Doug Engelbart and Bill English

Douglas Carl Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart in 1984. Digital Image. History of the Computer. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/mouse.html

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in 1925, and died only a few years ago in 2013 at the age of eighty-eight [1]. He grew up near Portland, Oregon on a small farm, and went from graduating high school in 1942 to studying electrical engineering at Oregon State University [1].

During World War II, Engelbart enlisted in the Navy and served for two years as a radar technician [2]. Returning to school after his service, he completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1948, and moved to San Francisco to work for the NACA Ames Laboratory [3].

In 1963, Doug Engelbart began to receive funding for his own research laboratory, a lab that he named the Augmentation Research Center [4]. A short five years later, Engelbart presented what became known as the “Mother of All Demos” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco [5]. This presentation was the first ever public demonstration of on-screen video teleconferencing, hypermedia, and last but certainly not least, the computer mouse. It is this last invention for which he is most well-known [6]. For more information about the “Mother of All Demos,” visit that section of the History tab in the menu bar.

Though Engelbart’s professional life was incredibly involved and well-developed, it was not to the detriment of his personal life. Engelbart enjoyed a marriage that lasted forty-seven years, and had four children, as well as nine grandchildren [7]. According to Engelbart’s daughter he also had many hobbies, including hiking, camping, sailing, reading, and raising ducks, earthworms, and bees [8].

Sadly, in 2007, Engelbart was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which he suffered from until his death in 2013 [9]. On the Doug Engelbart Institute website, Engelbart’s daughter states that his response would be that this is “all the more reason to get working on boosting our collective IQ, so we can get better at solving these complex, urgent problems” [10].

William (Bill) English

Bill English with Computer. Digital Image. History of the Computer. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/mouse.html

William English (aka Bill English) is the somewhat lesser-known contributor to the invention of the computer mouse. In 1965, English was sponsored by NASA to lead a project meant to find the best method of selecting a single point on a computer screen [11]. Ultimately, the mouse won over other methods [12]. For more information on those methods, visit the Antecedents tab in the menu bar.

English had been a colleague of Engelbart’s for a number of years, and was hired by Engelbart to create the hardware design for the computer mouse. He was also a co-author with Engelbart and several others on a paper related to the work he had done for NASA that was published in 1967, and discussed various tests and analyses that the group had used to “determine the best display selection techniques for a computer-aided text-manipulation system” [13]. In 1968, English helped Engelbart to develop the presentation that turned into the “Mother of All Demos” [14].

English is credited with the design of not only the hardware for the original mouse, but also with the invention of the trackball that became the replacement to the wheel at the base of the mouse [15].

Footnotes:

1. Christina Engelbart and MRW Connected, “A Lifetime Pursuit.” A Lifetime Pursuit – Doug Engelbart Institute, Accessed February 20, 2017. http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Janet Silver Gent, “The Mouse that Roared.” Palo Alto Weekly, March 26, 2015, accessed February 20, 2017, http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/26/the-mouse- that-roared.
6. Ibid.
7. Christina Engelbart and MRW Connected, “A Lifetime Pursuit.” A Lifetime Pursuit – Doug Engelbart Institute.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Larry Greenemeier, “The Origin of the Computer Mouse: Now an Endangered Species, it was Crucial to the Development of Personal Computing and Internet.” Scientific American, August 18, 2009, accessed February 20, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origins-computer-mouse/.
12. Ibid.
13. William K. English, Douglas C, Englebart, and Melvyn L. Berman, “Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation.” IEEE Transaction on Human Factors in Electronics 8, no. 1 (March 1967): 5-15.
14. Janet Silver Gent, “The Mouse that Roared.”
15. Larry Greenemeier, “The Origin of the Computer Mouse: Now an Endangered Species, it was Crucial to the Development of Personal Computing and Internet.