to Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California.
In 1977 SRI bought Engelbart’s NLS groupware system to Tymshare, Incorporated, a phone networking firm that renamed it Augment and sought to make it right into a commercially viable workplace automation system. Engelbart was the final remaining member of his analysis laboratory, and SRI confirmed no additional curiosity in his work, so he joined Tymshare. In 1984 Tymshare was acquired by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, the place Engelbart labored on info methods. In 1989 he based the Bootstrap Institute, a analysis and consulting agency. Over the next decade he lastly started to obtain recognition for his improvements.